Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/178

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136
Songs of Experience


known to me, one only, the uncoloured copy in the Reading Room of the British Museum, contains this plate, and there the watermark of the paper, which is dated 1832, proves that it must have been printed at least five years after Blake's death. The only other existing specimen of the engraved song is a proof impression (also uncoloured) in the possession of Mr. William Muir, which he has reproduced in facsimile at the end of his beautiful edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It is quite clear that Blake engraved this poem with a view to its forming one of the Songs of Experience; and the total number of plates specified as belonging to this work in his prospectus 'To the Public' (see Bibliographical Preface to the Songs) would seem to show that this was his intention in October, 1793, when this advertisement was issued. It is fairly plain too that Blake rejected the plate without destroying it — perhaps because it was one of those which were engraved on both sides of the copper — leaving it possible for it to be inadvertently introduced into one or two copies which may have been printed when the plates passed into other hands, after the death of Mrs. Blake in October, 1831. This poem seems to have been unknown to Blake's first editor, Wilkinson, as well as to Gilchrist, who rightly represents 54 as the number of plates belonging to a complete set of both series of the Songs. It is first introduced into the Songs of Experience by R. H. Shepherd (1866), who probably took it from the posthumously printed copy which the British Museum had acquired two years before. Since then it has been included among the Songs without comment by W. M. Rossetti and all Blake's later editors, who follow Shepherd in placing it immediately after 'A Little Girl Lost.'