After all, this matter of the combination garment is the merest quibble. The design has all the enchantment of the spring in its pale delicious tints, and the browsing sheep with the glint of gold on their fleeces bring something of Argonautic romance into this vision of April.
The flamboyant title-page of the "Songs of Innocence," is a fine piece of decorative design and colour.
The keynote of the whole scheme is set in the perfectly simple song, and the page in which it is embodied, called "The Introduction." The poem is written in brown, on a ground bright with tremulous colours which wane and wax in prismatic variation. Rose shoots, bent in and out, make a trellis up each side of the verses, and the result of the whole! well! you may call it a slight thing if you like, but it is as joyous as childhood, and strangely delightful! No songs ever written for children were as these songs; in especial, perhaps, "The Lamb," of which the simplicity and tenderness are of so delicate a quality that the poem cannot be handled critically at all. It can only be felt.
The slightly richer and deeper tones of colour, and the premonitory note of mysticism in the "Little Black Boy," afford a subtle charm:
And we are put on earth a little space That we may learn to bear the beams of love, And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
It is of lyrics such as this that Pater writes: "And the very perfection of such poetry often appears to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding, as in some of the most imaginative compositions of William Blake."
"The Divine Image" is another equally lovely poem, with its sinuous growth of ribbon-like leaves, climbing among the verses. The unmistakeable figure of Christ at the root, raises a prostrate figure.
The verses, writ in golden brown, lie on a ground of palest blue, thrilling to Tyrian purple.
"Holy Thursday," after the rainbow tints of many of the pages and the luxuriance of their designs, is a Quaker-like and unpretending affair altogether. It would seem to be the untouched impression as it was first stereotyped off the plate; and is interesting for that reason.