During the Romantic period, many writers began soul-searching for the inspiring aspects of existence.  Human spirituality dwindled in lieu of scientific/earthly focus and the proliferating materialist mindset all but denied a ‘reality’ that lingered beneath the veil of the physical.  If something could not be quantifiably measured as an aspect of a purported objective, material world, it simply did not exist.  As a response to the unintentional war rationalists had declared on religion, writers in the Romantic period strove to re-realize the moments of life they could rightly remember as possessing a quality of undeniable divinity.  A central focal point of this renewed experiencing on the divine light of reality occurred when writers such as Blake and Wordsworth rediscovered the fact that children actually possess a certain wisdom that is lost with age and with the passing of an individual from a state of innocence to a state of experience.  In the gates of paradise or in the face of god, all are children.  With daring insight into the actual nature of innocence, Blake and Wordsworth both propounded in their works the idea that while they were children they were aware of the inherent divinity in nature.

Modern scholars describe William Blake as a ‘mystic’, which functions as a general catch-all term for someone who is so far out of the mainstream consciousness as to seem esoteric even to learned theologians.  Blake apparently experienced visions as a child, and from the farsightedness provoked in his poetry that muses on timeless themes, to his skillful delivery of his imaginative world into the waking world through his paintings and engravings, one can well see how this tag mystic applies to Blake’s world and his work.  Blake endeavored through his work to arouse people to take action to amend their misery; the modern world was a smoldering heap of human sorrow to him.  But one of Blake’s main griefs with the modern world was how children were treated.

To Blake, the state of innocence as exemplified in childhood represented the most lively, miraculous and sublime world a human could ever achieve.  The fact that many children stayed within the walls of schools during the day while they should be playing outside and enjoying nature irked Blake, not to speak of the guilt he felt at observing the poor children who were forced into working as “chimney-sweepers” because of their minute size.  To Blake, a child possesses a certain wisdom that differs from the wisdom gained from the world of experience; every experience to a child is a new and wonderful thing.  Children never want to go to sleep because their very reality is so engaging.  But there is nothing objectively different about the reality children and adults experience every day upon waking; it is a subjective disparity in the manner by which children perceive their world, seeing it more as an illustrious paradise of endless possibilities more so than the quotidian reality of the ever-moving cycle of recurring events that embitters the adult from ever achieving this more innocent mode of consciousness.