Would experience eventually restore the innocence that was lost with Eden? Were they even things of the same kind? No; Blake was sure that they were contraries, contrary as Swedenborg's heaven and hell, contrary states of the human soul. But many contraries can be married. Innocence married to experience must vanish as innocence, but rise again in a new form in the more fruitful married relation. It appears that with most men innocence lost never returns. Blake never lost his. It is seen in all its infantine simplicity in _The Songs of Innocence_, and it could show itself at any time during his long life. But this divine element is sadly rare even in the poets, and it is its irresistible presence in Blake that makes him wellnigh unique. In ourselves we find from experience knowledge of good and evil, complicated views on philosophy and theology, puzzled brains, and a frightfully murky atmosphere, and it seems Utopian to imagine that it will ever be otherwise. Blake maintained, and so had the Saints, that when experience had effected its work and disposed of its dirt, smoke, and mud, a glorious something would emerge which innocence could never know, but which will include the innocence that we see in lambs and babies and buttercups and saints. Between what we are and what we shall be is a sandy desert; and, since Eden is lost, all, even the Christ, have to pass through the desert to gain the promised land. The words of Christ are not the words of one who has lived only in Eden. They are crystalline clear, flaming, simple, deep, and infinitely wise, we should almost say innocent, but as to "create a flower is the labour of ages," so when we look behind the words of Christ, and seize their implications, we discover not only the sorrow and joy, labour and triumph of His own experience, but that of the past labouring ages; and until we know something of present living experience added to that of the past, we shall never have an inkling of even the simplest words that lie on the face of the gospel. It was fitting that in 1794, when Blake uttered his prophecy of things to come in _Europe_, he should also gather together his _Songs of Experience_, and engrave them for the joy of posterity. _The Little Girl Lost_ and _The Little Girl Found_ bring together better than any perhaps the two contrary states of innocence and experience. Lyca, being innocent and only seven summers old, wandered, allured by the wild birds' song. She is lost but not dismayed. Falling asleep, the beasts of prey come around her and minister to her, and finally convey her tenderly to a cave. Then her parents, experienced but not innocent, arise and seek her. They pass through all the sufferings, sorrows, sighings, of this waste howling wilderness, buying the experience that almost kills them, till in terror they find Lyca among the wild beasts. But beholding Lyca they learn her secret, and