Of Blake’s longer poems, his titanic prophecies and apocalyptic splendors, it is impossible to write justly in such a brief work as this.  Outwardly they suggest a huge chaff pile, and the scattered grains of wheat hardly warrant the labor of winnowing.  The curious reader will get an idea of Blake’s amazing mysticism by dipping into any of the works of his middle life,—­Urizen, Gates of Paradise, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, The French Revolution, or The Vision of the Daughters of Albion.  His latest works, like Jerusalem and Milton, are too obscure to have any literary value.  To read any of these works casually is to call the author a madman; to study them, remembering Blake’s songs and his genius, is to quote softly his own answer to the child who asked about the land of dreams: 

    “O what land is the land of dreams,
    What are its mountains and what are its streams? 
    —­O father, I saw my mother there,
    Among the lilies by waters fair.” 
    “Dear child, I also by pleasant streams
    Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;
    But though calm and warm the waters wide,
    I could not get to the other side.”

MINOR POETS OF THE REVIVAL

We have chosen the five preceding poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake, as the most typical and the most interesting of the writers who proclaimed the dawn of Romanticism in the eighteenth century.  With them we associate a group of minor writers, whose works were immensely popular in their own day.  The ordinary reader will pass them by, but to the student they are all significant as expressions of very different phases of the romantic revival.

JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748).  Thomson belongs among the pioneers of Romanticism.  Like Gray and Goldsmith, he wavered between Pseudo-classic and the new romantic ideals, and for this reason, if for no other, his early work is interesting, like the uncertainty of a child who hesitates whether to creep safely on all fours or risk a fall by walking.  He is “worthy to be remembered” for three poems,—­“Rule Britannia,” which is still one of the national songs of England The Castle of Indolence, and The Seasons.  The dreamy and romantic Castle (1748), occupied by enchanter Indolence and his willing captives in the land of Drowsyhed, is purely Spenserian in its imagery, and is written in the Spenserian stanza. The Seasons (1726- 1730), written in blank verse, describes the sights and sounds of the changing year and the poet’s own feelings in the presence of nature.  These two poems, though rather dull to a modern reader, were significant of the early romantic revival in three ways:  they abandoned the prevailing heroic couplet; they went back to the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope, for their models; and they called attention to the long-neglected life of nature as a subject for poetry.