they foundered in the stream of time. They live in his poetic use of them only. But to know of a few is to know of them all. Some have been already mentioned, but one or two more may be considered.

We have already seen how the country walks of Blake while still apprentice produced his first lyrical utterances, while the cold tombs of the Abbey were the parents of his red-hot scenes of Elizabethan drama. It was Elizabethan, of course, from the pricking of the cruel spur of envy that goaded him to try to "out-do" Shakespeare. Sometimes a mere word let fall by chance would set him off into a productive fever of imagination, and be the cause of a sweet and never-to-be-forgotten poem or ballad.

There is a revelation of how this happened. The word "jocund," which also perhaps inspired his drawing of Jocund Day, called Glad Day by Gilchrist, was first to inspire a poem, as may be gathered from the notes written in later life that have been already referred to, about Woollett the engraver, who dared to be contemptuous of Basire. From those reminiscences we also learn that among Woollett's prints was one called Jocund Peasants. At the moment when this was under Blake's eye, and he saw "Jack Brown" working on it for Woollett, he was not thinking of writing Anecdotes of Artists. He was in the poetic exaltation of the years that produced the verses afterwards printed by the kind Mr. Mathews under the title Poetical Sketches.

At that time he was Trilby entranced, and the youthful blood in his veins was the Svengali that made the magic passes as he strode about the green fields in his holiday rambles. To him in this easily inspirable state the word "jocund" was enough. It set him off at once, as a match sets off a firework, and we have

I love the jocund dance,

a poem whose third stanza begins—

I love the peasant cot,

which is evidently directly produced by the imaginative delight with which he gave life and love from his own mental riches to the title of another print claimed at the same date by Woollett, called The Cottagers.

Every one will recall an example of an incident almost similar, noted in Keats's letter to John Hamilton Reynolds,

written April 17, 1817, from Carisbrook. Keats is at the time nervous from want of regular rest, as he says almost apologetically, as if to explain such weakness as the fact that the passage in Lear—

Do you not hear the sea?

has "haunted him intensely."

Then the letter gives the sonnet beginning

It keeps eternal whisperings around,

which was the result of that intense haunting.

In the high tide of what may be called Blake's missionary activity, when the whole purpose of his life was—

To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal Eyes,
Of Man inwards, into the worlds of Thought, into Eternity,
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination,

he was still caught sometimes by a word.

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball,

It will lead you in at heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall,

he wrote as a little outburst of cheering to encourage those who were likely to faint by the way in threading the mazes of his great poem Jerusalem. The verse seems to have been similarly the result of a chance suggestion in one word. We find on another page of the MS. book, where this little quatrain is crowded into a margin and written upside down so as to catch his eye among its confused and crammed-up leaves

"2nd May 1807. Found the word Golden."

In the Jerusalem the lines are printed by Blake on page 77, which is known to have been engraved long after 1804-the date of the title-page. There is only one clue to its period. The page of the MS. on which it occurs shows, by the manner in which the entries crowd on one another, the prose paragraphs written wherever room could be found for them in and out of spaces left by epigrams, short poems, and sketches, that the reminiscence about Woollett and Jack Brown was written after-probably soon after-the quatrain about the golden string. These reminiscences were to form part of an advertisement to the Canterbury Pilgrims, including

Anecdotes of Artists, which could not have been written before 1808 or 1809. It was therefore in the mood of reminiscence, and not long before he wrote about the days when he had found the word "jocund," that he "found the word golden." This is natural enough. To the prolific mind the void of nature, when entered into, " becomes a womb that heaves in enormous circles." It is probable, in fact, that the verse he wrote after finding "the word golden," by recalling to him a similar experience of earlier years, brought back the time when he used to see Woollett, and to boil with suppressed indignation at his prosperity, while Basire was going out of fashion. This would now lead to the production of Anecdotes of Artists in the year 1808 or 1809.

The Passions, the one more poem so lately come to light that seems to belong to the period of the Poetical Sketches, has a value of a special kind. It enables us to see that moods underlie all Blake's mythic names, and that real mental relationships are intended by his mythic genealogies.

The one quality of his work which most encourages the reader, when wearied by its wonders, is its continuity of general scheme from the opening of his life to its close. This quality is difficult to find, however, for a very natural reason. It was a matter of course to Blake, and he only took pains to show it now and then under revolt from the incredulous and patronising contempt of those who excused themselves for not understanding him by whispering that he did not understand himself. He was slow to learn how those who could not comprehend him despised him, though it is the lesson that is the beginning of maturity, and there is perhaps hardly any one, with any strength or generosity at all, who has not at times attempted to gather the feeble as Christ would have gathered Jerusalem, "as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings," only to find that they "would not." Continuity is difficult to trace in Blake, because the thing in his work that interested him was not its continuity, as a rule, but was each separate flash of imaginative creation as it flared up in his mind. He despises the artistic quality called by painters "getting together" in a picture, a merit first violently thrust upon the attention of connoisseurs by Rembrandt with his single-spot scheme of illumination. Blake, in furious rebellion against the cheap praise that has grown rank about this, exclaims, "Real effect is the making out of parts." He loves "minute particulars," and called them the beloved "little ones of the parent Imagination.

He loves separate emotions,-first one, then the other. He loves almost anything better than sequence, gradation, continuity. His pictures, whether light or dark, are patchy. Sustained will expressed with gradated fervour was unknown to him. There would have been, we see, no plot in his Edward III or his Island in the Moon, as there was none in the lighting of his paintings. In each figure each muscle is "made out" with as much foreground emphasis as each other muscle. The toes and fingers are equally insisted on. In sculpture this is right, no doubt, but it makes the difference, of course, between a painting and a picture in an illusionary art like that which uses a flat surface to express depths and distances. Blake never discovered that he was not a painter, but was constitutionally a born sculptor. He was a pioneer in colour as in verse, but though he has the first place as a maker of lyric maxims or poetic proverbs and of philosophic myth, by a similar oversight he thought himself a writer of epic poetry. His only idea of plot in literature may be symbolised by the numbers 1, 2, 1, or a "fall into division and a resurrection into unity" (Vala, Night I, 1. 17).

In the Job series he seemed to have a plot in his drawings. It is the same thing,-a fall from plenty, a return to plenty. There is no There is no plot. The sons, daughters, flocks and herds that, in the Bible, make Job's plenty at the end are not the same that make it at the beginning, but to Job's elastic mind they seem the same. He really thinks of nothing but himself and his God. All else is an occasion to show his faith and his God's power. No one can call this a plot.

Blake's mythic and symbolic scheme is therefore not the backbone of his myth or his symbolism. It is an accident, and is due to the significance, of which he never lost sight, being always a reference to the essentially unchanged truths of life, feeling, and mind. It is precisely its union of the firm and the unsought that makes the unity of his work the irrefragable proof, and the only proof, of his sanity. Let no praise, therefore, be stinted to those who, like Gilchrist, D. G. Rossetti, and Mr. Swinburne, believed in this sanity, and announced it, though the proof was hidden from them.

Only habitual readers of Blake possess it even now, for it is not to be found without going over the whole of his work. It is like the treasure buried in the farmer's field, which he told his sons was two feet below the surface, but of whose place he gave no further indication, with the result that they