Again we take up the little book which was the first we handled in the Print Room, for the "Songs of Experience" are bound with the "Songs of Innocence." The Museum copy bears the double title on the first page as well as the two separate ones, which occur appropriately before each book. Into this first plate, with its kindling title flashing across the page--"Songs of Innocence and Experience showing two contrary states of the human soul"--Blake has wrought some of that intense and passionate feeling which makes the work so valuable as much psychologically as artistically. Two energetic and expressive figures, a male and a female, symbolize Innocence and Experience, while flames of Desire and Aspiration burn fiercely around them, leaping up to lick the letters of the title, which lie on a ground of flickering and fainting colour. In the "Songs of Innocence," the marriage of the poems and designs was complete, and matter and form (poetic and artistic) attained an almost complete identity. Here, however, the case is somewhat different, the task to be accomplished not being so easily achievable, for the mood is less lyrical and more mystic. Experience is a hard teacher concerned only with this material life and its limited conditions, and sets itself against the Innocence which retains, in Plato's phrase, "recollections of things seen" by eternal man before generation here. Experience has nothing to do with vision, but only with facts, and it deals with the results of concrete experiment; never with the flashing spark of heaven-sent inspiration. Thus the "Songs of Experience" are of far less simple mood and single utterance than their bright forerunners. Something of the remorselessness of experience has passed into these lyrics--for lyrics they still are, though Blake has lost the spontaneity and felicitous gush of melody which came from him so naturally, so rightly, six years previously. [Illustration: PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM "SONGS OF EXPERIENCE," 1794] Of one--not spontaneous certainly, but created little bit by little bit with unerring judgement and rich fancy, struck out like the embossed design on a shield, each blow, each delicately graduated tap and touch, bringing out in clearer relief the magnificence of the heraldic images--of this poem, "The Tyger," it is impossible to speak too enthusiastically. It is a grand piece of chased metal work, and Blake has done nothing better. The fierce swift rhythm, imitative of the padding footfalls, Tyger, tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night, called out Lamb's critical admiration, and no one was ever better qualified than Lamb to appreciate our painter and poet. It is matter for regret that he came across so little of Blake's work in either kind, though we shall find him presently with something to say anent the engraving of the "Canterbury Pilgrimage."