All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery over artistic expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete, as is the technique of well-nigh all artists who have striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions than any before him; his imagination and technique are more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination and technique of any other master. ‘I am,’ wrote Blake, ‘like others, just equal in invention and execution.’ And again, ‘No man can improve an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without execution, organized, delineated and articulated either by God or man ... I have heard people say, “Give me the ideas; it is no matter what words you put them into”; and others say, “Give me the designs; it is no matter for the execution.”... Ideas cannot be given but in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.’ Living in a time when technique and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in Giotto. The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge’s opium cloud; as Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake’s anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body. II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE.