It is long since anyone doubted the worth of the _Poetical Sketches_. The twentieth century wholly endorses the glowing and just criticism that Swinburne wrote fifty years ago. It must have startled the stolid bookish people of the 'sixties to be told that the best of Blake's _Poetical Sketches_--_To Spring_, _To Memory_, _To the Muses_, _To the Evening Star_--were comparable to the world's best in any age. Swinburne frequently exaggerated in his excitement; but here was no exaggeration, and the poems which were once thought by a partial friend "to merit some respite from oblivion" are now reckoned among the chief pearls of great price in England's rich treasury of Songs.
There remains little more for the critic to say, but the biographer turns to these _Sketches_ for any intimation of Blake's spiritual and mental growth.
We must not be misled by the "scent and sound of Elizabethan times" that is upon them. It is of course interesting to the literary mind to discover Ben Jonson in _How sweet I roamed_, Beaumont and Fletcher in _My Silks and fine Array_, Webster in the _Mad Song_, and Shakespeare in _King Edward the Third_; but these intimations of kinship are only such as are found in original geniuses of the same age. That which gives life and immortality and irresistible sweetness to the songs is Blake's own child-spirit seeing with wide-eyed simplicity the simple commonplace things of this world that God made, and that are to the pure in heart the immediate revelation of Him. If in fashioning into Song the things that he saw Blake refuses the artifice of his time and catches the scent and sound of a more robust age, yet the prime inspiration was entirely his own; and we can only wonder that such inspiration should have come to him while still a mere boy.
The other pieces in the collection, though of much less importance, have their interest. _Fair Elinor_ with the "silent tower," the "castle gate," the "dreary vaults," and "sickly smells," like Horace Walpole's _Mysterious Mother_ and _Castle of Otranto_, is not of the time but anticipatory of the romantic horrors that Mrs Radcliffe was to make entirely her own. _Gwen King of Norway_ and _King Edward the Third_ are remarkable for their martial language. This was no accident. Blake was a born fighter. The heroic side of War stirred his spirit, even though