Whatever may have been the precise moment of their meeting, there is no doubt that the three stars of the romantic renascence mingled their radiance. Blake's poems 'excited great interest in Wordsworth,' who finely said that they were 'undoubtedly the production of insane genius, but there is something in the madness of this man that interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.' When Crabb Robinson in 1825 read to Blake Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, the stanza ending with the lines, Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? 'threw him almost into an hysterical rapture.' It is significant that in Wordsworth's Evening Walk WILLIAM BLAKE. From the Portrait by Thomas Phillips, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. and Descriptive Sketches (1793), and in Coleridge's Borderers (1795), there is no trace of the romantic wonder that revealed itself in the Lyrical Ballads (1798). Was it Blake's poetry that wrought the transfiguration? On the whole, it seems possible, although decisive evidence on the point is not available. In 1784, his father having died, and his eldest brother having succeeded to the hosier's business at 28 Broad Street, Blake set up shop next door (No. 27) as printseller and engraver, in partnership with James Parker; Blake's youngest brother, Robert, living with him as an apprentice. In 1787 Robert died, the partnership was dissolved, and Blake went to lodge at 28 Poland Street. While pondering over the problem of finding a publisher for his poems, his beloved brother appeared to him in a dream, and revealed a somewhat obvious solution of the difficulty. The process was a kind of relief etching. The poems and designs were outlined on copper with an impervious liquid. The rest of the plate was then eaten away with an acid, so that the outline was left in relief. After the impressions had been tinted, they were done up in boards by Mrs Blake. Thus with their own hands the poet and his wife made every part of that lyrical missal, the Songs of Innocence. In the same year (1789) Blake engraved in like fashion The Book of Thel the first of his prophetic books. A year later he produced The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In 1791 the first book of The French Revolution was issued by Johnson the bookseller, at whose shop Blake forgathered with Godwin, Tom Paine, and Fuseli, his republican zeal leading him to flaunt the bonnet rouge in the streets. In 1793 he left Poland Street for 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, where he passed seven busy years, designing, engraving, and issuing further prophetic books, The Gates of Paradise, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and America. At this time began his long friendship with Thomas Butts, for nearly thirty years a regular purchaser of his drawings, temperas, and 'frescoes.' In 1794 he issued the Songs of Experience and the prophetic books Europe and The Book of Urizen, followed next year by The Song of Los and The Book of Ahania. In 1800 Flaxman introduced Blake to Hayley, a popular poetaster who posed as 'the Hermit of Eartham.' Hayley induced Blake to settle at Felpham while engraving the illustrations for his Life of Cowper. There he remained three years; but Hayley's vapid triviality vexed his ethereal spirit, and in 1804 he returned to London, taking a first floor at 17 South Molton Street, where he lived nearly seventeen years. Here he produced the prophetic books Jerusalem and Milton, and fell into the unscrupulous hands of Cromek, who, after buying his designs for Blair's Grave, cheated him out of the copyright. Cromek crowned this treachery by plagiarising Blake's design for the Canterbury Pilgrimage,' which he persuaded Stothard to forestall, thus bringing about a permanent estrangement between the two friends. Blake vindicated himself by opening an exhibition for which he wrote a brilliant Descriptive Catalogue, containing the famous study of Chaucer that delighted Lamb. But the public remained deaf and blind, and the poet sank into laborious poverty, indomitably toiling over innumerable designs and scores of manuscripts, never resting, never taking a holiday, working valiantly whether ill or well. In 1813 he found a new friend and patron in John Linnell, who was the staff and stay of his declining years, and through whom he met others, such as John Varley. It was for Varley tha: Blake drew the wonderful 'Spiritual Portraits,' or Visionary Heads,' the most celebrated of which are the grotesquely satirical 'Man who built the Pyramids' and the fantastically humorous 'Ghost of a Flea.' In 1813 Blake moved, for the last time, to 3 Fountain Court, Strand, where he engraved the most sublime of all his drawings, the 'Inventions to the Book of Job,' and the noble designs for Dante. On 12th August 1827 he died, his last hours being radiant with ecstatic visions and spiritual rapture. A