That is a curious flower to find growing in the London street; but it suggests Blake’s own life, which was outwardly busy and quiet, but inwardly full of adventure and excitement.  His last huge prophetic works, like Jerusalem and Milton (1804), were dictated to him, he declares, by supernatural means, and even against his own will.  They are only half intelligible, but here and there one sees flashes of the same poetic beauty that marks his little poems.  Critics generally dismiss Blake with the word “madman”; but that is only an evasion.  At best, he is the writer of exquisite lyrics; at worst, he is mad only “north-northwest,” like Hamlet; and the puzzle is to find the method in his madness.  The most amazing thing about him is the perfectly sane and cheerful way in which he moved through poverty and obscurity, flinging out exquisite poems or senseless rhapsodies, as a child might play with gems or straws or sunbeams indifferently.  He was a gentle, kindly, most unworldly little man, with extraordinary eyes, which seem even in the lifeless portraits to reflect some unusual hypnotic power.  He died obscurely, smiling at a vision of Paradise, in 1827.  That was nearly a century ago, yet he still remains one of the most incomprehensible figures in our literature.

WORKS OF BLAKE.  The Poetical Sketches, published in 1783, is a collection of Blake’s earliest poetry, much of it written in boyhood.  It contains much crude and incoherent work, but also a few lyrics of striking originality.  Two later and better known volumes are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, reflecting two widely different views of the human soul.  As in all his works, there is an abundance of apparently worthless stuff in these songs; but, in the language of miners, it is all “pay dirt”; it shows gleams of golden grains that await our sifting, and now and then we find a nugget unexpectedly: 

    My lord was like a flower upon the brows
    Of lusty May; ah life as frail as flower! 
    My lord was like a star in highest heaven
    Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;
    My lord was like the opening eye of day;
    But he is darkened; like the summer moon
    Clouded; fall’n like the stately tree, cut down;
    The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves.

On account of the chaotic character of most of Blake’s work, it is well to begin our reading with a short book of selections, containing the best songs of these three little volumes.  Swinburne calls Blake the only poet of “supreme and simple poetic genius” of the eighteenth century, the one man of that age fit, on all accounts, to rank with the old great masters.[207] The praise is doubtless extravagant, and the criticism somewhat intemperate; but when we have read “The Evening Star,” “Memory,” “Night,” “Love,” “To the Muses,” “Spring,” “Summer,” “The Tiger,” “The Lamb,” “The Clod and the Pebble,” we may possibly share Swinburne’s enthusiasm.  Certainly, in these three volumes we have some of the most perfect and the most original songs in our language.