‘For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Is God our Father dear; And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love Is man, His child and care. For Mercy has a human heart; Pity a human face; And Love the human form divine; And Peace, the human dress. Then every man of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine— Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.’ Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that were of old, and the iron throne of Satan. By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake’s paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth hung from Dante’s beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phæacians, who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in ‘the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,’ lived before Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when none had time to live, ‘the minute particulars of life,’ the little fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space at all. ‘Every space smaller than a globule of man’s blood,’ he wrote, ‘opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow.’ And again, ‘Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal’ in its tenor and value ‘to six thousand years, for in this period the poet’s work is done, and all the great events of time start forth, and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of the artery.’ Dante, indeed, taught, in the ‘Purgatorio,’ that sin and virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church. Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty, rapture and labour. ‘I know of no other Christianity, and of no other gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more.