Thus whilst Goldsmith in much of his work continues the classical school of Pope, alike in his predilection for didactic verse and his practice of the heroic couplet, in his poetic language he is essentially individual. In his descriptive passages he rarely uses the conventional jargon, and the greater part of the didactic and moral observations of his two most famous poems is written in simple and unadorned language that would satisfy the requirements of the Wordsworthian canon. That pure and unaffected diction could be employed with supreme effect in other than moral and didactic verse was soon to be shown in the lyric poetry of William Blake, who, about thirty years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, evolved for himself a poetic language, wonderful alike in its beauty and simplicity. In those of the “Songs of Innocence” and “The Songs of Experience,” which are concerned with natural description, the epithets and expressions that had long been consecrated to this purpose find little or no place. Here and there we seem to catch echoes of the stock diction, as in the lines, the starry floor the watery shore of the Introduction to the “Songs of Experience,” or the happy, silent, _moony_ beams of “The Cradle Song”; but in each case the expressions are redeemed and revitalized by the pure and joyous singing note of the lyrics of which they form part. Only once is Blake to be found using the conventional epithet, when in his “Laughing Song” he writes the _painted_ birds laugh in the shade, whilst with his usual unerring instinct he marks down the monotonous smoothness of so much contemporary verse in that stanza of his ode “To the Muses” in which, as has been well said, the eighteenth century dies to music:[80] How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move, The sound is forced, the notes are few. Not that he altogether escaped the blighting influence of his time. In the early “Imitation of Spenser,” we get such a couplet as To sit in council with his modern peers And judge of tinkling rhimes and elegances terse, whilst the “vicious diction” Wordsworth was to condemn is also to be seen in this line from one of the early “Songs”: and Phœbus fir’d my vocal rage. Even as late as 1800 Blake was capable of writing Receive this tribute from a harp sincere.[81] But these slight blemishes only seem to show up in stronger light the essential beauty and nobility of his poetical style.