n emotional penury, seemed as important to his old age as to his
youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds it in its purely
artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in 1824: 'Excess is
the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest
art. There are many mediums in the _means_--none, oh, not a jot, not a
shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a picture whose merit is to
be excessively brilliant, it can't be too brilliant, but individual tints
may be too brilliant.... We must not begin with medium, but think always
on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.'

These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance, were
insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called again and
again 'demons' and 'villains,' 'hired' by the wealthy and the idle; but in
private, Palmer has told us, he could find 'sources of delight throughout
the whole range of art,' and was ever ready to praise excellence in any
school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no need for the emphasis of
exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in 'Jerusalem' in which the
merely mortal part of the mind, 'the spectre,' creates 'pyramids of
pride,' and 'pillars in the deepest hell to reach the heavenly arches,'
and seeks to discover wisdom in 'the spaces between the stars,' not 'in
the stars,' where it is, but the immortal part makes all his labours vain,
and turns his pyramids to 'grains of sand,' his 'pillars' to 'dust on the
fly's wing,' and makes of 'his starry heavens a moth of gold and silver
mocking his anxious grasp.' So when man's desire to rest from spiritual
labour, and his thirst to fill his art with mere sensation and memory,
seem upon the point of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new
inspiration; and here and there among the pictures born of sensation and
memory is the murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans
and symbols.

It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did the
various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his fame. He
had already completed the illustrations to Young's _Night Thoughts_--in
which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even with the
luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly intolerable
in plain black and white--and almost all the illustrations to 'the