This lyric is born out of the spirit of Blake's life; there was no man better fitted to understand the dangers of the sheltered existence, or with a more visible appreciation of the discipline of life and labour. "I don't understand what you mean by the want of a holiday," he said; "I never stop for anything--I work on whether ill or not:" we may take the lines as applying to, and perhaps suggested by, Blake's dilettante friend and patron, Hayley, the hermit of Eartham, a feeble and profuse poetaster, who mistook the gentlemanly celebrity of a country squire who wrote verses, for the fame of the laborious poet. A certain lyric, pre-eminently praised by Mr. Swinburne, has a solemn music of its own, but is less what a lyric should be, the flash of a single mood, a passing experience, than the opening of a stately prelude: Silent, silent night Quench the holy light Of thy torches bright. For possessed of Day, Thousand spirits stray That sweet joys betray. Why should joys be sweet Used with deceit, Nor with sorrows meet? There is but one more stanza, and in that, inspiration seems suddenly to flag and falter as if the hand had grown weary. And so it is all through--many poems have, especially at the beginning, passages of the rarest lyrical beauty, and then comes some lapse of rhyme or sense that makes the reader feel that the writer either did not know what perfection was, or that he mistook for inspiration the sudden flow and ebb of a mood; many poets must have this experience, that of a mood not lasting quite long enough to stamp the "thoughts that breathe" on "words that burn;" the intellectual faculty fails first--and then succeeds the power which Wordsworth thought so characteristic of the true poet, the power of rendering remembered emotion. Blake seems to have had none of that; the mood flashed without his control, the words flowed, and good or bad there was no mending them. Edward FitzGerald, one of the sanest and surest of critics, lays his finger on this blot: he recognises the genius of Blake, but he says there is not a single poem which retains its inspiration all through. For instance, it seems almost incredible that the same hand can have written, in the _Songs of Experience_, within a few pages, The Holy Word That walked among the ancient trees, Calling the lapsed soul, And weeping in the evening dew, That might control The starry pole And fallen, fallen light renew-- and when we turn the page, in the "Human Vagabond," And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church, Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch-- which is gross and unintelligible.