r we--

reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp.

The real evil is that we can suffer the need of the crust of bread to
exist. This is a view which is gradually beginning to be realised
to-day.

Blake is peculiarly daring and original in his use of the mystical
method of crystallising a great truth in an apparently trivial fact. We
have seen some of these truths in the Proverbs, and the _Auguries of
Innocence_ is nothing else but a series of such facts, a storehouse of
deepest wisdom. Some of these have the simplicity of nursery rhymes,
they combine the direct freshness of the language of the child with the
profound truth of the inspired seer.

If the Sun & Moon should Doubt
They'd immediately Go Out.

It would scarcely be possible to sum up more completely than does this
artless couplet the faith--not only of Blake--but of every mystic.
Simple, ardent, and living, their faith is in truth their life, and the
veriest shadow of doubt would be to them a condition of death. They are
the only people in the world who are the "possessors of certainty." They
have seen, they have felt: what need they of further proof? Logic,
philosophy, theology, all alike are but empty sounds and barren forms to
those who know.

To Francis Thompson the presence of the Divine in all things is the one
overwhelming fact. As a result of this sense, the consciousness that
everything is closely related, closely linked together, is ever present
in his poetry. It is the vision of this truth, he believes, which will
be the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth.

When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.

_The Mistress of Vision._

His "Divine intoxication," his certainty of the presence of God, is the
more remarkable when it is realised through what depths of want and
degradation and suffering Thompson passed, and what his life was for
many years. His father, a north-country doctor, wished him to follow the
profession of medicine, but the son could not bear it, and so he ran
away from home with--for sole wealth--a Blake in one pocket and an
Aeschylus in the other. In his struggle for life in London, fragile in
body and sensitive in soul, he sank lower and lower, from selling boots
to errand-boy, and finally for five years living as a vagabond withou