Of Blake[185], it is difficult to speak in such a company. He was a winged thing hovering over little formal beds of lavender, catching for a moment an echo of children’s voices repeating the creed of “The Little Black Boy,” dropping a tear for the Chimney-Sweeper, then flying off unseen and unheard to sing his own songs of joy and love, too much a child to suffer the interruptions of other children; scarcely to be understood by those who were dreaming their own dreams under the noses of the pedagogues. A Pied Piper who never offered his services to the community; a sublime truant from every school. Of the realistic faith that could map out a Geography of Heaven, he had no knowledge; yet Laws and Moralities were the burden of some songs that had touched him. There is a magic in the simplest form of verse that may quicken the beat of a child’s heart, and endow little forgotten rules and prescriptions of the nursery with unexpected significance. If Blake could have alighted in the starlight outside a window and heard Ann Taylor putting one of her children to bed, he might have come in and acknowledged the existence of naughtiness, just for the pleasure of being forgiven. Some voices can sweeten the longest homily, and the culprit waits patiently for the kiss that must come when the sermon begins:
“And has my darling told a lie?”[186]
There is a triumphant contradiction in so tender a severity; a very rainbow of promise:
“Do you think I can love you so naughty as this,[187]
Or kiss you all wetted with tears?”
“Idle Mary” can pass it all on to her doll. Later on, when she looks down from the height of the first speaker, she understands how forgiveness and hope came with a sudden rush at the end:
“Oh, Mary, this will never do!
This work is sadly done, my dear,
And then so little of it too!