ices speaking out of bramble-bushes that he may have the wisdom of the
world. The Puritanism that drove the theatres into Surrey was but part of
an inexplicable movement that was trampling out the minds of all but some
few thousands born to cultivated ease.

May 1901.

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION

There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future
mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid
them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these
men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke
things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world about him.
He announced the religion of art, of which no man dreamed in the world
about him; and he understood it more perfectly than the thousands of
subtle spirits who have received its baptism in the world about us,
because, in the beginning of important things--in the beginning of love,
in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a
moment when are understand more perfectly than we understand again until
all is finished. In his time educated people believed that they amused
themselves with books of imagination but that they 'made their souls' by
listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When
they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great
poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons. In our
time we are agreed that we 'make our souls' out of some one of the great
poets of ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or
Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he
became a prophet and fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's
pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of
soul, by listening to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things.
We write of great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have
seemed an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept
for the beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we
believe with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things,
as Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have 'lain
burningly on the Divine hand,' and that when time has begun to wither, the
Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity. When no man
believed these things William Blake believed them, and began