the watery shore
of the Introduction to the “Songs of Experience,” or the
happy, silent, moony beams
of “The Cradle Song”; but in each case the expressions are redeemed and revitalized by the pure and joyous singing note of the lyrics of which they form part. Only once is Blake to be found using the conventional epithet, when in his “Laughing Song” he writes
the painted birds laugh in the shade,
whilst with his usual unerring instinct he marks down the monotonous smoothness of so much contemporary verse in that stanza of his ode “To the Muses” in which, as has been well said, the eighteenth century dies to music:[80]
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.