I must refer the reader to the entire chapter for a full exposition of De Quincey’s views on this subject. Despite the bravura style, which makes us in our soberer days listen a little incredulously to these far-fetched sighs and breathings, the passage quoted bears testimony to that apprehension of childhood which De Quincey shared with Wordsworth. Both of these writers were looked upon in their day as somewhat reactionary in their poetical philosophy; so much the more valuable is their declaration of a poetical and philosophical faith which was fundamentally in unison with the political faith that lay behind the outburst of the French Revolution. The discovery of this new continent of childhood by such explorers of the spiritual world marks the age as distinctly as does the discovery of new lands and explorations in the earlier renaissance. It was indeed one of the great signs of the period ushered in by the French Revolution and the establishment of the American republic, that the bounds of the spiritual world were extended. When poverty and childhood were annexed to the poet’s domain, the world of literature and art suddenly became larger. * * * * * At such times there are likely to be singular exhibitions of genius, which are ill-understood in contemporary life, but are perceived by later observers to be part and parcel of the age in which they occur. Something like this may be said of the pictures and poems of William Blake, who was a visionary in a time when a red flame along the horizon made his spiritual fires invisible. He has since been rediscovered, and has been for a generation so potent an influence in English art that we may wisely attend to him, not merely as a person of genius, but as furnishing an illustration of some of the deep things of our subject. No one acquainted with Blake’s work has failed to observe the recurrence of a few types drawn from elemental figures. The lamb, the child, the old man,—these appear and reappear, carrying the prevalent ideas in this artist’s imagination. Of all these the child is the most central and emphatic, even as the Songs of Innocence is the most perfect expression of Blake’s vision of life. It may be said that in his mind childhood was largely resolvable into infancy, and that when he looked upon a babe, he saw life in its purest form, and that most suggestive of the divine, as in the exquisite cradle song, into which is woven the weeping of the child Jesus for all the human race. The two short antithetical poems, The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, reveal the depths which Blake penetrated when engaged in his solitary voyage of discovery to the little known shores of childhood. They have, to be sure, the teasing property of parables, and it would be hard to render them into the unmistakable language of the understanding; but they could be set to music, and like the Duke we exclaim:— “That strain again! it had a dying fall.”