divinely patient painter and a divinely impatient poet, his impatient poetry is rarer and finer in quality than his patient designs. His revolt against form in poetry, which marched beside his loyalty to form in art, was partly due to his Ossianism and partly to his Swedenborgian mysticism. These things choked his imagination with weedy symbolism and wild rhetoric. Although Blake was not quite sane, neither was he quite insane. He lived in that unexplored region which separates madness from sanity, and in which imagination is supreme. He was too sane to be called mad, and too mad to be called sane. Wordsworth said the last word on this question. The madness of Blake interests us more than the sanity of other men. His swift word flashes out of the clouds, leaping on us like lightning in brief miracles of lyrical beauty. He was the first child to be a poet, the first poet to be a child. He did not merely sing childhood: rather childhood sang in him as it never sang before or since. He was the first evangelist of youth. His songs have influenced our social temper not less than our literature, for to them may be traced the beginnings of that modern reverence for childhood which has followed afar off the modern reverence for womanhood. There are gleams of poetry in the chaotic symbolism of the prophetic books, such as the splendid line that breaks through the mists of Milton: Time is the mercy of eternity. But as a whole the prophetic books may be left to the high priests of dogmatic mysticism whose fantastic exegesis lies outside literature. Song. My silks and fine array, My smiles and languished air, By love are driven away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: His face is fair as heaven When springing buds unfold ; Oh, why to him was 't given Whose heart is wintry cold? His breast is love's all-worshipped tomb, Where all love's pilgrims come. Bring me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding-sheet; When I my grave have made, Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay. True love doth pass away. 'Introduction' to 'Songs of Innocence.' In a book, that all may read: ' And I stained the water clear, The Chimney-Sweeper. A little black thing among the snow, Crying, 'Weep! weep!' in notes of woe: Where are thy father and mother, say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smiled among the winter's snow, They clothed me in the clothes of death And taught me to sing the notes of woe : And because I am happy and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and His Priest and King Who make up a heaven of our misery.' Infant Joy. 'I have no name, I am but two days old.' What shall I call thee? 'I happy am, Joy is my name.' Sweet joy befall thee! Pretty joy, Sweet joy, but two days old, Sweet joy I call thee; Thou dost smile, I sing the while, Sweet joy befall thee! Infant Sorrow. My mother groaned, my father wept, Struggling in my father's hands, Striving against my swaddling bands, The Blossom. And what shoulder and what art What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? When the stars threw down their spears, Did He who made the lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger, burning bright Oh, the cunning wiles that creep In thy little heart asleep! When thy little heart doth wake, Then the dreadful light shall break. The standard Life of Blake is Gilchrist's (2nd ed. 1880), which contains a supplementary chapter and notes by D. G. Rossetti; and the best study of his work is Mr Swinburne's Critical Essay (1868). His works have been edited by Ellis and Yeats (1893), and his poems, with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti, are in the Aldine Series. The Life by Story (1893) and R. Garnett's Portfolio article (1895) should be consulted. JAMES DOUGLAS. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), 'the restorer of natural poetry,' born at King's Sutton vicarage, Northamptonshire, was educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, and in 1804 became rector of Bremhill in Wiltshire and a prebendary of Salisbury (from 1828 a canon residentiary). His first publication was a little volume of Fourteen Sonnets published anonymously at Bath in 1789, to which additions were made from time to time, and which in 1805 had reached a ninth edition. Meanwhile he had not been idle; other poetical works were Coombe Ellen and St Michael's Mount (1798), The Battle of the Nile (1799), The Sorrows of Switzerland (1801), The Spirit of Discovery (1805), The Missionary of the Andes (1815), Days Departed (1828), St John in Patmos (1833), and The Village Verse Book (1837). None of these can be said to have been popular, though all contain passages of fine descriptive and meditative verse. The 1789 sonnets had the extraordinary distinction of doing Coleridge's 'heart more good than all the other books he ever read excepting the Bible,' in serving the metaphysician -then only