law and blind negation. Blake considered this doctrine to be of the utmost importance, and claimed to have written it under the dictation of spiritual presences. 'I have written this poem from immediate dictation,' he wrote, of 'Jerusalem,' 'twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation, and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered nonexistent, and an immense poem exists which seems the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.' It is not possible in a short essay like the present to do more than record these things, for to discuss and to consider what these presences were would need many pages. Whatsoever they were, presences or mere imaginings, the words they dictated remain for our wonder and delight. There is not one among these words which is other than significant and precise to the laborious student, and many passages of simple poetry and the marvel of the pictures remain for all who cannot or will not give the needed labour. Merlin's book lies open before us, and if we cannot decipher its mysterious symbols, then we may dream over the melody of evocations that are not for our conjuring, and over the strange colours and woven forms of the spread pages® In 1793 Blake removed to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, and besides the illustrating of 'The Prophetic Books' did there much artistic work, notably 'Nebuchadnezzar,' a huge water-colour, and 'The Lazar House,' and 'The Elohim creating Adam,' and a series of designs to Young's 'Night Thoughts,' of which a few were printed with the poem in 1797. The remainder are with Mr. Bain, of the Haymarket, who very kindly shows them to Blake's students. The printed designs are, of course, in plain black and white, but the rest are faint luminous sketches in water-colour. At Lambeth, too, he saw the one ghost of his life. When he was talking on the subject of ghosts,' writes Gilchrist, 'he was wont to say they did not appear much to imaginative men, but only to common minds who did not see the finer spirits. A ghost was a thing seen by the gross bodily eye, a vision by the mental. "Did you ever see a ghost?" asked a friend. "Never but once," was the reply. And it befell thus: Standing one evening at his garden door in Lambeth, and chancing to look up, he saw a horrible grim figure, "scaly-speckled, very awful," stalking downstairs towards him. More frightened than ever before or after, he took to his heels and ran out of the house.' In 1800 he left London for the first time. Flaxman had introduced him to a certain Hayley, a popular poet of the day, who · poured out long streams of verse, always lucid, always rational, always uninspired. He wrote prose too, and was now busy in his turreted country house putting together a life of Cowper. Blake was invited to engrave the illustrations, and to set up house in the neighbourhood. At first all went well. The village of Felpham seemed an entirely beautiful place, beloved of God and of the spirits. Blake met all manner of kings and poets and prophets walking in shadowy multitudes on the edge of the sea, 'majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of man.' Other and more gentle beings appeared likewise. 'Did you ever see a fairy's funeral?' said Blake to a lady who sat next him at some gathering at Hayley's or elsewhere. 'Never, sir,' was the answer. 'I have,' he replied; 'but not before last night. I was writing alone in my garden; there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with songs and disappeared.' He has elsewhere described the fairies as 'the rulers of the vegetable world,' and 'vegetable' was with him a technical term meaning 'bodily' and sensuous. Jacob Boehme is also said to have had a vision of the fairies. After a while patronage became more than he could bear, and kind worldly Hayley a burden more insistent and persistent than the grasshopper of old. Not only did Hayley himself give the prophet, who was his guest, little but mechanical work, but he sought out excellent ladies, kindly and worldly like himself, who wanted miniatures and painted firescreens. Before long Blake began to hurl at his head petulant epigram, though there were times now and afterwards when the worldliness disappeared, and the kindliness remained alone visible to him, and then he would say that Hayley had kept him safe by his good will through spiritual terror and contests 'not known to men on earth,' but which had else made the three years he spent at Felpham 'the darkest years that ever mortal suffered.' Towards the last an event occurred which awoke all his slumbering gratitude. One evening he found a soldier in his garden, and not knowing that he had been put there to dig by his own gardener, asked him with all politeness to be gone. The man refused with threats, and Blake, getting angry, caught him by the elbows, and, despite his endeavour to spar forced him away down the road to the village tavern where he was quartered. The soldier avenged himself by swearing that Blake had cursed the King, and vowed help to Bonaparte mythology. In 1804 he returned to London and took a |