And what shoulder, and what art,
    Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
    And when thy heart began to beat,
    What dread hand? and what dread feet?

So Blake engraved the verse; and, as Mr. Sampson points out,’the terrible, compressed force’ of the final line vanishes to nothing in the ‘languid punctuation’ of subsequent editions:—­’What dread hand and what dread feet?’ It is hardly an exaggeration to say, that the re-discovery of this line alone would have justified the appearance of the present edition.

But these considerations of what may be called the mechanics of Blake’s poetry are not—­important as they are—­the only justification for a scrupulous adherence to his autograph text.  Blake’s use of language was not guided by the ordinarily accepted rules of writing; he allowed himself to be trammelled neither by prosody nor by grammar; he wrote, with an extraordinary audacity, according to the mysterious dictates of his own strange and intimate conception of the beautiful and the just.  Thus his compositions, amenable to no other laws than those of his own making, fill a unique place in the poetry of the world.  They are the rebels and atheists of literature, or rather, they are the sanctuaries of an Unknown God; and to invoke that deity by means of orthodox incantations is to run the risk of hell fire.  Editors may punctuate afresh the text of Shakespeare with impunity, and perhaps even with advantage; but add a comma to the text of Blake, and you put all Heaven in a rage.  You have laid your hands upon the Ark of the Covenant.  Nor is this all.  When once, in the case of Blake, the slightest deviation has been made from the authoritative version, it is hardly possible to stop there.  The emendator is on an inclined plane which leads him inevitably from readjustments of punctuation to corrections of grammar, and from corrections of grammar to alterations of rhythm; if he is in for a penny, he is in for a pound.  The first poem in the Rossetti MS. may be adduced as one instance—­out of the enormous number which fill Mr. Sampson’s notes—­of the dangers of editorial laxity.

    I told my love, I told my love,
      I told her all my heart;
    Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
      Ah! she doth depart.

This is the first half of the poem; and editors have been contented with an alteration of stops, and the change of ‘doth’ into ‘did.’  But their work was not over; they had, as it were, tasted blood; and their version of the last four lines of the poem is as follows: 

    Soon after she was gone from me,
      A traveller came by,
    Silently, invisibly: 
      He took her with a sigh.

Reference to the MS., however, shows that the last line had been struck out by Blake, and another substituted in its place—­a line which is now printed for the first time by Mr. Sampson.  So that the true reading of the verse is: 

    Soon as she was gone from me,
      A traveller came by,
    Silently, invisibly—­
      O! was no deny.