R. WALTER PATER has described the romantic temper in its technical sense as one that possesses, in addition to the love of beauty, which is an integral part

of every artistic nature, the element of curiosity. By virtue of this element, there exists a longing for fresh impressions, a sense of satiety of the old, and a seeking after a departure from precedent into untried regions and untrodden fields. This, which Mr. Pater calls the element of curiosity, may be said to exist in all romanticists, but in the higher types of the school it deserves the name of originality. In them the mere spirit of inquiry into the novel leads to creation. The classic temperament, on the contrary, clings to the models established by the artists of the past, and sees in these alone the basis for all canons of true art. Its outcome is an adherence to form, unbalanced by an intuitive discernment of the prompting spirit. It is when the two are united in one man that the product of highest genius is given. Dante claims Virgil as his guide, and the five noble poets to whom he awards the

meed of admiration are classic authors of greater or less repute; yet Dante can feel the charm of the "sweet new style," and can throw the light of romantic beauty around Francesca da Rimini and Ugolino. Shakespeare and Milton are by no means free from a debt to the past, but whatever their fancy touches"Doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange."

Such a blending, however, of the classic and romantic elements is as rare as genius, and in any age the preponderance of the one over the other is to be detected. It is as men's minds have been stirred with creative enthusiasm and a craving for true selfexpression, or as conventionalism has satisfied them, and a subservience to the most minute of established details, that the romantic temper or its opposite has colored the age in which they have lived. The conditions of the present day with its gloomy dearth of romantic writers are closely akin to those prevailing in England during the latter part of the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries. This was the age of classicism. The creative imagination must work strictly under the stern control of Reason. As in the pulpit the divines held out to their hearers no sweet high realms

"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth,"

but treated them instead to maxims of wise morality, so in the poetic world imagination must give way to the expression of sage truths and sententious utterances to which the prim couplet was essentially adapted.

In such a period as this, William Blake is a figure of peculiar individuality. He was a romanticist by nature, and no surrounding influences of classicism could completely control him. He rebelled against the very form of verse then in vogue, which was too confining a channel for his turbid imagination. He knew what it

was

"To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;"

and to the rush and melody of his thoughts he forced the verse to conform. The workings of his inner nature were far from normal, and in proportion as they were complicated, it was necessary that the substance in which his thoughts were clothed should be pliant material in his imagination's hands.

In no feature of Blake's style is this fact so strongly indicated as in his use of figures. They serve him in their proper province, as tools for the clear delineation of the pictures with which his fancy is teeming. He never forces them irrelevantly; with the tact of a writer in harmony with his theme, he omits them entirely where the simple narrative pictures the scene or object with sufficient vividness. Perhaps the poem of "Holy Thursday" furnishes as apt an iliustration as any of his moderation. The description there is absolutely direct, yet the figures are so suggestive that their boldness does not in the least mar the simplicity of the whole

"The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among;
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor,
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door."

This use of a figure to suggest an entire scene is frequent in Blake's poems, and serves to connect him strikingly with the romantic movement. Where a classicist revels in a minute and detailed description, Blake with a word strikes the correct cord of association. He finds an adequate descriptive power in such expressions as,

or again,

"When the silent sleep
Waves o'er heaven deep."

('A Little Girl Lost.')

In the poem of London,' too, there is a forcible expression of the same type:

The last verse in its simplicity presents, as no detailed description could, the picture of a world "groaning and travailing together.” In Broken Love,' also, whatever the poem may mean, there is no question that this characteristic pervades the figures of the lines:

"A dark winter deep and cold

Within my heart thou dost unfold;
Iron tears and groans of lead

Thou bindest round my aching head."

In Blake's personifications this suggestive power of which I am speaking, manifests itself very clearly. Personification was a pet figure with the classicists; they had found Fortuna, Pax, Concordia scattered through the pages of their Ovids and Horaces, and they flattered themselves that if only they gave an abstract quality a capital letter at the beginning of its name, they were classical. That the old mythology was a growth, that the existence of these gods was ever believed in, did not come within their mental ken, and as if the ancient models in cold blood had created a Pantheon, so these disciples sought to follow in the footsteps of their masters by simply turning out divinities by the line; the more capital letters the better poet. "Sweet Memory," sings Rogers,

"From Thee gay Hope her airy coloring draws;
And Fancy's flights are subject to thy laws.
From Thee that bosom-spring of rapture flows,
Which only Virtue, tranquil Virtue, knows."

But Blake does not let Conscience speak, without allowing us to

hear seraphic melodies and listen to angelic choirs singing in harmony with her tones.

"When neither warbling voice

Nor trilling pipe is heard, nor pleasure sits

With trembling age, the voice of Conscience then,
Sweeter than music in a summer's eve

Shall warble round the snowy head, and keep

Sweet symphony to feathered angels, sitting

As guardians round your chair; then shall the pulse

Beat slow, and taste and touch and sight and sound and smell
That sing and dance round Reason's fine-wrought throne,

Shall flee away, and leave him all forlorn;
Yet not forlorn if Conscience is his friend. "

('King Edward III.')

Particularly noticeable, too, in contrast with

contrast with the ponderous

movement of classicism is the light, airy grace of his fancy in 'Memory, hither come,' and the peculiarly characteristic personification that occurs in the 'Cradle Song':

Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep

Little sorrows sit and weep."

Not only abstractions, however, did Blake personify; but seeing as he did, with double vision, he could discern in all the objects of Nature a twofold essence:

"With my inward eye 't is an old man gray,

With my outward a thistle across my way."

The universe had for him a slender reality in comparison with the spiritual truths that, to his mind, it bodied forth; and just because it existed for him as an allegory, he was peculiarly apt in endowing abstractions and objects of Nature with a personal existence. Her every phase has a fantastic meaning of its own. She is a thesaurus from which he draws at pleasure:

"I walked abroad on a snowy day,

I asked the soft Snow with me to play;
She played and she melted in all her prime;
And the Winter called it a dreadful crime."

('Couplets and Fragments,' I.)

In the 'Mad Song,' for example, not a single natural object nor an element is mentioned that is not endowed with a strange,