things his opponents held white were indeed black, and that the things they held black, white; with a strong persuasion that all busy with government are men of darkness and ‘something other than human life’; one is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry, though with a less abundant philosophic faculty, but still more of Nietzsche, whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent current, in the bed Blake’s thought has worn. The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets; men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget that even love and death and old age are an imaginative art. In these opposing kingdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings he wrote on the margins of the great sketch-book, and of those others, still more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has recorded in his diary. The sayings about the forgiveness of sins have no need for further explanation, and are in contrast with the attitude of that excellent commentator, Herr Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned from pity at the tale of Francesca, will only ‘sympathize’ with her ‘to a certain extent,’ being taken in a theological net. ‘It seems as if Dante,’ Blake wrote, ‘supposes God was something superior to the Father of Jesus; for if He gives rain to the evil and the good, and His sun to the just and the unjust, He can never have builded Dante’s Hell, nor the Hell of the Bible, as our parsons explain it. It must have been framed by the dark spirit itself, and so I understand it.’ And again, ‘Whatever task is of vengeance and whatever is against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser, the father of Hell.’ And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, ‘Dante saw devils where I saw none. I see good only.’ ‘I have never known a very bad man who had not something very good about him.’ This forgiveness was not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in a mystical vision, ‘that the imagination is the man himself,’ and believes he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life. At another moment he called Dante ‘an atheist, a mere politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old age, returned to God whom he had had in his childhood.’ ‘Everything is atheism,’ he has already explained, ‘which assumed the reality of the natural and unspiritual world.’ Dante, he held, assumed its reality when he made obedience to its laws a condition of man’s happiness