speare was almost too quiet for Blake's redundant youth. Then also, he took up the shepherd pipe to which the greater Elizabethans sang their songs. A song like My silks and fine array might have been fathered by Fletcher.

What charmed him in these ancients was their naturalism. What displeased him in his contemporaries was their artificialism. Collins, though he strove for simplicity and loved it, though he arrived at some natural joy, could not altogether shake off the atmosphere of his time. In Gray there was too much self-contemplation, too much self-conscious art, too much traditional convention, to allow natural impulse, natural passion, to have its full freedom. Blake never breathed that artificial atmosphere. He lived when it brooded, still heavily, on poetry, but he lived above its close and breezeless elements. He was conscious of them, but would have nothing to do with them. 'Let others,' he said, 'sit in council with their modern peers,

And judge of tinkling rhymes and elegances terse,

I will not.' And he might well say that, for the transition poetry which followed on Gray and Collins had now sunk into the miserable twangling of Hayley's Triumphs of Temper. Now and again a little musical cry like a child's laugh arose in some neglected ballad, but, on the whole, the Muses had fallen asleep in England. And Blake could find them nowhere. His poem, in 1777, entitled To the Muses, expresses, not only his dismay at the decay of

poetry in England, but cries out for the restoration to poetry of the childlike passion which, among the ancient poets of England, sprang to lovely life, fresh as a fountain from the hills.

Whether on Ida's shady brow,

Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the Sun, that now
From antient melody have ceas'd:

Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the Earth,
Or the blue regions of the air

Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wand'ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc'd, the notes are few!

There is no languor, no forced or conventional phrasing in the verses of this early book. And the notes he strikes are manifold and various. Notes of loveliness, simplicity, and passion, even of fine melody, for, though the metre of these poems is in the strangest confusion, it has a sweetness of its own, a musical wash as of the wind through woods of pine; and before long, as his original nature forced him, he made his own manner of verse and his own metres. The manner and music of the fragment of Edward III. had not been

heard in England since the Restoration. Its verse is sensational, but it does not think of itself. The imagination is at work in it like a savage of genius; but, at last, it is truly at work. No one, since Milton laid down his harp, would have written these lines on England as the sovereign of the seas:

Our right, that Heaven gave

To England, when at the birth of nature
She was seated in the deep; the Ocean ceas'd
Her mighty roar, and, fawning play'd around
Her snowy feet, and own'd his awful Queen.

Still nobler, almost like Milton, and inconceivably different from anything else written at the time, is this little speech of Chandos :

Considerate age, my Lord, views motives,
And not acts; when neither warbling voice
Nor trilling pipe is heard, nor pleasure sits
With trembling age, the voice of Conscience then,
Sweeter than music in a summer's eve,

Shall warble round the snowy head, and keep
Sweet symphony to feather'd angels, sitting

As guardians round your chair; then shall the pulse
Beat slow, and taste and touch and sound and smell,

That sing and dance round Reason's fine-wrought throne,
Shall flee away, and leave them all forlorn;

Yet not forlorn if Conscience is his friend.

This imagination, in contact here with human life, is even more fresh and vivid in its work on Nature. The four poems addressed to The Seasons retain that impersonation in which Spenser delighted, but they are nearer to such impersonation as Keats used in his Ode to Autumn than they are to Spenser.

They have the modern rather than the ancient literary touch. Moreover, they hold in them what Spenser's do not hold-the personal love of Nature which is the special mark of the poetry of the nineteenth century. In Blake that love of Nature for her own sake takes the form of joy; an audacious joy as of a young man in the plenitude of his power in the secret strength and godlike splendour of Nature. Here is part of Summer :

O thou who passest thro' our vallies in

Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! Thou, O Summer,
Oft pitched'st here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld

With joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

And here, as a contrast, as soft, as full of humanity as that I have quoted is strong and full of early godhead, are the Lines to the Evening Star: their metre halts, but it is a boy who is writing.

Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,

Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest the
(Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
(In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on

The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver.

The little poem To Morning, if Shelley could have repaired the metre into his own melody, would be like one of those lyrics of his which embody the

nature-myths of the early world. The poem goes back to such lines as these of Shakespeare:

Look where the dawn, in russet mantle clad,

Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill;

and it looks forward to Shelley. It is not too long to quote.

O holy virgin! clad in purest white,

Unlock heavn's golden gates, and issue forth;
Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light
Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring
The honied dew that cometh on waking day.
O radiant morning, salute the sun

Rouz'd like a huntsman to the chace, and with
Thy buskin'd feet appear upon our hills.

These, spite of their metrical mistakes, are even more modern than Wordsworth, as modern as Keats and Tennyson; they are prophetic of a time at hand when Nature should impress herself on the poets as a woman on her lover, and bring to life a new, impassioned music. The sounding cataract,' said Wordsworth, haunted me like a passion.'

Later on, in the prophetic books, he is sometimes, when his mysticism does not intrude, closer to reality. His eye, for the moment, is fixed on the subject. He draws direct from Nature. Nothing then seems to intrude into her sphere. All the world is alive. The lark sings the song of the

morning to God.

The sun listens, full of awe and humility. The whole world rejoices in itself and in its Maker. Here are lines which it is almost