I flee,
From strife and tumult far;
From scenes where Satan wages still
His most successful war.

The calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree,
And seem by thy sweet bounty made
For those who follow thee.

There if thy spirit touch the soul,
And grace her mean abode,
Oh with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!

There, like the nightingale, she pours
Her solitary lays,
Nor asks a witness of her song,
Nor thirsts for human praise.

Author and guardian of my life,
Sweet source of light divine,
And--all harmonious names in one--
My Saviour, thou art mine!

What thanks I owe thee, and what love--
A boundless, endless store--
Shall echo through the realms above
When time shall be no more.

Sad as was Cowper's history, with the vapours of a low insanity, if not
always filling his garden, yet ever brooding on the hill-tops of his
horizon, he was, through his faith in God, however darkened by the
introversions of a neat, poverty-stricken theology, yet able to lead his
life to the end. It is delightful to discover that, when science, which
is the anatomy of nature, had poisoned the theology of the country, in
creating a demand for clean-cut theory in infinite affairs, the
loveliness and truth of the countenance of living nature could calm the
mind which this theology had irritated to the very borders of madness,
and give a peace and hope which the man was altogether right in
attributing to the Spirit of God. How many have been thus comforted, who
knew not, like Wordsworth, the immediate channel of their comfort; or
even, with Cowper, recognized its source! God gives while men sleep.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE NEW VISION.

William Blake, the painter of many strange and fantastic but often
powerful--sometimes very beautiful pictures--wrote poems of an equally
remarkable kind. Some of them are as lovely as they are careless, while
many present a curious contrast in the apparent incoherence of the
simplest language. He was born in 1757, towards the close of the reign of
George II. Possibly if he had been sent to an age more capable of
understanding him, his genius would not have been tempted to utter itself
with such a wildness as appears to indicate hopeless indifference to
being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the
bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or