impulse, instinct, energy, imagination, as against reason, prudence, and facts, is essentially childlike, yet the very antithesis of childish. The Appeal does not merely find echo in our hearts, but is a king nightingale in the darkening grove, who, shouting aloud his own faith, calls out the voice that was sleeping in multitudes; or to put the metaphor in Blake's own words:—
Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of Spring;
The lark, sitting upon his earthy bed-nest, just as the morn
Appears, listens silent; then, springing from the waving cornfield, loud
He leads the Choir of Day.—Milton, ii. p. 31.
The Songs of Innocence express the holiest impulses of untutored childhood, the eager love of life in all things, the imaginative recognition of an ethical basis in life, the instinctive understanding of things that are true and practical in religion, the belief that "everything that lives is holy." I would quote, had I the time, "The Lamb," "The Chimney Sweeper," "The Divine Image," "On Another's Sorrow."
Then upon these convictions that the child is father of the man, Blake builds his
