PREFACE. HE Poems of William Blake are here for the Tfirst time printed in their integrity. Dr. Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, who published an edition of the Songs of Innocence and Experience in 1839, and Mr. Dante G. Rossetti, who superintended their republication in Gilchrist's Life of Blake in 1863, both thought fit, the latter more especially, to alter the poems considerably, so that they rather appear as these gentlemen considered they should have been written, than as they actually were written. Such amendments have seemed to the present writer altogether contrary to the true principles of editing. The present volume is a verbatim reprint of the original edition as regards the Songs of Innocence and Experience, and the Miscellaneous Poems at the end of the collection are printed from Blake's own manuscript, now in the possession of the Publisher. The editor has taken no further liberty with the original than to modernize the spelling and punctuation, of which Blake was very careless. In one poem a stanza, and in another a couplet, have been suppressed for sufficient reasons, and asterisks substituted. Dr. Wilkinson's edition, issued by the father of the present Publisher, in 1839, has become very scarce; and as it was thought, independently of the above considerations, that many persons might desire to possess the poems separately from the other matter in the late Mr. Gilchrist's beautiful and costly volumes, we determined to offer to the public a new and enlarged edition. Two poems appear here which were excluded by Mr. Rossetti. That the poems of William Blake should have been long neglected was but the natural consequence both of the apathy of the time and of the unusual manner of their publication—if publication it can, indeed, be called, "It consisted," says Mr. Gilchrist, "in a species "of engraving in relief both words and designs. "The verse was written, and the designs and 66 marginal embellishments outlined on the copper "with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary "stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the "white parts or lights, the remainder of the plate "that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other 66 66 (6 acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent as in stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing, or ground "colour in his facsimiles; red he used for the letter66 press. The page was then coloured up by hand "in imitation of the original drawing, with more "or less variety of detail in the local hues."* It is not extraordinary that a book appearing in this way should have failed to attract the attention of an age which applauded the mediocrities of Hayley and Jerningham, and which refused to read or to buy the Lyrical Ballads in ordinary "hot-pressed twelves." To William Blake must, however, be accorded the merit of having been the first to inaugurate the return to simplicity and nature in his poetry, from which the school of Pope and his feeble imitators had so widely departed. He preceded Wordsworth by nearly ten years, the Songs of Innocence appearing in 1789, and the Songs of Experience in 1794; yet the reader will be struck by the remarkable resemblance in tone and style, the similarities of subject * Gilchrist's Life of Blake, (Lond. 1863), i. 69. |