After these exertions, it must have seemed natural enough to Rossetti and his successors to print four other expunged lines as part of the poem, and to complete the business by clapping a title to their concoction—­’Love’s Secret’—­a title which there is no reason to suppose had ever entered the poet’s mind.

Besides illustrating the shortcomings of his editors, this little poem is an admirable instance of Blake’s most persistent quality—­his triumphant freedom from conventional restraints.  His most characteristic passages are at once so unexpected and so complete in their effect, that the reader is moved by them, spontaneously, to some conjecture of ‘inspiration.’  Sir Walter Raleigh, indeed, in his interesting Introduction to a smaller edition of the poems, protests against such attributions of peculiar powers to Blake, or indeed to any other poet.  ‘No man,’ he says, ‘destitute of genius, could live for a day.’  But even if we all agree to be inspired together, we must still admit that there are degrees of inspiration; if Mr. F’s Aunt was a woman of genius, what are we to say of Hamlet?  And Blake, in the hierarchy of the inspired, stands very high indeed.  If one could strike an average among poets, it would probably be true to say that, so far as inspiration is concerned, Blake is to the average poet, as the average poet is to the man in the street.  All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making one, now and then, involuntarily ejaculate:  ’What made him think of that?’ With Blake, one is asking the question all the time.

Blake’s originality of manner was not, as has sometimes been the case, a cloak for platitude.  What he has to say belongs no less distinctly to a mind of astonishing self-dependence than his way of saying it.  In English literature, as Sir Walter Raleigh observes, he ’stands outside the regular line of succession.’  All that he had in common with the great leaders of the Romantic Movement was an abhorrence of the conventionality and the rationalism of the eighteenth century; for the eighteenth century itself was hardly more alien to his spirit than that exaltation of Nature—­the ‘Vegetable Universe,’ as he called it—­from which sprang the pantheism of Wordsworth and the paganism of Keats.  ‘Nature is the work of the Devil,’ he exclaimed one day; ’the Devil is in us as far as we are Nature.’  There was no part of the sensible world which, in his philosophy, was not impregnated with vileness.  Even the ‘ancient heavens’ were not, to his uncompromising vision, ’fresh and strong’; they were ‘writ with Curses from Pole to Pole,’ and destined to vanish into nothingness with the triumph of the Everlasting Gospel.