oems of William Blake, comprising Songs of Innocence and
of Experience, together with Poetical Sketches and some
Copyright Poems not in any other edition. London: Basil Montagu
Pickering.

It does not add to the mere delight of reading Blake's poems to know
that in point of time they preceded the writings of Cowper, Wordsworth
and Burns, but assuredly it enhances our estimation of their merit, and
should have great weight in determining the literary rank of their
author. His first volume, called _Poetical Sketches_, printed only for
private circulation after lying for six years in manuscript, appeared in
1783, and then only by dint of the kindly efforts of influential and
prosperous friends, notably Flaxman the sculptor. The _Sketches_ were
written between the ages of twelve and twenty. The _Songs of Innocence
and Experience_ appeared between 1787 and 1794, and were united in one
volume in the latter year. It is by the poems contained in these two
volumes, although he published or left in manuscript many other
compositions, most of which are collected in one or the other of the
editions now before us, that he is best known. During his lifetime his
writings never achieved any general literary success. It fared with his
poems as with his paintings, only in a minor degree: they were highly
esteemed by the initiated, by his personal friends, by a few men whose
keen natural perception of genius enabled them to discern it in spite of
the eccentricity and inequality of his work; but to the general public,
on whose recognition depends the reputation of the artist, his verses as
well as his drawings were a sealed, or at least an enigmatical, book.
His verses have no literary atmosphere about them: they smell neither
of the midnight oil nor of that smoke of fame the fumes of which Byron
tells us "are frankincense to human thought." They seem to have been
written as spontaneously as a bird might warble on a bough, and no bird
was ever more careless of auditors than Blake. It was not until twelve
years after his death that a selection from his poems was given to the
general public by the elder Pickering, and twenty-four years after
(eleven years ago) a more general interest was created in his work, both
as artist and poet, by a long and elaborate biography of him written by
Mr. Gilchrist, and accompanied by a selection from his poems made by Mr.
Rossetti. Subsequent to this publication appeared a voluminous critical