to the MS., however, shows that the last line had been struck
out by Blake, and another substituted in its place--a line which is now
printed for the first time by Mr. Sampson. So that the true reading of
the verse is:

Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly--
O! was no deny.

After these exertions, it must have seemed natural enough to Rossetti
and his successors to print four other expunged lines as part of the
poem, and to complete the business by clapping a title to their
concoction--'Love's Secret'--a title which there is no reason to suppose
had ever entered the poet's mind.

Besides illustrating the shortcomings of his editors, this little poem
is an admirable instance of Blake's most persistent quality--his
triumphant freedom from conventional restraints. His most characteristic
passages are at once so unexpected and so complete in their effect, that
the reader is moved by them, spontaneously, to some conjecture of
'inspiration.' Sir Walter Raleigh, indeed, in his interesting
Introduction to a smaller edition of the poems, protests against such
attributions of peculiar powers to Blake, or indeed to any other poet.
'No man,' he says, 'destitute of genius, could live for a day.' But even
if we all agree to be inspired together, we must still admit that there
are degrees of inspiration; if Mr. F's Aunt was a woman of genius, what
are we to say of Hamlet? And Blake, in the hierarchy of the inspired,
stands very high indeed. If one could strike an average among poets, it
would probably be true to say that, so far as inspiration is concerned,
Blake is to the average poet, as the average poet is to the man in the
street. All poetry, to be poetry at all, must have the power of making
one, now and then, involuntarily ejaculate: 'What made him think of
that?' With Blake, one is asking the question all the time.

Blake's originality of manner was not, as has sometimes been the case,
a cloak for platitude. What he has to say belongs no less distinctly to
a mind of astonishing self-dependence than his way of saying it. In
English literature, as Sir Walter Raleigh observes, he 'stands outside
the regular line of succession.' All that he had in common with the
great leaders of the Romantic Movement was an abhorrence of the
conventionality and the rationalism of the eighteenth century; for the
eighteenth century itself was hardly more alien to his spirit than that
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