Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/193

 Rh into temporal, essential into accidental, substantial into attributive; when at once the whole framework, which was meant otherwise to last out your present life, breaks up and leaves you stranded or cast out, feeble and sightless "like a weeping babe;" so that whereas at first you were full of light natural pleasure, "dancing merrily" in "the wild" of animal or childish life, you are now a child again, but unhappy instead of happy—less than a child, thrown back on the crying first stage of babyhood—having had the larger vision, and lost your hold of it by too great pressure of impatience or desire—unfit for the old pleasure and deprived of the new; and the maiden-mother of your spiritual life, your art or your love, is become wan and tearful as you, "pale reclined" in the barren blowing air which cannot again be filled with the fire and the luminous life of vision. In Mary we come again upon the main points of inner contact between Blake's mind and Shelley's. This frank acceptance of pleasure, this avowal without blushing or doubting "that sweet love and beauty are worthy our care," was as beautiful a thing to Shelley as to Blake: he has preached the excellence of it in Rosalind and Helen and often elsewhere: touching also, as Blake does here, on the persecution of it by all "who amant miserè":—

for in their sight the tender and outspoken purity of instinct and innocence becomes confounded with base desire or vanity. This rather than genius or mere beauty seems to be the thing whose persecution by the world is here symbolized.