Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/149

 Rh, with the day's damp fodder drooping half-chewed from its relaxed jaw, at some dim sick planet of the Mason system, there was a poet, alive if obscure, who had eyes to behold

who had ears to hear and lips to reveal the music and the splendour and the secret of the high places of verse. Again, in a changed century, when the reading and warbling world was fain to drop its daily tear and stretch its daily throat at the bidding of some Irish melodist—when the "female will" of "Albion" thought fit to inhale with wide and thankful nostril the rancid flavour of rotten dance-roses and mouldy musk, to feed "in a feminine delusion" upon the sodden offal of perfumed dog's-meat, and take it for the very eucharist of Apollo—then too, while this worship of ape or beetle went so noisily on, the same poet could let fall from lavish hand or melodious mouth such grains of solid gold and flakes of perfect honey as this:

Verse more nearly faultless and of a more difficult perfection was never accomplished. The sweet facility of