What Burns did for the idea of liberty, Blake did for that and every
other idea current among Wordsworth and his successors. There is nothing
stranger in the history of English literature than the miracle by which
this poet and artist, working in obscurity, utterly unknown to the
literary world that existed outside him, summed up in himself all the
thoughts and tendencies which were the fruit of anxious discussion and
propaganda on the part of the authors--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb--who
believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to
their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace
and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a
rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal
is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary
indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy.
Blake, by himself, held and expressed quite calmly that condemnation of
the "classic" school that Wordsworth and Coleridge proclaimed against
the opposition of a deriding world. As was his habit he compressed it
into a rude epigram,
"Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
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