A STRANGE BOOK
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Lastly, to complete this interesting little circle of estimates and comparisons, let us hear Mr. Swinburne. He agrees with Dr. Wilkinson, as we learn from several passages in the "Essay," that there are points of strong resemblance in Blake and Shelley. But in the conclusion of his volume (p. 300, et seq.), it is not Shelley whom he fixes as the nearest of kin to Blake. Unfortunately space lacks for full quotation:—
"I can remember one poet only whose work seems to me the same or similar in kind—a poet as vast in aim, as daring in detail, as unlike others, as coherent to himself, as strange without and as sane within. The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable form of a possible and universal Republic is equally requisite and adorable as the temporal and spiritual queen of ages as of men. To each all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable or endurable. . . . Both are spiritual, both democratic; both by their works recall, even to so untaught and tentative a student as I am, the fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic poetry of the East. Their casual audacities of expression or speculation are in effect well nigh identical. Their outlooks and theories are evidently the same on all points of intellectual and social life. The divine devotion and selfless love which make men martyrs and prophets are alike visible and palpable in each. It is no secret now, but a matter of public knowledge, that both these men, being poor in the sight and the sense of the world, have given what they had of time or of money, of labour or of love, to comfort and support all the suffering and sick, all the afflicted and misused, whom they had the chance or the right to succour and to serve. And in externals and details the work of these two constantly and inevitably coheres and coincides. . . . Whitman has seldom struck a note of thought and speech so just and so profound as Blake has now and then touched upon; but his work is generally more frank and fresh, smelling of
