Page:William Blake in his relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1911).djvu/18

— 18 — belief and in the collection of Rossetti's poems we find none to match Blake's splendid lyrics: Nurse's Song, Spring, the Echoing Green, and so many others display an innocent joy and gladness, which qualities though toned down in Blake's later works, never wholly disappear from them. Also among Blake's drawings we find many that show these qualities e.g. his engravings "Infant Joy", "The Reunion of the Soul and the Body", "Morning or Glad Day". In the drawing "Infant Joy" the innocent light-heartedness of youth has been expressed; in the "Reunion of the Soul and the Body" we see the rapture with which after a long separation a longed-for meeting can fill the heart. But especially expressive of joy in an abstract sense is the drawing "Morning or Glad Day". A male, naked figure descends from above; just alighted, he with one foot touches the earth; a flood of radiance still encircles his head; his arms are outspread, exultingly he brings joy and solace to this lower world, announcing the birth of a new day, full of glory. As said above Dante Gabriel Rossetti has neither poems nor pictures to match these in joyfulness and lightheartedness. We always move in an atmosphere of mystery, the inscrutability of which is never lost sight of, and the melancholy and thoughts without hope which are the result of this mysterious sadness, are apparent in all his poems and pictures. This sense of sadness and mystery is not always very pronounced. Sometimes hardly definable, we merely feel that it is there; sometimes it reveals itself in a weird description of nature as in "The Portrait:" In painting her I shrined her face Mid mystic trees, where light falls in Hardly at all; a covert place When you might think to find a din Of doubtful talk, and a live flame Wandering, and many a shape whose name Not itself knoweth, and old dew, And your own footsteps meeting you, And all things going as they came." And further on: