The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor better put.  The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he expresses as curtly and off-handedly,

“The sun’s light when he unfolds it,
 Depends on the organ that beholds it.”

In the realm of childhood and innocence, which Wordsworth entered fearfully and pathetically as an alien traveller, he moves with the simple and assured ease of one native.  He knows the mystical wonder and horror that Coleridge set forth in The Ancient Mariner.  As for the beliefs of Shelley, they are already fully developed in his poems.  “The king and the priest are types of the oppressor; humanity is crippled by “mind-forg’d manacles”; love is enslaved to the moral law, which is broken by the Saviour of mankind; and, even more subtly than by Shelley, life is pictured by Blake as a deceit and a disguise veiling from us the beams of the Eternal."[6]

[Footnote 6:  Prof.  Raleigh.]

In truth, Blake, despite the imputation of insanity which was his contemporaries’ and has later been his commentators’ refuge from assenting to his conclusions, is as bold a thinker in his own way as Neitzsche and as consistent.  An absolute unity of belief inspires all his utterances, cryptic and plain.  That he never succeeded in founding a school nor gathering followers must be put down in the first place to the form in which his work was issued (it never reached the public of his own day) and the dark and mysterious mythology in which the prophetic books which are the full and extended statement of his philosophy, are couched, and in the second place to the inherent difficulty of the philosophy itself.  As he himself says, where we read black, he reads white.  For the common distinction between good and evil, Blake substitutes the distinction between imagination and reason; and reason, the rationalizing, measuring, comparing faculty by which we come to impute praise or blame is the only evil in his eyes.  “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;” to rid the world of thinking, to substitute for reason, imagination, and for thought, vision, was the object of all that he wrote or drew.  The implications of this philosophy carry far, and Blake was not afraid to follow where they led him.  Fortunately for those who hesitate to embark on that dark and adventurous journey, his work contains delightful and simpler things.  He wrote lyrics of extraordinary freshness and delicacy and spontaneity; he could speak in a child’s voice of innocent joys and sorrows and the simple elemental things.  His odes to “Spring” and “Autumn” are the harbingers of Keats.  Not since Shakespeare and Campion died could English show songs like his

“My silks and fine array.”

and the others which carry the Elizabethan accent.  He could write these things as well as the Elizabethans.  In others he was unique.