There is hardly anything in the book more delicious than Plate 25, "Infant Joy." A typical (rather than botanically correct) flower with a flame-shaped bud, and a wind-tossed bloom, springs across a page dyed like a butterfly's wing. In the cloven blossom a mother and her small baby sit enthroned while an angel with wings like a "White Admiral" stands entranced before the happy child. "I have no name; I am but two days old." What shall I call thee? "I happy am, Joy is my name." Sweet joy befall thee. Pretty joy! Sweet joy but two days old. Sweet joy I call thee: Thou dost smile, I sing the while; Sweet joy befall thee. These are the spontaneous, gushing notes of the bird in springtime, careless, unstudied but felicitously right, not to be corrected or even touched, for each word must lie where it fell, just so and no other way. [Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF INNOCENCE," 1789] Plate 20, "Night," with its graceful lady tree growing up beside the verses, is a beautiful shadowy design on a background in which blue and green merge and deepen in a veil of evening mist and the poem is another of those minute pieces of perfection, which, like delicate sea-shells, were cast up out of the stormy ocean of Blake's mind. In their own way, and with due regard to their special range and quality, the "Songs of Innocence" are the most perfect things Blake ever did, for he attempted no effect in song or design that his art was not adequate to express, and his imagination lies over all like the haze of spring sunshine. At that time the lyric poet in Blake was dominant, compelling him to sing, while the mystic was hardly yet consciously awake in him. But in the next book, "The Book of Thel," the mystic has stirred and breathes through the poem. The story is veiled in a shining mystery, but is still quite intelligible and pellucid in style, till just at the end, when the sphinx riddle of this life, the paradox of the senses, the wonder and terror of death, close round the consciousness of Thel, and dark sayings are uttered darkly. Thel is the youngest of the daughters of the Seraphim, but is herself a mortal. All her joy in her own beauty and that of the natural world is destroyed by the thought that she must die, the flowers must fade, the cloud will melt away, everything must change and decay. The Lily of the Valley answers her gentle lamentation, telling her that in this very change, the feeding of the lives of others with our own life, lies the secret of an endless and blessed immortality. She herself will hereafter "flourish in eternal vales." Thel assents to this-- Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb: he smells thy milky garments, He crops thy flowers, while thou sittest smiling in his face, Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.