oys of
life, but without discriminating between the higher and the lower. Yet
these exuberant animal spirits which, unrestrained by conscience
or taste, drove him too often into scurrility, gave his work that
passion--warm, throbbing, and personal--which had been painfully wanting
in earlier poets of sensibility. It was his emotional intensity as well
as his lyric genius that made him the most popular poet of his time.

In Burns, sentimentalism was largely temperamental, unreflective, and
concrete. In William Blake, the singularity of whose work long retarded
its due appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but,
unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, more spiritual,
and more consistently philosophic. Indeed, Blake was the ultimate
sentimentalist of the century. A visionary and symbolist, he passed
beyond Shaftesbury in his thought, and beyond any poet of the school
in his endeavor to create a new and appropriate style. His contemporary,
Erasmus Darwin, author of _The Botanic Garden_, was trying to give
sentimentalism a novel interpretation by describing the life of plants
in terms of human life; but, Darwin being destitute of artistic sense,
the result was grotesque. Blake, by training and vocation an engraver,
was primarily an artist; but, partly under Swedenborgian influences, he
had grasped the innermost character of sentimentalism, perceived all its
implications, and carried them fearlessly to their utmost bounds. To him
every atom of the cosmos was literally spiritual and holy; the divine
and the human, the soul and the flesh, were absolutely one; God and Man
were only two aspects of pervasive "mercy, pity, peace, and love."
Nothing else had genuine reality. The child, its vision being as yet
unclouded by false teachings, saw the universe thus truly; and Blake,
therefore, in _Songs of Innocence_, gave glimpses of the world as the
child sees it,--a guileless existence amid the peace that passes all
understanding. He hymned the sanctity of animal life: even the tiger,
conventionally an incarnation of cruelty, was a glorious creature of
divine mould; to slay or cage a beast was, the _Auguries of Innocence_
protested, to incur anathema. The _Book of Thel_ allegorically showed
the mutual interdependence of all creation, and reprehended the maiden
shyness that shrinks from merging its life in the sacrificial union
which sustains the whole.

To Blake the great enemy of truth was the cold lo