irit and of
vision, which, for him, was the only real world. At the age of four he
saw God looking in at the window, and from that time until he welcomed
the approach of death by singing songs of joy which made the rafters
ring, he lived in an atmosphere of divine illumination. The material
facts of his career were simple and uneventful. He was an engraver by
profession, poet and painter by choice, mystic and seer by nature. From
the outer point of view his life was a failure. He was always crippled
by poverty, almost wholly unappreciated in the world of art and letters
of his day, consistently misunderstood even by his best friends, and
pronounced mad by those who most admired his work. Yet, like all true
mystics, he was radiantly happy and serene; rich in the midst of
poverty. For he lived and worked in a world, and amongst a company,
little known of ordinary men:--

With a blue sky spread over with wings,
And a mild Sun that mounts & sings;
With trees & fields full of Fairy elves,
And little devils who fight for themselves--

* * * * *

With Angels planted in Hawthorn bowers,
And God Himself in the passing hours.[72]

It is not surprising that he said, in speaking of Lawrence and other
popular artists who sometimes patronisingly visited him, "They pity me,
but 'tis they are the just objects of pity, I possess my visions and
peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage." The
strength of his illumination at times intoxicated him with joy, as he
writes to Hayley (October 23, 1804) after a recurrence of vision which
had lapsed for some years, "Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take
a pencil or graver into my hand." This is the "divine madness" of which
Plato speaks, the "inebriation of Reality," the ecstasy which makes the
poet "drunk with life."[73]

In common with other mystics, with Boehme, St Teresa, and Madame Guyon,
Blake claimed that much of his work was written under direct
inspiration, that it was an automatic composition, which, whatever its
source, did not come from the writer's normal consciousness. In speaking
of the prophetic book _Milton_, he says--

I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or
sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without pre-meditation
and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing