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o I smote them, and their goreStained the roots my myrtle bore;But the time of youth is fled,And grey hairs are on my head." Now not even the spilt blood of those who forbid and betray shall quickenthe dried root or flush the faded leaf of love; the myrtle being past allcomfort of soft rain or helpful sun. So in the _Rose-Tree_ (vol. ii. p.60), when for the sake of a barren material fidelity to his "rose" ofmarriage, he has passed over the offered flower "such as May never bore,"the rose herself "turns away with jealousy," and gives him thorns forthanks: nothing left of it for hand or lip but collapsed blossom andimplacable edges of brier. Blake might have kept in mind the end of hisactual wild vine (vol. i. p. 100 of the _Life_), which ran all to leaf andnever brought a grape worth eating, for fault of pruning-hooks andvine-dressers. In all this there is a certain unmistakeable innocence which accounts forthe practical modesty and peaceable forbearance of the man's way ofliving. The material shape of his speculations never goes beyond a sort ofboyish defiant complaint, a half-humorous revolt of the will. Inconstancywith him is not rooted in satiety, but in the freshness of pure pleasure;he would never cast off the old to put on the new. The chain once broken,against which between sleeping and waking he chafes and wrestles, he wouldlie for most hours of the day with content enough in the old shade ofwedded rose or myrtle tree. Nor in leaping or reaching after the newflower would he wilfully bruise or break the least bud of the old. Hisdesire is towards the freedom of the dawn of things--not towards the "darksecret hour" that walks under coverings of cloud. "Are not the joys of morning sweeterThan the joys of night?" The sinless likeness of his seeming "sins"--mere fancies as it appearsthey mostly were, mere soft light aspirations of theory without body orflesh on them--has something of the innocent immodesty of a birds' orbabies' paradise--of a fools' paradise, too, translated into the practiceand language of the untheoretic world. Shelley's "Epipsychidion" scarcelypreaches a more bodiless evangel of bodily liberty. That famous andexquisitely written passage beginning, "True love in this differs fromgold and clay," delivers in more daringly definite words the exact messageof Blake's belief. Nowhere has the note of pity been more strongly and sweetly struck than inthose lovely opening verses of the "Garden of Love," which must here beread once again:-- "I laid me down upon a bankWhere Love lay sleeping:I heard among the rushes dankWeeping, weeping. Then I went to the heath and the wild,To the thistles and thorns of the waste;And they told me how they were beguiled,Driven out, and compelled to be chaste." The sharp and subtle change of metre here and at the end of the poem hasan audacity of beauty and a justice of impulse proper only to the leadersof lyrical verse: unfit alike for definition and for imitation, if anycopyist were to try his hand at it. The next song we transcribe from the"Ideas" is lighter in tone than usual, and admirable for humorousimagination; a light of laughter shines and sounds through the words.
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