an argument. As in prose, he often coins exquisite phrases, but he is abrupt and fragmentary and apt to break down both in grammar and rhythm. A true inspiration comes as it came to Blake in the midst of much incoherence and stammering utterance. Few poems are more touching than the 'Dirge' and the 'Threnody,' in which he commemorates his brothers and the son who died in infancy. The 'Threnody' recalls Wordsworth in the simplicity and in the concluding meditation where he finds soothing, if not fully consoling thought. What orthodox critics may say of it I know not, but, at any rate, few poems bring one into so close a contact with a perfectly sweet nature, or could show how a great sorrow should be met by a man equally brave and tender. In the essay upon 'Experience'—on which, it must be confessed, it is not easy to put any clear interpretation—he refers again to the loss of his son. 'Grief,' he says, 'makes us idealists. The world becomes a dream. Life is a train of moods;' the moods 'are many-coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue.' And yet the dream is somehow the reality. The facts, as he has learnt from Swedenborg, are only symbols. Life wears 'a visionary face.' It is hard, he admits, to keep
