Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/268

252 CRITICAL STUDIES Lamb," " The Chimney Sweeper," the " Laughing Song," "A Cradle Song," "Holy Thursday," "Infant thoughts, such a tramp of hardness and troubles, as does not cede to the attempt to act the infantine even for a moment." (Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, "The Human Body and its Connexion with Man," p. 98, note.) What is true of common breathing, is true more conspicuously of breathing idealised and harmonised, of the breathing of song in which psychical have superseded the physical rhythms. The adult cannot sing like a child ; but Blake in these Songs does so : he did not act the infantine, for he was infantine, by a regeneration as real while as mysterious as ever purest saint experienced in the religious life. And this regeneration, so far as we can learn, was effected without the throes of agony and doubt and despair, which the saints all pass through in being born again. I am merely writing a few remarks on the poet, not sketching the life and character of the man ; but I may be allowed to call the attention of readers to this wonderful life and character. Blake was always poor in world's wealth, always rich in spiritual wealth, happy and contented and assured, living with God. As to his soul's salvation, I do not believe that he ever gave it a thought, any more than a child thinks of the question whether its loving parents will continue to feed and clothe and cherish it. He had none of the feverish raptures and hypochondriac remorses which even in the best of those who are commonly called saints excite a certain contemptuous pity in the midst of love and admiration : he was a thoroughly healthy and liappy religious soul, whose happi- ness was thoroughly unselfish and noble. As to the "Christian Evidences," as they are termed, of which the mass of good people are so enamoured, in trying to argue themselves and others into a sort of belief in a sort (and such a sort !) of deity, he would have no more dreamed of appealing to them than he would have tried elaborately to argue himself into belief in the existence of the sun. " I feel the warmth, 1 see the light and see by the light : what do you want to argue about? You may call it sun, moon, comet, star, or Will-o'-the-Wisp, if so it pleases you ; all I know and care for is this, that day by day it warms and lights me." Such would have been the sum of his reply to any questioner ; for he was emphatically a seer, and had the disdain of all seers for the pretensions of gropers and guessers who are blind. Like Swedenborg, he always relates things heard and seen ; more purely a mystic than Swedenborg, he does not condescend to dialectics and scholastic divinity. Those