26o CRITICAL STUDIES the critics, and laugh quietly at the current censures and raptures of the Reviews : and these men would scarcely consider it a waste of time to search into the meaning of the darkest oracles of William Blake. I wish to add a few words on the relations subsist- ing between our author and succeeding English poets. In his early maturity, as a reincarnation of the mighty Elizabethan spirit, the first fruit of a constructive after a destructive period, his affinity to the great poets who flourished a few years before his death (he died in 1827) will be readily understood. Thus in the Min- strel's Song, before quoted, we at once discern that the rhythm is of the same strain as the largest utter- ance of Marlowe and Webster and Shakespeare pre- cedent, and as the noblest modern exemplar, the blank verse of " Hyperion " subsequent.* It is not, however, in this early maturity, but in his second childhood and boyhood and youth, when he was withdrawn from common life into mysticism, when moonlight was his sunlight, and water was his wine, and the roses red as blood were become all white as snow, in the " Songs of Innocence," the " Songs of Experience," and the "Auguries of Innocence" (always Innocence, mark, not Virtue) that the seeds may be traced of much which is now half-consciously struggling towards organic perfection, and which in
- Keats avowed imitation of Milton in the structure of his
rhythm. Similarity to the Council in Pandemonium there of course could not but be in the Council of the overthrown Titans ; but the verse of Keats (if I have any ear and intelligence for verse) is as different from the verse of Milton as with the same language and the same metrical standard it possibly could be. It is in my judgment even more beautiful and more essentially powerful and sublime than Milton's.
