Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/269

THE POEMS OF WILLIAM BLAKE 253 Joy," "The Divine Image;" what holy and tender and beautiful babe-lullabies, babe joy-songs, are these! The ideal Virgin Mother might have sung them to her infant ; lambs and doves and flowers might com- prehend them ; they are alone in our language, which they glorify by revealing its unsuspected treasures of heavenly innocence and purity. I transcribe one of the shortest of them, " Infant Joy ; " a sudden throb of maternal rapture which we should have thought inarticulate — expressible only by kisses and caresses and wordless cradle-crooning— marvellously caught up and rendered into song. " ' I have no name, I am but two days old.' who fancy that a dozen stony syllogisms seal up the perennial fountain of our deepest questionings, will affirm that Blake's belief was an illusion. But an illusion constant and self-consistent and harmonious with the world throughout the whole of a man's hfe, wherein does this differ from a reality? Metaphysically we are absolutely unable to prove any existence : we believe that those things really exist which we find pretty constant and consistent in their relations to us — a very sound practical but very unsound philosophical belief. Blake and Swedenborg and other true mystics (Jesus among them) undoubtedly had senses other than ours ; it is as futile for us to argue against the reality of their perceptions as it would be false in us to pretend that our perceptions are the same. As, however, Blake was supremely a mystic, it is but fair to add that he (and the same may be affirmed of Jesus) was unlike common Christians as thoroughly as he was unlike common atheists ; he lived in a sphere far removed from both. In the clash of the creeds, it is always a comfort to remember that sects with their sectaries, orthodox and heterodox, could not intersect at all, if they were not in the same plane. Blake's esteem for argumentation may be read in one couplet : — " If the sun and moon should doubt They'd immediately go out."