Thomson himself would be the first to admit that his vision of the City
of Dreadful Night is inferior, as poetry, to the visions of William
Blake in the same city, of whom Thomson writes with a certain wistful
envy,

He came to the desert of London town,
Mirk miles broad;
He wandered up and he wandered down,
Ever alone with God.
[Footnote: _William Blake._]

Goethe speaks of the poet's impressions of the outer world, the inner
world and the other world. To the poet these impressions cannot be
distinct, but must be fused in every aesthetic experience. In his
impressions of the physical world he finds, not merely the reflection of
his own personality, but the germ of infinite spiritual meaning, and it
is the balance of the three elements which creates for him the
"aesthetic repose."

Even in the peculiarly limited sensuous verse of the present the third
element is implicit. Other poets, no less than Joyce Kilmer, have a dim
sense that in their physical experiences they are really tasting the
eucharist, as Kilmer indicates in his warning,

Vain is his voice in whom no longer dwells
Hunger that craves immortal bread and wine.
[Footnote: _Poets._]

Very dim, indeed, it may be, the sense is, yet in almost every
verse-writer of to-day there crops out, now and then, a conviction of