seventeen-as an authentic revelation of the poetic spirit, and deepening his aversion to the poetic theories and artificial didacticism of Pope's imitators and successors. Coleridge in his sonnet to Bowles thanks him For those soft strains Whose sadness soothes me like the murmuring Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring; and praises their 'mild and manliest melancholy' as having relieved the 'thought-bewildered man' torn by the 'mightier throes of mind.' It was fortunate for Bowles's fame-as it was for Crabbe'sthat he began to publish when there was in England a signal dearth of true poetry, and that his best work was before the world ere the great poetic revival found its greater exponents. Now we find in the sonnets grace and tenderness, a gentle melancholy, a sweet and native simplicity sufficient to distinguish their author from his contemporaries, but not enough of power, passion, or magic to lead a movement or mark an epoch. But when in his edition of Pope (1806) he criticised, severely and somewhat unjustly, his character, and attacked his claim to be ranked amongst the great poets-Pope was only at the head of the second rank, he said -he initiated a long-continued and bitter controversy that had a profound historic significance and influence. Bowles insisted that images for what is beautiful and sublime in nature are as such nobler and more expressive and more poetical than images derived from art. As usual in such controversies, each party vehemently affirmed facts that their opponents did not deny explicitly or implicitly. Thus Campbell retorted on Bowles, what he did not really dispute, that an exquisite description of artificial objects and manners may be equally characteristic of genius with the disciple of external nature. He further protested against preRaphaelite elaboration of detail in description— 'every rock, every leaf, every diversity of hue in nature's variety'-which Bowles actually did demand. Byron became the most fervid and thorough-going defender of Pope; his stinging sarcasms at Bowles's expense- "Stick to thy sonnets, Bowles-at least they pay'-were more effective than his serious arguments; and Bowles, an absent-minded, eccentric, amiable, musicianly High-Church divine, was no match in the arts of effective polemics for Byron. But, contrary to what might have been expected from his poetry, Bowles was both vehement and fierce in the great controversy, defending his contention in a series of letters' or pamphlets-to Campbell, Byron, Roscoe, a 'Quarterly Reviewer,' and the public. Bowles was no mean antiquary, and wrote a parochial history, the annals of an abbey, and other historical and antiquarian researches; and besides a Life of Bishop Ken and some sermons, he published occasional pamphlets on education, the poor-laws, and Church politics. The first three specimens are from the Sonnets, which in the later editions were some of them a good deal altered in wording; the fourth is from the opening of the Missionary; the sixth from the Spirit of Discovery; the seventh from Childe Harold's last Pilgrimage; the last two from the Miscellaneous Poems ultimately appended to the Sonnets. The Influence of Time on Grief. O Time! who know'st a lenient hand to lay And think when thou hast dried the bitter tear Hope. As one who, long by wasting sickness worn, Salute his lonely porch, now first at morn Goes forth, leaving his melancholy bed; He the green slope and level meadow views, Or marks the clouds that o'er the mountain's head, Or turns his ear to every random song Bamborough Castle. Ye holy towers that shade the wave-worn steep, Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, In South America. Beneath aerial cliffs and glittering snows, Summer was in its prime; the parrot flocks Amid the clear blue light are wandering by ; Winter Evening at Home. Fair Moon! that at the chilly day's decline Wanders my heart, whilst I by turns survey Thee slowly wheeling on thy evening way; And this my fire, whose dim, unequal light, Just glimmering, bids each shadowy image fall Sombrous and strange upon the darkening wall, Ere the clear tapers chase the deepening night ! Yet thy still orb, seen through the freezing haze, Shines calm and clear without; and whilst I gaze, I think around me in this twilight gloom, I but remark mortality's sad doom; The Andes. Andes sweeping the horizon's tract, Mightiest of mountains! whose eternal snows Feel not the nearer sun; whose umbrage chills The murmuring ocean; whose volcanic fires A thousand nations view, hung like the moon High in the middle waste of heaven. From 'Byron's Death.' So ends Childe Harold his last pilgrimage! His pale cheek fading where his brows were bound Sun-dial in the Churchyard of Bremhill. So passes silent o'er the dead thy shade, And have not they, who here forgotten lie Careless alike; the hour still seems to smile, I heard the village-bells, with gladsome sound, |