All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of the power of splendid and terrible anger. His invectives and vituperations bite and flay like steel whips. The "buyers and sellers" in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance. He was afraid of no man living--nor of any man's god. Working with his own hands, composing his poems, illustrating them, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his own workshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the "great" and the "little" vulgar. He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having something about him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance" which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser, kindlier and more human a shield for an artist's freedom, than the sarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde. Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road," and gave all obscurantists and oppressors to ten million cart-loads of horned devils! It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many miles from that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-like fantasies, a fairy's funeral. That funeral must have been followed after Blake's death by many others; for there are no fairies in Felpham now. But Blake's cottage is there still--to be seen by any who care to see it--and the sands by the sea's edge are the "yellow sands," flecked with white foam and bright green sea-weed of Ariel's song; and on the sea-banks above grow tufts of Homeric Tamarisk. It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy oysters for his cat, William Blake--in mind and imagination a contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman--should have been asserting the artist's right (why should we not say the individual's right, artist or no artist?) to live as he pleases, according to the morals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his own absolute humour and fancy. This was more than one hundred years ago. What would William Blake think of our new world,--would it seem to him to resemble his New Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty?--our world where young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the sea without their stockings? Well! at Felpham they do not tease them with stockings. What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his guilelessness and purity of heart.