Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/26

xx of schools of painters, are expounded at length in his Descriptive Catalogue of his exhibition of 1809, in his Advertisement or 'Public Address,' of 1810, in the jottings in his copy of Reynolds' Discourses, and epigrams in the MS. Book, and in the aphorisms in his sibylline leaflet, the Laocoon. Barry: a Poem must unfortunately be numbered among lost works.

In the field of literature Blake's early study, as Malkin tells us, was of the Elizabethans. His attitude to eighteenth-century verse may be noted in his lines 'To the Muses,' or in the contemptuous reference to 'tinkling rhymes and elegances terse' in the youthful Poetical Sketches. We meet here also with the imitations of Macpherson, continued in Tiriel and Thel; but a more lasting and potent influence was that of Milton, to which may be attributed the metrical experiments of the Prophetic Books, the shorter rhythms being evidently suggested by the choruses in Samson, and the preface to Jerusalem showing that in this attempt at a new cadence Blake was deliberately following the example set by the author of Paradise Lost. Even Blake's phrases and subject-matter, which, except in the purely imitative Poetical Sketches, are almost entirely his own, may occasionally be traced to the same source, as in the opening lines of Europe, reminiscent of the 'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity':—

Minor influences may be detected in the epigrams in the manner of Wolcot; in the lyrics from the Prophetic Books which often recall the hymns of Charles Wesley, and in the grotesque Hudibrastic lilt of 'The Everlasting Gospel.'

Blake's Prophetic Books tell us what is known of his mystical religion and philosophy. It is in the message,