Now in our own age--an age that feels as though Wilde himself were growing a little old-fashioned--we find ourselves returning to William Blake and discovering him to be more entirely in harmony with the instincts of our most secret souls than any single genius we could name actually working in our midst. It is as though to find our completest expression, the passionate and mystical soul of our materialistic age were driven back to an author who lived a hundred years ago. This phenomenon is by no means unknown in the history of the pilgrimage of the human spirit; but it has never presented itself in so emphatic a form as in the case of this extraordinary person. In the early ages of the world, the result without doubt would be some weird deification of the clairvoyant prophet. William Blake would become a myth, a legend, an avatar of the divine Being, a Buddha, a Zoroaster, a wandering Dionysus. As it is, we are forced to confine ourselves to the fascinating pleasure of watching in individual cases, this or that modern soul, "touched to fine issues," meeting for the first time, as it may often happen, this century-buried incarnation of their own most evasive dreams. I myself, who now jot down these fragmentary notes upon him, had the privilege once of witnessing the illumination--I can call it by no other name--produced upon the mind of the greatest novelist of America and the most incorrigibly realistic, by a chance encounter with the "Songs of Innocence." One of the most obvious characteristics of our age is its cult of children. Here--in the passion of this cult--we separate ourselves altogether, both from our mediaeval ancestors who confined their devotion to the divine child, and from the classical ages, who kept children altogether in the background. "When I became a man," says the apostle, "I put away childish things," and this "putting away of childish things" has always been a special note of the temper and attitude of orthodox Protestants for whom these other Biblical words, spoken by a greater than St. Paul, about "becoming as little children," must seem a sort of pious rhetoric. When one considers how this thrice accursed weight of Protestant Puritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the perverted superstitions that have darkened man's history, a superstition which, though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a "business asset," altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned in Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of generations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiest signs of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith and Pagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in the House" into the clear sunlight of an almost religious appreciation.