Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/444

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340
ESSAY ON BLAKE.

Gilchrist, which adds another proof of our theory that a veil of innocent unreason spread its haze over one side of his nature. Surely by this time the little poem which begins—

'Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,'

and which Charles Lamb called 'glorious,' is pretty well known, as also the song beginning—

'Piping down the valleys wild.'

The exceeding delicacy and sweetness of some separate verses in his poems convey that sense of enchantment which Scott describes as coming over him at any recurrence of the stanza

'The dews of summer night did fall,
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
And many an oak that grew thereby.'

It is hard to say in what this happy quality consists. To our own mind there is something of it in a song by Bulwer in the Last Days of Pompeii, beginning,

'By the cool banks where soft Cephisus flows,
A voice sailed trembling down the waves of air.'

To which Blake's 'Song to the Muses,' might have given the key-note:—

'Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun that now
From ancient melody have ceased;


'Whether in Heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;