fulfillment the sentimental desire for the liberation of the emotions;
but his work, taken as a whole, can scarcely be said to vindicate the
faith that the emotions, once freed, would manifest instinctive purity.
At his almost unrivalled best, he can sing in the sweetest strains the
raptures or pathos of innocent youthful love, as in _Sweet Afton_ or _To
Mary in Heaven_; but straightway sinking from that elevation of feeling
to the depths of vulgarity or grossness, he will chant with equal zest
and skill the indulgence of the animal appetites.[1] He hails the joys of
life, but without discriminating between the higher and the lower. Yet
these exuberant animal spirits which, unrestrained by conscience
or taste, drove him too often into scurrility, gave his work that
passion--warm, throbbing, and personal--which had been painfully wanting
in earlier poets of sensibility. It was his emotional intensity as well
as his lyric genius that made him the most popular poet of his time.

In Burns, sentimentalism was largely temperamental, unreflective, and
concrete. In William Blake, the singularity of whose work long retarded
its due appreciation, sentimentalism was likewise temperamental; but,
unconfined to actuality, became far broader in scope, more spiritual,
and more consistently philosophic. Indeed, Blake was the ultimate
sentimentalist of the century. A visionary and symbolist, he passed
beyond Shaftesbury in his thought, and beyond any poet of the school
in his endeavor to create a new and appropriate style. His contemporary,
Erasmus Darwin, author of _The Botanic Garden_, was trying to give
sentimentalism a novel interpretation by describing the life of plants
in terms of human life; but, Darwin being destitute of artistic sense,
the result was grotesque. Blake, by training and vocation an engraver,
was primarily an artist; but, partly under Swedenborgian influences, he
had grasped the innermost character of sentimentalism, perceived all its
implications, and carried them fearlessly to their utmost bounds. To him