ead, as he laughs and weeps and sings, the
branches of the trees of the forest of night stir and rustle under the
immense spaces, and, floating above them, the planets and the stars
flicker down upon him with friendly mysterious joy.

No poet gives one the impression of greater strength than William
Blake; and this is emphasised by the very simplicity and
childishness of his style. Only out of the strength of a lion could
come such honeyed gentleness. And if he is one of the strongest
among poets he is also one of the happiest.

Genuine happiness--happiness that is at the same time intellectual
and spontaneous--is far rarer in poetry than one might suppose. Such
happiness has nothing necessarily to do with an optimistic
philosophy or even with faith in God. It has nothing at all to do with
physical well-being or the mere animal sensations of eating and
drinking and philandering. It is a thing of more mysterious import
and of deeper issues than these. It may come lightly and go lightly,
but the rhythm of eternity is in the beating of its wings, and deep
calls to deep in the throbbing of its pulses.

As Blake himself puts it--

"He who bends to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sun-rise."

In the welling up, out of the world's depths, of happiness like this,
there is a sense of calm, of serenity, of immortal repose and
full-brimmed ecstasy. It is the "energy without disturbance" which
Aristotle indicates as the secret of the life of the eternal Being
himself. It is beyond the ordinary pleasures of sex, as it is beyond
the ordinary difference between good and evil. It is human and yet
inhuman. It is the happiness of da Vinci, of Spinoza, of Goethe. It is
the happiness towards which Nietzsche all his life long struggled
desperately, and struggled in vain.

One touches the fringe of the very mystery of human symbols--of
the uttermost secret of _words_ in their power to express the soul of
a writer--when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of
William Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, so
limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We
all have the same words at our command; we all have the same
rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest
syllables so original, so personal, a shape?

"What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was th