e genius of Europe.

Much of his writing will fall into oblivion. It is too occasional, too
topical, too fretted by the necessity of clearing away the half-gods so
that the gods may arrive. But certain of his books will live forever;
assured of that smiling and amiable immortality, beyond the reach of
all vulgar malice, which the high invisible ones give to those who
have learnt the sacramental secret that; only through the senses do
we understand the soul, and only through the soul do we understand
the senses.

WILLIAM BLAKE

The strange and mysterious figure of William Blake seems
continually to appear at the end of almost every vista of intellectual
and aesthetic interest down which we move in these latter days.

The man's genius must have been of a unique kind; for while writers
like Wordsworth and Byron seem now to have stiffened into
dignified statues of venerated and achieved pre-eminence, he--the
contemporary of William Cowper--exercises now, half way through
the second decade of the twentieth century, an influence as fresh, as
living, as organic, as palpable, as that of authors who have only just
fallen upon silence.

His so-called "Prophetic Books" may be obscure and arbitrary in
their fantastic mythology. I shall leave the interpretation of these
works to those who are more versed in the occult sciences than I am,
or than I should greatly care to be; but a prophet in the most true
sense of that distinguished word, Blake certainly was--and to prove
it one need not touch these Apocalyptic oracles.

Writing while Cowper was composing evangelical hymns under the
influence of the Rev. Dr. Newton, and while Burns was celebrating
his Highland Mary, Blake anticipates many of the profoundest
thoughts of Nietzsche, and opens the "charmed magic casements"
upon these perilous fairy seas, voyaged over by Verlaine and
Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and Mallarme.

When one considers the fact that he was actually writing poems and
engraving pictures before the eighteenth century closed and before
Edgar Allan Poe was born, it is nothing short of staggering to realise
how, not only in literature but in art, his astounding genius
dominates our modern taste.

It might almost seem as if every single one of the poets and painters
of our age--all these imagists and post-impressionists and symbolists
and the rest--had done nothing during the sensitive years of their life
but brood over the work of William Blake. Even in mu