Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/322

these are in no sense "ghostly" to him, but intensely living spirits, with bodies of spiritual or supereminent reality.

In connection with the "most absolute resemblance," amounting almost to identity, of these poems and Blake's ("startlingly akin to Blake's writings—could pass, in fact, for no one's but his"), as read by so competent a student as Mr. Rossetti, it is interesting to consider certain passages in Dr. Wilkinson's Preface to his edition [the first printed one, as the poor Blake had to engrave his text as well as his designs] of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience:" though, as this was published so far back as 1839, when the editor was but twenty-seven years old, his estimate of Blake may have become very different by the time the "Improvisations" were issued in 1857, and may be yet more different now, especially after the publication of the "Life and Selections," the "Essay" by Mr. Swinburne, and the Aldine edition of the Poems, with Prefatory Memoir, by Mr. W. M. Rossetti. Dr. Wilkinson, forty years back, fully appreciated the beauty of the poems he edited: why else should he have edited them? But in my judgment he should have included several more in the praise he lavished on these. He writes:—

 

"The present volume contains nearly all that is excellent in Blake's poetry; and great, rare, and manifest is the excellence that is here. The faults are equally conspicuous, and he who runs may read them. They amount to an utter want of elaboration, and even, in many cases, to an inattention to the ordinary rules of grammar. Yet the 'Songs of Innocence,' at least, are quite free from the dark becloudment which rolled and billowed over Blake in his later days. He here transcended Self, and escaped from the isolation which Self involves; and, as it then