Then said the Lawgiver, "Funny enough! Let's have Handel's water piece

A crowned king,

On a white horse sitting,

With his trumpets sounding,

And banners flying,

Through the clouds of smoke he made his way.

And the shout of his thousands fills his heart with rejoicing and victory.
And the shout of his thousands fills his heart with rejoicing and victory.
Victory! Victory! 'Twas William, Prince of Orange,---

(Here a page is wanting, if not more.)

-thus illuminating the manuscript."

"Ay," said she, "that would be excellent."

"Then," said he, "I would have all the wording engraved instead of printed, and at every other leaf a high-finished print,-all in three volumes folio, and sell them (for) a hundred pounds apiece. They would print off two thousand."

"Then," said she, "whoever will not have them will not deserve to live."

"Don't you think I have something of the goat's face?" said he. "Very like a goat's face," she answered.

"I think your face," said he, “is like that noble beast the tiger. Oh, I was at Mrs. Sicknacher's, and I was speaking of my abilities, but their nasty hearts, poor devils, are eat(en) up with envy. They envy my abilities, and all the women envy your abilities."

"My dear, they hate people who are of higher abilities than their nasty, filthy selves. But do you outface them, and then strangers will see that you have an opinion."'

"Now I think we should do as much good as we can when we are at Mr. Femality's. Do you snap, and take me up, and I will fall into such a passion. I'll hollow and stamp, and frighten all the people there, and show them what truth is."

At this instant Obtuse Angle came in.
"Oh, I am glad you are come," said Quid.

Having begun with laughter, Blake ends very suddenly with a mixture of feelings. He has drifted by a mere accident into the idea of the Songs of Innocence, the book through which he is still best known all the world over. He was too young and good-natured to keep up the mood of bitter derision for long at a time. He has lost his way into the region of beauty when he intended mere mockery. It occurs to him suddenly that he has hit on a new kind of art, and he pauses. The Songs of Innocence, with their pages printed on floating tints of sunrise, with their verses nestled up against quaint or pretty designs, and with the touch of the author's own hand upon every page, have always been an invention about which the world has wondered with increasing delight. The price of a copy (including the second part, the Songs of

Experience) in Blake's time was five guineas. A hundred guineas would not be considered unusual now, and more has been paid for the best examples.

Those of us who have been dissatisfied with the mere vague, general attribution of their originality and sweetness to Blake's spirituality and genius are no longer to be kept at arm's length from the author by the prestige of these beautiful words. We can come nearer to his mind. We find that the substance or sentiment of the opening poems was due to his amusement at the sentimentality of the ladies who sang similar songs at Rathbone Place, while the form and appearance were invented as a mock at the hare-brained projects of one of the men who wanted to be preposterously original in order to outdo the others. To outdo is a phrase in this caricature which went straight to the centre of Blake's character. There is a similar meaning to the word "work" in these pages. I could work him simply meant “I could excel so as to humiliate him" in the Rathbone Place drawing

room.

But just as vulgar people become especially revolting and unendurable when they try to be witty, so poetic peoplethose at least in whom the real faculty of poetry is deep down-cannot remain shallow and childish, even when only intending to make fun, if they compose verse upon really beautiful and lovable subjects. The simplicity of lovers in a grot will bring a sweetness to the tune of their words, and the sublimity and pathos of a crowd of innocent children as they sing tunes, feeling the pinch of mutability as sunset puts a term to their wild play, has a magic power on the nerves of poets as they write, and affects the verse itself; so that what comes forth under such influences is not verse merely, but poetry.

This innate tendency to tune the measure in harmony with the thought was Blake's real muse, though he never knew it. This was the "author in eternity" who "dictated to him" his "mild song." When he wrote mere sarcasm about conceit, envy, folly, and fraud, that author went on a journey like Baal and could not be called, or peradventure he slept and would not be awakened.

