They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand. The solemn, silent moon Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs. The birds and beasts rejoice and play, And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy. Furious and terrible they rend the nether deep, The deep lifts up his rugged head, And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry. The fading cry is ever dying, The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.' 1897. WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_ I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not allegory, being 'a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.' A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily no part of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist between symbol and mind, for in doing so I should come upon not a few doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the man of modern culture; but it is necessary to just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of much of the practice and of all the precept of his artistic life.