Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/156

 140 forbearance of the man's way of living. The material shape of his speculations never goes beyond a sort of boyish defiant complaint, a half-humorous revolt of the will. Inconstancy with him is not rooted in satiety, but in the freshness of pure pleasure; he would never cast off the old to put on the new. The chain once broken, against which between sleeping and waking he chafes and wrestles, he would lie for most hours of the day with content enough in the old shade of wedded rose or myrtle tree. Nor in leaping or reaching after the new flower would he wilfully bruise or break the least bud of the old. His desire is towards the freedom of the dawn of things—not towards the "dark secret hour" that walks under coverings of cloud.

The sinless likeness of his seeming "sins"—mere fancies as it appears they mostly were, mere soft light aspirations of theory without body or flesh on them—has something of the innocent immodesty of a birds' or babies' paradise—of a fools' paradise, too, translated into the practice and language of the untheoretic world. Shelley's 'Epipsychidion" scarcely preaches a more bodiless evangel of bodily liberty. That famous and exquisitely written passage beginning, "True love in this differs from gold and clay," delivers in more daringly definite words the exact message of Blake's belief.

Nowhere has the note of pity been more strongly and sweetly struck than in those lovely opening verses