What various habits, various tongues beset Trodden under foot, and mingled dust with dust. Waiting the appointed time! All, all within But with thick ivy hung, or branching fern, Where once a slave withstood a world of arms. Sweet as when Tully, writing down his thoughts, Ever at hand to calm his troubled soul Sailed slowly by, two thousand years ago, For Athens; when a ship, if north-east winds Blew from the Pæstan gardens, slacked her course. These temples, in their splendour eminent Well might he dream of g'ory! Now, coiled up, In this, the nobler pile, the elements In such an hour as this, the sun's broad disk * They are said to have been discovered by accident about the middle of the la century. E. L. vol. v.-5 Walls of some capital city first appeared, O that the chemist's magic art The little brilliant, ere it fell, Its lustre caught from Chloe's eye; Sweet drop of pure and pearly light, ་ Benign restorer of the soul, The sage's and the poet's theme, The very law which moulds a tear, WILLIAM BLAKE. Be An artist-poet of rare but wild and wayward genius-touched with a fine poetic madness'-appeared in WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827), whose life has been written with admirable taste and feeling by Allan Cunningham (Lives of British Painters,' 1830), and in a more copious form by Alexander Gilchrist (1863). Blake was a native of London, son of a hosier. He was apprenticed to an engraver, but devoted all his leisure to drawing (in which he had occasional instruction from Flaxman and Fuseli), and in composing verses. tween his twelfth and twentieth years he produced a variety of songs, ballads, and a dramatic poem. A collection of these was printed at the cost of Flaxman and a gentleman named Matthews, who presented the sheets to their author to dispose of for his own advantage. In 1789 Blake himself published a series of Songs of Innocence,' with a great number of illustrations etched on copper by the poet and his wife-the affectionate, dark-eyed Kate.' His wife, we are told, worked off the plates in the press, and Blake tinted the impressions, designs, and letter-press with a variety of pleasing colours. His next work was a series of sixteen small designs, entitled, 'The Gates of Paradise' (1793); these were followed by Urizen,' or twenty-seven designs representing hell and its mysteries; and shortly afterwards by a series of illustrations of Young's Night Thoughts' --a congenial theme. Flaxman introduced Blake to Hayley the poet, and Hayley persuaded the artist to remove to Felpham in Sussex, to make engravings for the Life of Cowper.' At Felpham Blake resided three years (1800-3), and in the comparative solitude of the country, in lonely musings by the sea-shore, in dulged in those hallucinations which indicated a state of diseased imagination or chronic insanity. He conceived that he had lived in other days, and had formed friendships with Homer and Moses, with Pindar and Virgil, with Dante and Milton. These great men, he asserted, appeared to him in visions, and even entered into conversation. When asked about the looks of those visions, he answered: They are all majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the common height of men' (Cunningham). Blake laboured indefatigably, but with little worldly gain, at his strange fanciful illustrations. A work entitled Jerusalem' comprised a hundred designs; he executed twelve designs for Blair's Grave,' and a watercolour painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims, which was exhibited with other productions of the artist. These were explained in a 'Descriptive Catalogue' as eccentric as the designs, but which had a criticism on Chaucer admired by Charles Lamb as displaying 'wonderful power and spirit.' Lamb also considered Blake's little poem on the tiger as glorious.' The remaining works of the artist were "Twenty-one Illustrations to the Book of Job,' and two works of 'Prophecies' (1793-4), one on America in eighteen plates, and the other on Europe in seventeen: he also illustrated Dante, but only seven of his illustrations were engraved. Three days before his death he was working on one of his prophetic works, the Ancient of Days.' 'He sat bolstered up in bed, and tinted it with his choicest colours, and in his happiest style. He touched and retouched it -held it at arm's length, and then threw it from him, exclaiming: "There! that will do! I cannot mend it." He saw his wife in tears -she felt this was to be the last of his works-"Stay, Kate!" cried Blake; keep just as you are-I will draw your portrait-for you have ever been an angel to me." She obeyed, and the dying artist made it a fine likeness.' The poems of Blake have been frequently printed at least in part-and his designs are now eagerly sought after. I love our neighbours all, Songs of Innocence' (1789). So I sang the same again, 'Piper, sit thee down and write, And I stained the water clear, The Lamb.-Fron the same. Little lamb, who made thee? Little lamb, who made thee? The Tiger.-From Tiger, tiger, burning bright In what distant deeps or skies Little lamb, I'll tell thee, I a child and thou a lamb, Songs of Experience' (1794). And what shoulder and what art What the hammer? what the chain ? When the stars threw down their spears, Did He who made the lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger, burning bright WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, the most original of modern poets, was a native of Cockermouth, in the county of Cumberland, where he was born on the 7th of April 1770. His father was law-agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale, but died when the poet was in his seventh year. William and his brother-Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, long master of Trinity College-after being some years at Hawkshead School, in Lancashire, were sent by their uncles to the university of Cambridge. William was entered of St. John's in 1787. Having finished his academical course, and taken his de gree, he travelled for a short time. In the autumn of 1790, he accomplished a tour on the continent in company with a fellow-student, Mr. Robert Jones. We went staff in hand,' he said, 'without knapsacks, and carrying each his needments tied up in a pocket handkerchief, with about £20 apiece in our pockets. With this friend, Wordsworth made a tour in North Wales the following year, after taking his degree in college. He was again in France towards the close of the year 1791, and remained in that country about a twelvemonth. He had hailed the French Revolution with feelings of enthusiastic admiration. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, Few poets escaped the contagion. Burns, Coleridge, Southey, and Campbell all felt the flame, and looked for a new era of liberty and happiness. It was long ere Wordsworth abandoned his political theory. His friends were desirous he should enter the church, but his republican sentiments and the unsettled state of his mind rendered him averse to such a step. To the profession of the law he was equally opposed. Poetry was to be the sole business of his life. A young friend, Raisley Calvert, dying in 1795, left him a sum of £900. Upon the interest of the £900,' he says, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200 deducted from the principal, and £100, a legacy to my sister, and £100 more which the 'Lyrical Ballads' brought me, my sister and I contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.' A further sum of about £1000 came to him as part of the estate of his father, who died intestate; and with this small competence, Wordsworth devoted himself to study and seclusion. He first appeared as a poet in his twenty-third year, 1793. The title of his work was 'Descriptive Sketches,' which was followed the same year by the Evening Walk.' The walk is among the mountains of Westmoreland; the sketches refer to a tour made in Switzerland by the poet and his friend Jones. The poetry is of the style of Goldsmith; but description predominates over reflection. The enthusiastic dreams of liberty which then buoyed up the young poet, appear in such lines as the following: O give, great God. to freedom's waves to ride To sweep where pleasure decks her guilty bowers, And grant that every sceptred child of clay Who cries, presumptuous, Here their tide shall stay,' In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth and his sister were settled at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne in Somersetshire, where they were visited in the summer of 1797 by Coleridge. The poets |