In the small portion of the MS. of The Island in the Moon here reproduced we see the handwriting of the first of the Songs of Innocence as it was composed, and we see beyond that of the second a fragment of how the manuscript ran on,-a sarcastic piece of deliberate foolishness, not

even free from the reproach of coarseness. Blake was so deficient in the power of seizing the value of his own literary work that it was only a page or two later that he was pulled up by seeing that he was playing with what should be important and beautiful, when his artistic imagination saw the poems of the future printed on rainbows of beauty and making visible on the page the colours of the excitement that their delight owned as an atmosphere.

We are sometimes reminded that the faculty of seeing colour at all in nature around us is very imperfect still in our branch of the Aryan race, and is of very modern development. There was as little colour in art as there was in music harmony a few centuries ago. The harmony of to-day is as new as the seven colours now commonly found in the rainbow. Our fathers only saw three.

An improvement in general perception seldom comes to a whole race, or even to a whole country, at once. A great man here, and a great man there, first sees or hears in his mind what others are taught to see and hear through him.

Blake's own faculty of vision in art will soon be within most people's power, though it still causes his sanity to be suspected by many people who know more of medical textbooks than of the imagination which they parcel out so glibly into normal and morbid. The idea that "normal" supplies us with a criterion by which to measure sanity is, Max Nordau notwithstanding, as funny as anything in The Island in the Moon. Blake himself deliberately advised artistic youth to "cultivate imagination till it reaches vision."

There is an idea now gaining ground that colours have a direct relation to sounds, as these have to emotions. Blake has left an accidental observation which tells his own position here in a way that reveals, as an inherent quality of his emotional organism, the origin of the colouring that covers the pages of the Songs of Innocence, and explains why he instantly saw, even though first conceived in fun, the seriousness of the idea of treating printed verse in this way. In the description of the appalling vision of Leviathan in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell we are told, "His forehead was divided into streaks of green and purple, like those on a tiger's forehead."

These colours are those of the emotions of "vegetative or physical fury that we cannot separate from our imaginations when we think of a tiger's forehead.

With the Songs of Innocence, not as printed, but as first

written during the time of The Island in the Moon, really closes the first or literary period of Blake's poetic life.

Before the Songs of Experience were added to them the great change began in his manner of thought which sets him not merely in advance of all other writers, but apart from them.

He was now about to become altogether a myth-maker. He did not for some years know the fact, and it was still longer before he himself perceived the importance of it. But the need had been felt for this change, and the time for the change was at hand.

Before it is considered, however, a change of another kind that belongs to this period of his life calls aloud to be looked at and understood.

CHAPTER IX

'MARY'

HOWEVER glad we may be to glean something from The Island in the Moon about the opening of Blake's career, about how his best-known works came to be produced, or about how he bore himself among the literary people of his day, this, we cannot help feeling, is not enough. The Rathbone Place period was the beginning of his married life. "Here is the poet," we say to ourselves as we read, "but where was the husband?"

Only on the last page of the Island is there any indication that such a thing as married life existed. It appears here in the caricature of a couple who are conspiring at home to make a sensation at a literary party. Such a scheme, with no intention that it should be realised, may very probably have been hatched between Mr. and Mrs. Blake. One of the two speakers is the intending author of the ideal volume whose real form, when it came to be produced, was that of the Songs of Innocence. The wife in this dialogue seems to have formed a very bad opinion of the "nasty, filthy," and "envious" people of the literary coterie. Envy was one thing when it stimulated a poetic nature to make sweet songs; it was quite another thing when it led mean natures to utter abuse or detraction.

Mrs. Blake must have been, in the early months, several times to Rathbone Place. She had learned to read and write since she married, and that was but lately. She had lived a useful life for five-and-twenty years, and had learned qualities of common-sense without the aid of literature, qualities which in old age were to develop into the marked precision, formal and methodical habits, and primness of manner that were noticed in her during her last years. She was certain to have at this time of her early marriage quite as much contempt as her husband had for the literary