To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected lights was to fall into the power of his ‘Vala,’ the indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in ‘the prophetic books’ as ‘sweet pestilence,’ and whose children weave webs to take the souls of men; but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has also a ‘masculine portion’ or ‘spectre’ which kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually at war with inspiration. To ‘generalize’ forms and shadows, to ‘smooth out’ spaces and lines in obedience to ‘laws of composition,’ and of painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish uniformity; as the popular art of Blake’s day had done, and as he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into ‘Entuthon Benithon,’ or ‘the Lake of Udan Adan,’ or some other of those regions where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by so many resonant phantastical names. ‘General knowledge is remote knowledge,’ he wrote; ‘it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is founded.... As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant, much less an insignificant blot or blur.’ Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has called ‘corporeal reason,’ the desire for ‘a tepid moderation,’ for a lifeless ‘sanity in both art and life,’ he had protested years before with a paradoxical violence. ‘The roadway of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,’ and we must only ‘bring out weight and measure in time of dearth.’ This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that ‘The _Lives of the Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,’ because dissipation is better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his old age as to his youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in 1824: ‘Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the _means_—none, oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant.... We must not begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to make excess more abundantly excessive.’