'What thou bid'st Unargued I obey; so God ordains: God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more All seasons and their change, all please alike.' To her he never seemed erratic or wild. There had indeed at one time been a struggle of wills, but she had yielded; and his was a kind, if firm rule. Surely never had visionary man so loyal and affectionate a wife! CHAPTER XIII. THE SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. 1794. [ÆT 37.] IN the Songs of Experience, put forth in 1794, as complement to the Songs of Innocence of 1789, we come again on more lucid writing than the Books of Prophecy last noticed,writing freer from mysticism and abstractions, if partaking of the same colour of thought. Songs of Innocence and Experience, showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul: the author and printer, W. Blake, is the general title now given. The first series, quite in keeping with its name, had been of far the more heavenly temper. The second, produced during an interval of another five years, bears internal evidence of later origin, though in the same rank as to poetic excellence. As the title fitly shadows, it is of grander, sterner calibre, of gloomier wisdom. Strongly contrasted, but harmonious phases of poetic thought are presented by the two series. One poem in the Songs of Experience happens to have been quoted often enough (first by Allan Cunningham in connection with Blake's name), to have made its strange old Hebrew-like grandeur, its Oriental latitude yet force of eloquence, comparatively familiar: The Tiger. To it Charles Lamb refers: 'I have heard of his poems,' writes he, 'but have never seen them. There is one to a tiger, beginning Tiger tiger burning bright which is glorious!' Of the prevailing difference of sentiment between these poems and the Songs of Innocence, may be singled out as examples The Clod and the Pebble, and even so slight a piece as The Fly; and in a more sombre mood, The Garden of Love, The Little Boy Lost, Holy Thursday (antitype to the poem of the same title in Songs of Innocence), The Angel, The Human Abstract, The Poison Tree, and above all, London. One poem, The Little Girl Lost, may startle the literal reader, but has an inverse moral truth and beauty of its own. Another, The Little Girl Lost, and Little Girl Found, is a daringly emblematic anticipation of some future age of gold, and has the picturesqueness of Spenserian allegory, lit with the more ethereal spiritualism of Blake. Touched by 'The light that never was on sea or shore,' is this story of the carrying off of the sleeping little maid by friendly beasts of prey, who gambol round her as she lies; the kingly lion bowing 'his mane of gold,' and on her neck dropping from his eyes of flame, ruby tears;' who, when her parents seck the child, brings them to his cave; and They look upon his eyes, Well might Flaxman exclaim, Sir, his poems are as grand as his pictures,' Wordsworth read them with delight, and used the words before quoted. Blake himself thought his poems finer than his designs. Hard to say which are the more uncommon in kind. Neither, as I must reiterate, reached his own generation. In Malkin's Memoirs of a Child, specimens from the Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence and Experience were given; for these poems struck the wellmeaning scholar, into whose hands by chance they fell, as somewhat astonishing; as indeed they struck most who stumbled on them. But Malkin's Memoirs was itself a book not destined to circulate very freely; and the poems of Blake, even had they been really known to their generation, were not calculated in their higher qualities to win popular favour, -not if they had been free from technical imperfection. For it was an age of polish, though mostly polish of trifles; not like the present age, with its slovenliness and licence. Deficient finish was never a characteristic of the innovator Wordsworth himself, who started from the basis of Pope and Goldsmith; and whose matter, rather than manner, was obnoxious to critics. Defiant carelessness, though Coleridge in his Juvenile Poems was often guilty of it, did not become a characteristic of English verse, until the advent of Keats and Shelley; poets of imaginative virtue enough to cover a multitude of their own and other people's sins. The length to which it has since run (despite Tennyson), we all know. Yet in this very inartificiality lies the secret of Blake's rare and wondrous success. Whether in design or in poetry, he does, in very fact, work as a man already practised in one art, beginning anew in another; expressing himself with virgin freshness of mind in each, and in each realizing, by turns, the idea flung out of that prodigal cornucopia of thought and image, Pippa Passes :-'If there should arise a new painter, 'will it not be in some such way by a poet, now, or a musician ' (spirits who have conceived and perfected an ideal through 'some other channel), transferring it to this, and escaping our conventional roads by pure ignorance of them?' Even Malkin, with real sense, observes of the poet in general,-his mind is too often at leisure for the mechanical prettinesses 'of cadence and epithet, when it ought to be engrossed by 'higher thoughts. Words and numbers present themselves 'unbidden when the soul is inspired by sentiment, elevated 'by enthusiasm, or ravished by devotion.' Yes! ravished by devotion. For in these songs of Blake's occurs devotional poetry, which is real poetry too-a very exceptional thing. Witness that simple and beautiful poem entitled The Divine Image, or that On Another's Sorrow. The Songs of Innocence are in truth animated by a uniform sentiment of deep piety, of reverent feeling, and may be said, in their pervading influence, to be one devout aspiration throughout. The Songs of Experience consist rather of earnest, impassioned arguments; in this differing from the simple affirmations of the earlier Songs of Innocence,-arguments on the loftiest themes of existence. After the Songs of Experience, Blake never again sang to like angelic tunes; nor even with the same approach to technical accuracy. His poetry was the blossom of youth and early manhood. Neither in design did he improve on the tender grace of some of these illustrations; irregularities - became as conspicuous in it, as in his verse; though in age he attained to nobler heights of sublimity, as the Inventions to Fob will exemplify. Let us again take a glance at what was going on contemporaneously in English literature during the years 1789-94. In novels, these were the days of activity of the famous Minerva Press, with Perdita Robinson and melancholy Charlotte Smith as leaders. Truer coin was circulated by Godwin (St. Leon appeared in 1799), by Zeluco Moore, by Mrs. Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho, in 1794), by Monk Lewis, the sisters Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. In verse, it was the hour of the sentimental Della Cruscans, Madame Piozzi, Mrs. Robinson again, 'Mr. Merry,' and others. On these poor butterflies, Gifford, in this very year, laid his coarse, heavy hand; himself as empty a versifier, if smarter. Glittering Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants delighted the reading world in 1789, smooth Hayley, Anna Seward, ' Swan of Lichfield,' were popular poets. In satire, Dr. Wolcott was punctually receiving from the booksellers his unconscionably long annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, for copious Peter Pindarisms, fugitive odes, and epistles. In the region of enduring literature Cowper had closed his |