HE remarkable poet-artist, whose poems we here submit to public attention, William Blake, was born on the 28th of November

1757, at 28 Broad Street,

His

Carnaby Market, Golden Square, London. father was a hosier in poor circumstances, and this may help to account for the neglect of his early education; for all his knowledge, according to Mr Gilchrist, from whose precious and admirable book on Blake we draw the few biographic facts we are about to give, beyond that of reading and writing, was evidently self-acquired

knowledge. From this lack of early discipline to some extent may be ascribed the premature development of his marvellous imaginative faculty-his somewhat powerful self-assertive spirit and his early dalliance with the muses; for he was scarcely out of the years of infancy before he began to write verse, and one of the very loveliest lyrics in the English tongue was produced by Blake before he was fourteen years old. It is merely entitled "A Song," and runs thus

"How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer's pride,

Till I the Prince of Love beheld,

Who in the sunny beams did glide !

"He showed me lilies for my hair,

And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his garden fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

"With sweet May-dews my wings are wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

"He loves to sit and hear me sing,

Then, laughing, sports and plays with me ;
Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty."

Talk of inspiration !-if the boy who produced that was not inspired, then who in any age ever was? For airiness, brightness, and suggestiveness, we have only a very few such lyrics; but it is remarkable that one of those few was also produced by another "marvellous boy "at about the same age that the hosier's son was when he produced this. The poem referred to is entitled "To Helen," and its writer was Edgar Allan Poe; and as it may be interesting to the reader to have this other jewel at hand for the sake of comparison, we here subjoin it

SONG TO HELEN.

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently o'er a perfumed sea
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

"On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

At the age of ten our poet-artist attended a drawing school in the Strand, and at the age of fourteen he was sent as an apprentice to an engraver, a Mr. James Basire (evidently of foreign origin), in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is pleasant to think that while yet a boy, in his position of apprentice to an engraver, he would be brought into contact with notable people, and that he once at least did, at his master's shop, see the sweet-souled author of the Vicar of Wakefield, "whose finely marked head" he gazed at, and "thought to himself