Songs of Innocence and of Experience

William Blake must be accorded the merit of having been the first to inaugurate the return to simplicity and nature in his poetry, from which the school of Pope and his feeble imitators had so widely departed. He preceded Wordsworth by nearly ten years, the Songs of Innocence appearing in 1789, and the Songs of Experience in 1794; yet the reader will be struck by the remarkable resemblance in tone and style, the similarities of subject and metre, between these poems and the earlier poems of Wordsworth. There is precisely the same exquisite tenderness and noble simplicity in Blake. Some dozen of his Songs of Innocence .might assuredly have been printed in the Lyrical Ballads and have passed for Words worth's, and on the whole the attentive student who follows out this hint, which cannot in this place be further enlarged on, with the two books before him, will discover coincidences of thought and expression which are very remarkable. We think, however, that the poems of William Blake are destined at length to meet with a full though tardy recognition, and that they will therefore be welcome without such adventitious aid; that they will be cherished by children for their purity and simplicity, and by grown-up men and women for the deeper meanings which always underlie the most simple of them. There is something sublime in the spirit of child like innocence and Christian rebuke of worldliness and hardheartedness that pervades these productions.