The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.

* * * * *

Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor;
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.

But in short, scathing words and significant change of metre he reverses the picture to show his view of it, when, in the companion song of “Experience,” he asks—­

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

It is owing to a false idea that we can bear to see this so-called “charity” at all, for we—­

     reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp.

The real evil is that we can suffer the need of the crust of bread to exist.  This is a view which is gradually beginning to be realised to-day.

Blake is peculiarly daring and original in his use of the mystical method of crystallising a great truth in an apparently trivial fact.  We have seen some of these truths in the Proverbs, and the Auguries of Innocence is nothing else but a series of such facts, a storehouse of deepest wisdom.  Some of these have the simplicity of nursery rhymes, they combine the direct freshness of the language of the child with the profound truth of the inspired seer.

    If the Sun & Moon should Doubt
    They’d immediately Go Out.

It would scarcely be possible to sum up more completely than does this artless couplet the faith—­not only of Blake—­but of every mystic.  Simple, ardent, and living, their faith is in truth their life, and the veriest shadow of doubt would be to them a condition of death.  They are the only people in the world who are the “possessors of certainty.”  They have seen, they have felt:  what need they of further proof?  Logic, philosophy, theology, all alike are but empty sounds and barren forms to those who know.

To Francis Thompson the presence of the Divine in all things is the one overwhelming fact.  As a result of this sense, the consciousness that everything is closely related, closely linked together, is ever present in his poetry.  It is the vision of this truth, he believes, which will be the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth.

    When to the new eyes of thee
    All things by immortal power,
    Near or far,
    Hiddenly
    To each other linked are,
    That thou canst not stir a flower
    Without troubling of a star.

    The Mistress of Vision.