gical reason, a
truncated part of Man's spirit, which was incapable of attaining wisdom,
and which had fabricated those false notions that governed the practical
world and constrained the natural feelings. Instances of the unhappiness
caused by such constraint, he gave in _Songs of Experience_, where _The
Garden of Love_ describes the blighting curse which church law had laid
upon free love. To overthrow intellectualism and discipline, Man must
liberate his most precious faculty, the imagination, which alone can
reveal the spiritual character of the universe and the beauty that life
will wear when the feelings cease to be unnaturally confined. Temporarily
Blake rejoiced when the French Revolution seemed to usher in the
millennium of freedom and peace; and his interpretation of its earlier
incidents in his poem on that theme[2] illustrates in style and spirit
the highly original nature of his mind. More than any predecessor he
understood how the peculiarly poetical possibilities of sentimentalism
might be elicited, namely by emphasizing its mystical quality. Thus
under his guidance mysticism, which in the early seventeenth century had
sublimated the religious poetry of the orthodox, returned to sublimate
the poetry of the radicals; and with that achievement the sentimental
movement reached its climax.

Burns died in 1796; Blake, lost in a realm of symbolism, became
unintelligible; and temporarily sentimentalism suffered a reaction. The
French Revolution, with its Reign of Terror, and the rise of a military
autocrat, though supported, even after Great Britain had taken up arms
against Napoleon, by some "friends of humanity" who placed universal
brotherhood above patriotism, seemed to the general public to demonstrate
that the sentimental theories and hopes were untrue to life and led to
results directly contrary to those predicted. Once again, in Canning's
caustic satires of _The Anti-Jacobin_, conservatism raised its voice. But
by this time sentimentalism was too fully developed and widely spread to
be more than checked. Under the new leadership of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Southey, the movement, chastened and modified by experience, resumed
its progress; and the fame of its new leaders presently dimmed the memory
of those pioneers who in the eighteenth century had undermined the
foundations of orthodoxy, slowly upbuilt a new world of thought,
gradually fashioned a poetic style more suited to their sentiments than
the c