As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:

And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands of life shall run.

If we compare this with Marvell's Coy Mistress, with its conscious playing with the fancy of vast ranges of time, its momentary apprehension of eternity, and its relapse into lusty materialism, we shall measure the change that was come upon poetry.

Here the beauties of nature and of art, the rose and the melody, are utilised to enlarge the human aspect of beauty, they grow naturally out of a human mind conscious of a woman's beauty, and stored with the memories of all the past experiences of beauty in life of which she is the crowning moment; and the passion suggests its eternity, not by escaping into some transcendental region, but by limiting its survival to that of earth herself. Burns expressed the eternal through the momentary, because in his love, while remaining distinctively personal, he was also one with the whole universe in its positive assertion of life, and he proved it by embodying his own emotion in the fairest images drawn from nature and man. In his poetry, as distinct from his life, the creative instinct, with its demand for positive forces in harmony, subdues any destructive elements lurking in the physical impulse out of which the idea

sprung. In life maybe, as Keats expresses it, "he talked with Bitches-he drank with blackguards, he was miserable." But the love of his poetry never confines itself to personal desire; in the object of his passion he sees all loveliness, and in all the beauty of the world he sees her reflected and renewed:

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair:

I hear her in the tuneful birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There's not a bonnie flower that springs

By fountain, shaw or green,

There's not a bonnie bird that sings

But minds me o' my Jean.

This is no mere poetry of the senses, no idle indulgence of them in ornate epithets and delicate similes, nor is his a transcendental experience divorced from life. In Burns rather we see the creature passing through a perception of a fellow creature and of the earth to which he belongs into the mind of the creator. Burns humanises the love of man for woman, and in the combination of the human and the natural he reaches the divine. The fever of earth doubtless in him often destroyed the serenity of heaven. He was a seaman tossed on the universal deep, who only at times put safely into port, to be driven out again on the next high tide.

Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Frae off its thorny tree;

And my fause luver staw the rose,
But left the thorn wi' me.

The important thing was that men could once again be pricked with thorns or wrecked at sea. Their sensibility had returned, and with it their yearning after wide prospects and impossible perfections, their consciousness of the mud into which they too often fell, and of the serene heavens above their heads.

But oh! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!

An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

M

CHAPTER VI

WILLIAM BLAKE

'Tis Reason, but beyond your ken
There lives a light that none can view
Whose thoughts are brutish:-seen by few,
The few have therefore light divine;

Their visions are God's legions!

GEORGE MEREDITH.

I

Of all idealists William Blake is perhaps the earliest and the most absolute to be found in English literature, so absolute indeed that to many he has seemed inhuman or insane. Born late in the eighteenth century, a humble and unfrequented man, he escaped the narrowing influences of his time, and viewing the world of art from no standpoint but that of impartial sincerity, he became convinced that the age of mere cleverness and pedantry was to pass away for ever. He named it the Kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge, and asserted that those who tasted its fruit became militant towards each other, and in their mental self-assurance, set up a barrier of logic between themselves and the truth of life.

They starved their sensibility until it became dead, and ceased to enrich their minds with experience. Thus intellect, negative and mechanical in itself,

stunted their natures, blinded their vision, and withered their sympathies. Not only so, but they became cruel and unforgiving, because they were divorced from that universal life, in which the ego finds its true perspective and ceases to exaggerate its claims or denounce the actions of others as unforgivable sins, but realises that most evil in the world is traceable to ill-adjusted circumstances, for which he who condemns, or the system which he tolerates, may well be responsible. All evil in Blake's opinion can be forgiven, if not actually removed, by understanding. But by understanding he implied a blend of sympathy and reason. It was neither mere sentiment nor mere logic which he termed "a confident insolence, sprouting from.. systematic reason." The kingdom of the future was, in contrast with the Kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge, that of the Tree of Life, which gave to a man who ate of it a perpetual fellowship with the universe of man and of nature, with life's essential spirit, however it manifested itself. And through his identity with everything, through this wedding .. with the elements, a man could not condemn anything without condemning himself. He would rather pity error as one who shared at however great -remove in its causes and its consequences.

Can I see another's woe
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief

And not seek for kind relief?