, his limbs cast abroad, his head thrown
back in an ecstasy of intoxication, so that, to the frenzy of his
rolling vision, the whole universe is upside down. We look, and, as we
gaze at the strange image and listen to the marvellous melody, we are
almost tempted to go and do likewise.

But it is not as a prophet, it is as an artist, that Blake deserves the
highest honours and the most enduring fame. In spite of his hatred of
the 'vegetable universe,' his poems possess the inexplicable and
spontaneous quality of natural objects; they are more like the works of
Heaven than the works of man. They have, besides, the two most obvious
characteristics of Nature--loveliness and power. In some of his lyrics
there is an exquisite simplicity, which seems, like a flower or a child,
to be unconscious of itself. In his poem of _The Birds_--to mention, out
of many, perhaps a less known instance--it is not the poet that one
hears, it is the birds themselves.

O thou summer's harmony,
I have lived and mourned for thee;
Each day I mourn along the wood,
And night hath heard my sorrows loud.

In his other mood--the mood of elemental force--Blake produces effects
which are unique in literature. His mastery of the mysterious
suggestions which lie concealed in words is complete.

He who torments the Chafer's Sprite
Weaves a Bower in endless Night.

What dark and terrible visions the last line calls up! And, with the aid
of this control over the secret springs of language, he is able to
produce in poetry those vast and vague effects of gloom, of foreboding,
and of terror, which seem to be proper to music alone. Sometimes his
words are heavy with the doubtful horror of an approaching thunderstorm:

The Guests are scattered thro' the land,
For the Eye altering alters all;
The Senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat Earth becomes a Ball;
The Stars, Sun, Moon, all shrink away,
A desart vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink,
And a dark desart all around.

And sometimes Blake invests his verses with a sense of nameless and
infinite ruin, such as one feels when the drum and the violin
mysteriously come together, in one of Beethoven's Symphonies, to predict
the annihilation of worlds:

On the shadows of the Moon,
Climbing through Night's highest noon:
In Time's Ocean falling, drowned:
In Aged Ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp'd th