Fanny, dear girl! has in my spouse and me Her mother's father, one who has a store 'Pardon! good my friend, I not alone will pardon, I commend ; Think you that I have no remembrance left How nymphs will listen when their swains persuade, 'In mercy hear me now!' And here comes one who will the whole explain, 'Then be entreaty made To her, a woman, one you may persuade; A little teasing, but she will comply, 'O! he is mad, and miserable I!' Exclaimed the youth; but let me now collect The thing but man will tease you, if he loves. But now for business: tell me, did you think That we should always at your meetings wink? Poor Fanny! now I think I see her blush, And cannot bear to have her temper stirred ;— Then, first debating, we agreed at last To seek my Lord and tell him what had passed.* 'To tell the Earl?' 'Yes truly, and why not? And then together we contrived our plot.' 'Eternal God!' 'Nay be not so surprised,— In all the matter we were well advised; We saw my Lord, and Lady Jane was there, And said to Johnson-Johnson, take a chair.' But in the higher places so are they; We are obeyed in ours and they in theirs obey- * * * * * That evening all in fond discourse was spent When the sad lover to his chamber went, To think on what had passed, to grieve and to repent. Where the rough wind alone was heard to move, When now the young are reared, and when the old, Half hid in mist, that hung upon the fen; Took their short flights and twittered on the lea; WILLIAM BLAKE. [WILLIAM BLAKE was born in London, at No. 28, Broad Street, Golden Square, on the 28th November 1757; he died in Fountain Court, Strand, on the 12th of August, 1827. His Poetical Sketches were published in 1783, and the Songs of Innocence in 1787. In 1787 was also published The Book of Thel; and this was followed in 1790 by The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in 1791 by The French Revolution, and in 1793 by The Gates of Paradise, the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and the America. The Songs of Experience, designed as a companion series to the earlier Songs of Innocence, were issued in 1794. Of the later productions of the poet nearly all belonged to the class of prophetic books. To the year 1794 belong the Europe and The Book of Urizen; in 1795 appeared The Song of Los and The Book of Abania, and in 1804 the Jerusalem and the Milton.] The poetry of Blake holds a unique position in the history of English literature. Its extraordinary independence of contemporary fashion in verse, and its intuitive sympathy with the taste of a later generation, would alone suffice to give a peculiar interest to the study of the poet's career. Nor is this interest in any way diminished by a knowledge of Blake's singular and strongly marked individuality. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to do justice to the great qualities of his imagination, or to make due allowance for its startling defects, unless the exercise of the poetic gift is considered in relation to the other faculties of his mind. He appealed to the world in the double capacity of poet and painter; and such was the peculiar nature of his endowment and the particular method of his work, that it is difficult to measure the value of his literary genius without some reference to his achievements in design. For it is not merely that he practised the two arts simultaneously, but that he chose to combine them after a fashion of his own. An engraver by profession and training, he began at a very early age to employ his technical knowledge in the invention of a wholly original system of literary publication. With the exception of the Poetical Sketches, issued in the ordinary form through the kindly help of friends, nearly all of Blake's poems were given to the world in a fantastic dress of his own devising. He became in a special sense his own printer and his own pubisher. The typography of his poems and the pictorial illustration by which they were accompanied were blended in a single scheme of ornamental design, and from the engraved plate upon which this design was executed by the artist's own hand copies were struck off in numbers more than sufficient to satisfy the modest demands of his admirers. This peculiar process of publication cannot of course be held to affect Blake's claims as a poet. It bears a more obvious relation to those powers of a purely artistic kind which are not here in question; but its employment by him is nevertheless well deserving of remark in this place, because it indicates a certain quality of mind that deeply affected his poetic individuality. That happy mingling and confusion of text and ornament which give such a charm to Songs of Innocence was the symbol of a strongly marked intellectual tendency that afterwards received a morbid development. Blake has been called mad, and within certain well-defined limits the charge must, we think, be admitted. He possessed only in the most imperfect and rudimentary form the faculty which distinguishes the functions of art and literature; and when his imagination was exercised upon any but the simplest material, his logical powers became altogether unequal to the labour of logical and consequent expression. That this failure arose rather from morbid excess and excitement of visionary power than from any abnormal defect of intellectual energy is sufficiently indicated by the facts of his career. For while his hold over the abstract symbols of language grew gradually feebler, his powers of pictorial imagery became correspondingly vigorous and intense. The artistic faculty in Blake strengthened and developed with advancing life, and he produced no surer or more satisfying example of his powers than the series of illustrations to the Book of Job, executed when he was already an old man. Indeed if Blake had never committed himself to literature we should scarcely be aware of the morbid tendency of his mind. It is only in turning from his design to his verse that we are forced to recognise the imperfect balance of his faculties: nor could we rightly understand the strange limitation of his poetical powers without constant reference to this diseased activity of the artistic sense. For there is a large portion of Blake's verse which is not infected at all with the suspicion of insanity, and it seems at first |