has the softness of flowers; the touch of them has nothing metallic or mechanical, such as one feels in much excellent and elaborate verse of this day as well as of that. The sound of many verses of Blake's cleaves to the sense long after conscious thought of the meaning has passed. from one: a sound like running of water or ringing of bells in a long lull of the wind. Like all very good lyrical verse, they grow in pleasurable effect upon the memory the longer it holds them—increase in relish the longer they dwell upon the taste. These, for example, sound singularly plain, however sweet, on a first hearing; but in time, to a reader fit to appreciate the peculiar properties and merits of a lyric, they come to seem as perfect as well can be: "Thou the golden fruit dost bear, There is love, I hear his tongue." The two songs "To Memory," and "To the Muses" are perhaps nearer being faultless than any others in the book. This last especially should never be omitted in any professedly complete selection of the best English lyrics. So beautiful indeed is its structure and choice of language that its author's earlier and later vagaries and erratic indulgences in the most lax or bombastic habits of speech become hopelessly inexplicable. These unlucky tendencies do however break out in the same book which contains such excellent samples of poetical sense and taste; giving terrible promise of faults that were afterwards to grow rank and run riot over much of the poet's work. But even from his worst things here, not reprinted in the present edition, one may gather such lines as these: "My lord was like a flower upon the brows Of lusty May: ah life as frail as flower! Verses not to be despised, when one remembers that the boy who wrote them (evidently in his earlier teens) was living in full eighteenth century. But for the most part the blank verse in this small book is in a state of incredible chaos, ominous in tone of the future "Prophetic Books," if without promise of their singular and profound power or menace of their impenetrable mistiness, the obscurity of confused wind and cloud. One is thankful to see here some pains taken in righting these deformed limbs and planing off those monstrous knots, by one not less qualified to decide on such minor points of execution than on the gravest matters of art; especially as some amongst these blank verse poems contain things of quite original and incomparable grandeur. Nothing at once more noble and more sweet in style was ever written, than part of this "To the Evening Star": "Smile on our loves; and while thou drawest round The sky's blue curtains, scatter silver dew On every flower that closes its sweet eyes In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on The lake: speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, The two lines, or half lines, which make the glory of this extract resemble perfectly, for vigorous grace and that subtle strength of interpretation which transfigures the external nature it explains, the living leader of English poets. Even he has hardly ever given a study of landscape more large and delicate, an effect of verse more exquisite and sonorous. Of the "Spring" we have already said something; but for that poem nothing short of transcription would be adequate. The "Autumn," too, should hardly have been rejected: it contains lines of perfect power and great beauty, though not quite up to the mark of "Spring" or "Summer." From another poem, certainly not worthier of the place it has been refused, we have extracted two lines worth remembering for their terseness and weight of scorn, recalling certain grave touches of satire in Blake's later work: "For ignorance is folly's leasing nurse, And love of folly needs none other's curse." All that is worth recollection in the little play of " Edward the Third" has been here reproduced with a judicious care in adjusting and rejecting. Blake had probably never seen the praiseworthy but somewhat verbose historical drama on the same subject, generously bestowed upon Shakespeare by critics of that German acuteness which can accept as poetry the most meritorious powers of rhetoric. His own disjointed and stumbling fragment, deficient as it is in shape or plan or local colour, has far more of the sound and savour of Shakespeare's style in detached lines more indeed than has ever been caught up by any poet except one to whom his editor has seized the chance of paying tribute in passing the author of Joseph and his Brethren;" a poem which, for strength of manner and freshness of treatment, may certainly recall Blake or any other obscurely original reformer in art; although we may not admit the resemblance claimed for it on spiritual grounds to the works of Blake, in whose eyes the views taken by the later poet of the mysteries inherent in matters of faith or morality, and generally of the spiritual side of things, would, to our thinking, probably have appeared shallow and untrue by the side of his own mystic personal creed. In dramatic passion, in dramatic character, and in dramatic language, Mr. Wells' great play is no doubt far ahead, not of Blake's work only, but of most other men's: in actual conception of things that lie beyond these, it keeps within the range of common thought and accepted theory; falling therefore far short, in its somewhat over frequent passages of didactic and religious reflection, of much less original thinkers than Blake. One other thing we may observe of these "Sketches ;" that they contain, though only in the pieces rejected from our present collection, sad indications of the inexplicable influence which an early reading of the detestable pseudoOssian seems to have exercised on Blake. How or why such lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style did ever gain this luckless influence—one, too, which in after years was to do far worse harm than it has done here—it is not easy to guess. Contemporary vice of taste, imperfect or on some points totally deficient education, may explain much and more than might be supposed, even with regard to the strongest untrained intellect; but on the other hand, the songs in this same volume give evidence of so rare a gift of poetical judgment, such exquisite natural sense and art, in a time which could not so much as blunder except by precedent and machinery, that such depravity of error as is implied by admiration and imitation of such an one as Macpherson remains inconceivable. Similar puzzles will, however, recur to the student of Blake's art; but will not, if he be in any way worthy of the study, be permitted for a minute to impair his sense of its incomparable merits. Incomparable, we say advisedly for there is no case on record of a man's being quite so far in advance of his time, in everything that belongs to the imaginative side of art, as Blake was from the first in advance of his. In 1782 Blake married, it seems after a year or two of engaged life. His wife Catherine Boucher deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife on record. In all things but affection, her husband must have been as hard to live with as the most erratic artist or poet who ever mistook his way into marriage. Over the stormy or slippery passages in their earlier life Mr. Gilchrist has passed perhaps too lightly. No doubt Blake's aberrations were mainly matters of speech or writing; it is however said, truly or falsely, that once in a patriarchal mood he did propose to add a second wife to their small and shifting household, and was much perplexed at meeting on one hand with tears and on all hands with remonstrances. For any clandestine excursions or furtive eccentricities he had probably too much of childish candour and impulse; and this one hopeful and plausible design he seems to have sacrificed with a |