nverted to its principles. As a peasant, particularly a Scotch
peasant, he believed passionately in the native worth of man as man and
gave ringing expression to it in his verse. In his youth his
liberal-mindedness made him a Jacobite out of mere antagonism to the
existing regime; the Revolution only discovered for him the more
logical Republican creed. As the leader of a loose-living, hard drinking
set, such as was to be found in every parish, he was a determined and
free-spoken enemy of the kirk, whose tyranny he several times
encountered. In his writing he is as vehement an anti-clerical as
Shelley and much more practical. The political side of romanticism, in
fact, which in England had to wait for Byron and Shelley, is already
full-grown in his work. He anticipates and gives complete expression to
one half of the Romantic movement.

What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and every
other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing
stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which
this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the
literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the
thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and
propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who
believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to
their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace
and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a
rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal
is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary
indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy.
Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of
the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against
the opposition of a deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it
into a rude epigram,

"Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street."

The case for nature against urbanity could not be more tersely nor
better put. The German metaphysical doctrine which was the deepest part
of the teaching of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their main discovery, he
expresses as curtly and off-handedly,

"The sun's light when he unfolds it,
Depends on the organ that beholds it."

In the realm of childhood and in