The truth is plain:  Blake was an intellectual drunkard.  His words come down to us in a rapture of broken fluency from impossible intoxicated heights.  His spirit soared above the empyrean; and, even as it soared, it stumbled in the gutter of Felpham.  His lips brought forth, in the same breath, in the same inspired utterance, the Auguries of Innocence and the epigrams on Sir Joshua Reynolds.  He was in no condition to chop logic, or to take heed of the existing forms of things.  In the imaginary portrait of himself, prefixed to Sir Walter Raleigh’s volume, we can see him, as he appeared to his own ‘inward eye,’ staggering between the abyss and the star of Heaven, his limbs cast abroad, his head thrown back in an ecstasy of intoxication, so that, to the frenzy of his rolling vision, the whole universe is upside down.  We look, and, as we gaze at the strange image and listen to the marvellous melody, we are almost tempted to go and do likewise.

But it is not as a prophet, it is as an artist, that Blake deserves the highest honours and the most enduring fame.  In spite of his hatred of the ‘vegetable universe,’ his poems possess the inexplicable and spontaneous quality of natural objects; they are more like the works of Heaven than the works of man.  They have, besides, the two most obvious characteristics of Nature—­loveliness and power.  In some of his lyrics there is an exquisite simplicity, which seems, like a flower or a child, to be unconscious of itself.  In his poem of The Birds—­to mention, out of many, perhaps a less known instance—­it is not the poet that one hears, it is the birds themselves.

    O thou summer’s harmony,
    I have lived and mourned for thee;
    Each day I mourn along the wood,
    And night hath heard my sorrows loud.

In his other mood—­the mood of elemental force—­Blake produces effects which are unique in literature.  His mastery of the mysterious suggestions which lie concealed in words is complete.

    He who torments the Chafer’s Sprite
    Weaves a Bower in endless Night.

What dark and terrible visions the last line calls up!  And, with the aid of this control over the secret springs of language, he is able to produce in poetry those vast and vague effects of gloom, of foreboding, and of terror, which seem to be proper to music alone.  Sometimes his words are heavy with the doubtful horror of an approaching thunderstorm: 

    The Guests are scattered thro’ the land,
    For the Eye altering alters all;
    The Senses roll themselves in fear,
    And the flat Earth becomes a Ball;
    The Stars, Sun, Moon, all shrink away,
    A desart vast without a bound,
    And nothing left to eat or drink,
    And a dark desart all around.

And sometimes Blake invests his verses with a sense of nameless and infinite ruin, such as one feels when the drum and the violin mysteriously come together, in one of Beethoven’s Symphonies, to predict the annihilation of worlds: