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THE NEW VISION.
William Blake, the painter of many strange and fantastic but often
powerful--sometimes very beautiful pictures--wrote poems of an equally
remarkable kind. Some of them are as lovely as they are careless, while
many present a curious contrast in the apparent incoherence of the
simplest language. He was born in 1757, towards the close of the reign of
George II. Possibly if he had been sent to an age more capable of
understanding him, his genius would not have been tempted to utter itself
with such a wildness as appears to indicate hopeless indifference to
being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the
bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard
it as the reflex of madness in the writer. Here is a lyrical gem,
however, although not cut with mathematical precision.
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