What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and far from profane ears--is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in the church of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of the East, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happy groves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of the dancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where the children of passion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in the Golden Age. In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of God "shouting together" in the primal joy of creation, one has a vision of the large and noble harmony he strove after between an emancipated flesh and a free spirit. William Blake, in his Adamic innocence of "sin," has something in him that suggests Walt Whitman, but unlike Whitman he prefers to use the figure of Christ rather than any vague "ensemble" of nature-forces to symbolise the triumphant nuptials of soul and body. Sometimes in his strange verses one has the impression that one is reading the fragmentary and broken utterances of some great ancient poet-philosopher--some Pythagoras or Empedocles--through whose gnomic oracles runs the rhythm of the winds and tides, and for whose ears the stars in their courses have a far-flung harmony. He often seems to make use of the Bible and Biblical usages, very much as the ancient poets made use of Hesiod or of Homer, treating such writings with reverence, but subordinating what is borrowed from them to new and original purpose. "Hear the voice of the Bard, Who present, past and future sees, Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walked among the ancient trees. "Calling the lapsed soul And weeping in the evening dew, That might control The starry pole And fallen, fallen light renew! "O Earth, O Earth, return! Arise from out the dewy grass! Night is worn And the Morn Rises from the slumbrous mass. "Turn away no more; Why wilt thou turn away? The starry floor The watery shore Is given thee till break of day." If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one's mind, free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness, thevery impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I would unhesitatingly name William Blake. One is strangely conscious in reading him of the presence of some great unuttered power--some vast demiurgic secret--struggling like a buried Titan just below the surface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression.