er Fields.
Blake had already become acquainted with some of the rising artists of
his time, amongst them Stothard, Flaxman and Fuseli, and he now began to
see something of literary society. At the house of the Rev. Henry
Mathew, in Rathbone Place, he used to recite and sometimes to sing poems
of his own composition, and it was through the influence of this
gentleman, combined with that of Flaxman, that Blake's first volume of
poetry was printed and published in 1783. From this time forward the
artist came before the world in a double capacity. By education as well
as native talent, he was pledged to the life of a painter, and these
_Poetical Sketches_, though they are often no more than the utterances
of a boy, are no less decisive in marking Blake as a future poet.

For a while the two gifts are exhibited in association. To the close of
his life Blake continued to print and publish, after a manner of his
own, the inventions of his verse illustrated by original designs, but
there is a certain period in his career when the union of the two gifts
is peculiarly close, and when their service to one another is
unquestionable. In 1784 Blake, moving from Green Street, set up in
company with a fellow-pupil, Parker, as print-seller and engraver next
to his father's house in Broad Street, Golden Square, but in 1787 this
partnership was severed, and he established an independent business in
Poland Street. It was from this house, and in 1787, that the _Songs of
Innocence_ were published, a work that must always be remarkable for
beauty both of verse and of design, as well as for the singular method
by which the two were combined and expressed by the artist. Blake became
in fact his own printer and publisher. He engraved upon copper, by a
process devised by himself, both the text of his poems and the
surrounding decorative design, and to the pages printed from the copper
plates an appropriate colouring was afterwards added by hand. The poetic
genius already discernible in the first volume of _Poetical Sketches_ is
here more decisively expressed, and some of the songs in this volume
deserve to take rank with the best things of their kind in our
literature. In an age of enfeebled poetic style, when Wordsworth, with
more weighty apparatus, had as yet scarcely begun his reform of English
versification, Blake, unaided by any contemporary influence, produced a
work of fresh and living beauty; and if the _Songs of Innocence_
established Bl