ought of intentional deceit. No criticism affected him. Nothing could
shake his faith. "It must be right: I saw it so," was the beginning and
end of his defence. The testimony of these friends of his is that he was
of all artists most spiritual, devoted, and single-minded. One of them
says, if asked to point out among the intellectual a happy man, he
should at once think of Blake. One, a young artist, finding his
invention flag for a whole fortnight, had recourse to Blake.

"It is just so with us," he exclaimed, turning to his wife, "is it not,
for weeks together, when the visions forsake us? What do we do then,
Kate?"

"We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake."

To these choice spirits, these enthusiastic and confiding friends, his
house was the House of the Interpreter. The little back-room, kitchen,
bedroom, studio, and parlor in one, plain and neat, had for them a kind
of enchantment. That royal presence lighted up the "hole" into a palace.
The very walls widened with the greatness of his soul. The windows that
opened on the muddy Thames seemed to overlook the river of the water of
life. Among the scant furnishings, his high thoughts, set in noble
words, gleamed like apples of gold in pictures of silver. Over the gulf
that yawns between two worlds he flung a glorious arch, and walked
tranquilly back and forth. Heaven was as much a matter-of-fact to him as
earth. Of sacred things he spoke with a familiarity which, to those who
did not understand him, seemed either madness or blasphemy; but his
friends never misunderstood. With one exception, none who knew him
personally ever thought of calling his sanity in question. To them he
was a sweet, gentle, lovable man. They felt the truth of his life. They
saw that

"Only that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

Imagination was to him the great reality. The external, that which makes
the chief consciousness of most men, was to him only staging, an
incumbrance, and uncouth, but to be endured and made the most of. The
world of the imagination was the true world. Imagination _bodied_ forth
the forms of things unknown in a deeper sense, perhaps, than the great
dramatist meant. His poet's pen, his painter's pencil turned them to
shapes, and gave to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Nay, he
denied that they were nothings. He rather asserted the actual existence
of his visions,--an existence as real, though not of the same n