thus disagree; I can but hazard, in all humility, the suggestion that there is much truth if not all the truth, much truth with perchance a little error, in the judgment delivered by each of these learned adepts. With Mr. Rossetti, I find many of Wilkinson's poems, or verses thereof, startingly akin to some of Blake's, and can often fancy in reading them that I am verily reading Blake; but in many more, especially those due to Wilkinson's scientific and other studies, and those confined in the strait-waistcoat of Swedenborg's arbitrary, dogmatic, rigid, and frigid symbolisms or "Correspondences," I can discover very few hints of Blake: but more on this in the sequel. With Wilkinson I perceive much likeness between Blake and Shelley, and only wonder that he does not note (as Swinburne does in several places) certain rare and conspicuous identical traits: their dauntless devotion to political and religious liberty; their impassioned and yet more daring advocacy of sexual freedom; their reanimation and ardent propagation[1] of the great doctrine, in its essence so profoundly true, that in the appalling unintermitted struggle between the spirits of good and evil, the evil has hitherto prevailed, that the God
- ↑ Each supremely in his supreme work—Blake in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Shelley in the "Prometheus Unbound," though both elsewhere in their writings, as in the splendid opening of "Laon and Cythna" ("Revolt of Islam"), and Blake's "Everlasting Gospel"—
"Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white."As Mr. Swinburne says, p. 190: Blake "believed in redemption by Christ, and in the incarnation of Satan as Jehovah." For Christ read Prometheus, for Jehovah read Jupiter, and you have the same belief in Shelley, expressed in classical instead of biblical names.
