solitary instance, within our period, of poetry of the very first class falling quite unrecognized and remaining so for a long space of years. In the first edition of this Life of Blake it was prophesied that Wells's time would 'assuredly still come.' In 1876 Joseph and his Brethren was republished under the auspices of Mr. Swinburne, and with an introduction from his pen. Charles Wells lived to see this new phoenix form of the genius of his youth, but died in 1878. The work is attainable now, and need not here be dwelt on at any length. In what may be called the Anglo-Hebraic order of aphoristic truth, Shakespeare, Blake, and Wells are nearly akin, nor could any fourth poet be named so absolutely in the same connection, though from the Shakespearean point of view alone the 'marvellous,' nay, miraculous, Chatterton must also be included. It may be noted that Wells's admirable prose Stories after Nature (1822) have not yet been republished.
A very singular example of the closest and most absolute resemblance to Blake's poetry may be met with (if only one could meet with it) in a phantasmal sort of little book, published, or perhaps not published but only printed, some years since, and entitled, Improvisations of the Spirit. It bears no author's name, but was written by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, the highly gifted editor of Swedenborg's writings, and author of a Life of him: to whom, as has been before mentioned, we owe a reprint of the poems in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. These improvisations profess to be written under precisely the same kind of spiritual guidance, amounting to abnegation of personal effort in the writer, which Blake supposed to have presided over the production of his Jerusalem, &c. The little book has passed into the general (and in all other cases richly-deserved) limbo of the modern 'spiritualist' muse. It is a very thick little book, however unsubstantial its origin; and contains, amid much that is disjointed or hopelessly obscure (but then why be the polisher
