his shorter pieces unequalled except in Shakespeare and Tennyson, and evidently due to a reverential study of the earlier models. Our two greatest Poets have never written songs of more surpassing melody or richer music than the Blossom and the Sunflower.

Those other wonderful productions of Blake's mystical and visionary genius-the Books of Prophecy of which the key-note is struck in the two opening pieces of the Songs of Experience, have yet to find acceptance with the public. Despite their strangeness of metre, however, and a certain. forbidding aspect, at first sight, of wildness and incoherence, they will well repay study, and will be found to contain here and there lines of as great beauty as anything in his lyrical poems.

Before closing our remarks, we must say a final word respecting the principle adopted by Mr. Rossetti in his reprint of some of these poems in the second volume of Gilchrist's "Life of Blake." Once for all, while rendering due homage to his genius and rare critical perception, as well as to the great services he has rendered to the fame of Blake, we must firmly protest against the dangerous precedent he has established of tampering with his author's text. Much ruggedness of metre and crudeness of expression he has doubtless removed

or toned down by this process; but, however delicately and tastefully done, we contend that the doing of it was unwarrantable-nay, that it destroys to a certain extent the historical value of the poems. It was the growth of this mischievous system which prevented the readers of the eighteenth century from enjoying a pure text of Shakespeare; which to this day, in nine editions out of ten, gives us a corrupt and mutilated text of such writers as Bunyan, Walton, and De Foe, and which has spoilt some of the finest hymns in our language. For where is the process, once admitted as legitimate, to stop? It is not every emendator who possesses the taste and judgment of Mr. Rossetti, and, in a case like the present one, where the original edition is almost inaccessible as a check, what protection has the reader against the caprice or vanity of an editor who does not adhere religiously to his author's text? Mr. Rossetti (though sanctioned by Mr. Swinburne) has no more right to alter William Blake's poems than Mr. Millais would have to paint out some obnoxious detail of medievalism in a work of Giotto or Cimabue; or Mr. Leighton to improve some flaw in the flesh-colour of Correggio.

R. H. SHEPHERD.

BROMPTON, July, 1874.

WITH BLAKE'S "SONGS OF INNOCENCE."

[To Florence

at Mrs. Gilchrist's Cottage, Brookbank, near Haslemere, whence the Preface to Blake's Life is dated.]

ACCEPT, dear child, these songs of one whose
Muse

For happy children piped her sweetest lays,
Nor deem'd their suffrages her lightest praise
Who hold Heaven's kingdom as their proper dues.
And wilt thou with the lyric gift refuse

His thanks, whose drooping spirits thou couldst

raise

By airy gestures, graceful as a fay's

Dancing at eve in shady avenues?

With rapt delight I see you ponder long

The gentle words of one so pure of blame,

Who loved the right, who scorn'd and loathed the

wrong:

O future heiress of his double fame,

Whose smile, whose look, nay, even whose very

name

Recalls the sunny land of art and song.

1869.

R. H. S.