nocence, which Wordsworth entered
fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the
simple and assured ease of one native. He knows the mystical wonder and
horror that Coleridge set forth in _The Ancient Mariner_. As for the
beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems. "The
king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by
"mind-forg'd manacles"; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is
broken by the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley,
life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the
beams of the Eternal."[6]

[Footnote 6: Prof. Raleigh.]

In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was his
contemporaries' and has later been his commentators' refuge from
assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as
Neitzsche and as consistent. An absolute unity of belief inspires all
his utterances, cryptic and plain. That he never succeeded in founding a
school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to
the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of
his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which the
prophetic books which are the full and extended statement of his
philosophy, are couched, and in the second place to the inherent
difficulty of the philosophy itself. As he himself says, where we read
black, he reads white. For the common distinction between good and evil,
Blake substitutes the distinction between imagination and reason; and
reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come
to impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes. "There is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;" to rid the world
of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for thought,
vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew. The implications of
this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid to follow where they
led him. Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on that dark and
adventurous journey, his work contains delightful and simpler things. He
wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he
could speak in a child's voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the
simple elemental things. His odes to "Spring" and "Autumn" are the
harbingers of Keats. Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could
English show songs like his

"My silks and fine array."

and the o