A year after his marriage his first work, 'Poetic Sketches,' was published at the expense of Flaxman and of some dilettanti friends, who were accustomed to gather at a Rev. Mr. Matthews', of 28, Rathbone Place. No. 28 is now a chair and umbrella mender's shop, but was then a very fashionable house on the most northernly fringe of London, upon the way to the Jew's Harp house and the Green Man.' The preface tells that the poems were written between the ages of twelve and twenty. He was now twenty-six, and must have been silent for these six years. He was in a period of transition. He had lost interest probably in his purely literary work, and not yet learnt to set his symbolic visions to music. The poems mark an epoch in English literature, for they were the first opening of the long-sealed well of romantic poetry; they, and not the works of Cowper and Thompson and Chatterton, being the true heralds of our modern poetry of nature and enthusiasm. There is in them no trace of mysticism, but phrases and figures of speech which were soon to pass from the metaphorical to the symbolic stage, and put on mystical significance, are very common. The singer of the 'Mad Song' compares himself to 'a fiend hid in a cloud'; and we shall presently hear in definitely mystical poems of 'a child upon a cloud,' and of 'My brother John, the evil one, In a black cloud, making his moan'; for cloud and

vapour became to him a symbol for bodily emotions, and for the body itself. 'Edward III.' tells of golden cities,' though as yet the poet knows nothing of the ages of gold, silver, and brass; and tells of the times when the pulse shall begin to beat slow

•And taste, and touch, and sight, and sound, and smell,

That sing and dance round Reason's fine-wrought throne,

Shall flee away, and leave him all forlorn '

though as yet the poet has not learned to count and symbolize these senses, and call them 'the daughters of Albion,' and draw them dancing about fallen man among the Druidic monuments of ancient Britain. (See 'Jerusalem,' page 69, and elsewhere.)

A book called by its present owner, Mr. Murray, from a phrase in the first paragraph, The Island in the Moon,' was written probably soon after the close of the six silent years. It shows in a flickering, feeble way, the dawn of the mystical period. It is a clumsy and slovenly satire upon the dilettanti and triflers who gathered about Mr. and Mrs. Matthews, but contains some lyrics not to be found elsewhere, and here reprinted from 'The Works of William Blake' (B. Quaritch). The prose, touched now and then with a faint humour, has little but autobiographical interest. Of this

there is, however, plenty, for the whole manuscript lightens with a blind fury against the shallow piety and shallow philosophy of his day. The thing should be read once in 'The Works' and then forgotten, for it belongs to the weak side of a strong man, to his petulance, to a certain quarrelsome self-consciousness which took hold upon him at times. There is in it a peculiar and unpleasant poem upon surgery, which was, in all likelihood, his first symbolic verse, and several poems afterwards included in 'The Songs of Innocence.' In 1804 he was to write of being again enlightened by the light' which he had enjoyed' in his youth, and which had 'for exactly twenty years been closed' from him, 'as by a door and window shutters.' Was this darkening of the spiritual light caused by the awakening of his anger against the men and women of his time? 'The Argument' to 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,' now soon to be written, tells how the just man,' the imaginative man that is, walked the vale of mortal life among roses and springs of living water until the villain,' the unimaginative man, came among the roses and the springs, and then the just man' went forth in anger into 'the wilds' among the 'lions' of bitter protest. However this may be, the closing out of the light 'as by a door and window shutters,' if Blake's recollection do not play him false about the twenty years, the

writing of 'The Island of the Moon' and a quarrel with the Rathbone Place coterie, of which we have some vague record, must have come all very near together.

In 1784, upon the death of his father, William Blake moved into a house next door to the one where he had been born, and which his brother James had now inherited, and started a printseller's shop in partnership with a fellow apprentice, and took his brother Robert for apprentice to engraving. In 1787 Robert fell ill and died, Blake nursing him with such devotion that he is said to have slept for three days when the need for him was over. He had seen his brother's spirit ascending clapping its hands for joy, and might well sleep content.

Soon after the death of Robert, disagreement with his partner brought the print shop to an end, and Blake moved into neighbouring Poland Street, and started what was to prove the great work of his life. One night, a form resembling his brother Robert came to him and taught him how to engrave his poems upon copper, and how to print illustrations and decorative borderings upon the same pages with the poem. In later years he wrote to a friend, 'I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they are apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in

the most splendid, as well as the longest, of his mystical works, and was published by Mr. E. J. Ellis and myself, for the first time, in 'The Works of William Blake.' A conception of its luxuriant beauty can be got from the passages quoted in this volume. There is record too of a 'Bible of Hell,' and of this the title-page remains; of an unfinished poem called 'The French Revolution,' which was printed in the ordinary way, by a certain Johnston of St. Paul's Churchyard; of 'The Gates of Hell, for Children,' and of an engraved book called 'Othoon.' The earlier of the books which have come down to us show the influence of Jacob Boehme and of the kabalistic symbolism, and it is probable that the reading of The Morning Redness,' Mysterium Magnum,' and stray fragments of medieval magical philosophy, such as the works of Cornelius Agrippa, then not uncommon in translation, delivered his intellect from the spectral and formal intellect of Swedenborg, and taught him to think about the meaning of his own visions. He may also have met mystics and even students of magic, for there was then an important secret body working in London under three brothers named Falk. The miniature painter Cosway, too, may have come across him, and Cosway kept a house specially for the invocation of spirits. His own illumination probably reached its height between his twentieth and his twenty-seventh

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