Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/180

 164 of all these intricate and intense conceptions.) Doubt then, being one of the perishable qualities which depend on externals, is mere impotence and error: now let us hear further:—

Part of this reappears with no less vigour of evangelic assertion in the Auguries of Innocence, but stripped of the repellent haze of mythological form. That poem, full as it is of delicate power and clear sweetness of thought, does not however reproduce in full the emblematic beauty of our last extract: nor does it throw so much light of a fitful flame-like sort upon or over the subtlest profundities of Blake's faith.

Elsewhere, reverting with fresh spirit to the same charge, he demands (or his spectre for him—"This was spoken by my spectre to Voltaire, Bacon, &c.):—

Unhappily the respective answers from Verulam and Cirey have not been registered by a too contemptuous prophet; they would have been worth reading.

The dogma of "Christian humility” is totally