“’Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
    Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’
  So I sang the same again,
    While he wept with joy to hear.

  “’Piper, sit thee down and write
    In a book, that all may read!’
  So he vanished from my sight. 
    And I plucked a hollow reed,

  “And I made a rural pen,
    And I stained the water clear,
  And I wrote my happy songs
    Every child may joy to hear.”

A native of the jungle, leaping into the fine drawing-rooms of Cavendish Square, would hardly create more commotion than such a poem as “The Tiger,” charging in among Epistles to the Earl of Dorset, Elegies describing the Sorrow of an Ingenuous Mind, Odes innumerable to Memory, Melancholy, Music, Independence, and all manner of odious themes.

  “Tiger, tiger, burning bright
  In the forests of the night,
  What immortal hand or eye
  Framed thy fearful symmetry?

  “In what distant deeps or skies
  Burned that fire within thine eyes? 
  On what wings dared he aspire? 
  What the hand dared seize the fire?

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

  “What the hammer, what the chain,
  Knit thy strength and forged thy brain? 
  What the anvil?  What dread grasp
  Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

  “When the stars threw down their spears,
  And watered heaven with their tears,
  Did he smile his work to see? 
  Did He who made the lamb make thee?”

Mrs. Montagu, by virtue of the “moral” in the last line, may possibly have ventured to read the “Chimney-Sweeper” at her annual festival to those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a setting here; nor the “Little Black Boy,” with its matchless, sweet child-sadness.  Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems—­all written between the ages of eleven and twenty—­is without its peculiar, and often its peerless charm.

Arrived at the age of twenty-one, he finished his apprenticeship to Basire, and began at once the work and worship of his life,—­the latter by studying at the Royal Academy, the former by engraving for the booksellers.  Introduced by a brother-artist to Flaxman, he joined him in furnishing designs for the famous Wedgwood porcelain, and so one dinner-set gave bread and butter to genius, and nightingales’ tongues to wealth.  That he was not a docile, though a very devoted pupil, is indicated by his reply to Moser, the keeper, who came to him, as he was looking over prints from his beloved Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, and said, “You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, unfinished works of Art:  stay a little, and I will show you what you should study.”  He brought down Le Brun and Rubens.  “How did I secretly rage!” says Blake.  “I also spake my mind!  I said to Moser, ’These things that you call finished are not even begun; how, then, can they be finished?’” The reply of the startled teacher is not recorded.  In other respects, also, he swerved from Academical usage.  Nature, as it appeared in models artificially posed to enact an artificial part, became hateful to him, seemed to him a caricature of Nature, though he delighted in the noble antique figures.