Looking round the characteristic and representative collection, the ingenuous student realized that the predominant effect of this art on his mind was one of _strangeness_. It seemed to him unconnected with the past, unrelated to the present, an art set apart, unique, somewhat disquieting, which took him into Blake's visionary world, opposed in every sense to the natural world of daily experience. This visionary world of Blake's, was minutely discriminated by him, however, and was no formless region of emasculating dreams. The amazing vigour of his conceptions, and the flat contradiction which they impose on the orthodox and traditional images which most people's minds unconsciously harbour, added a sense of shock to that of strangeness. Inquiring yet further into the causes of this impression one discovered the truth of W. B. Scott's assertion, that Blake's genius was unaided by its usual correlative, talent--that facility which enthrones the idea in its appropriately wrought shrine, dowers it with its organically perfect form. Greatly as Blake disliked it to be said, the truth was apparent among these collected works of his, that his execution was seldom equal to his invention. As proof of the strangeness, the independence of his work, we may quote the water-colour drawing of the "Three Maries with the Angel at the Sepulchre" (date 1803), in which the holy women shrink terrified from the angel, with all the shuddering horror that humanity feels at the manifestations of the spiritual world. A small colour-print from "Urizen"--called here "The Flames of Furious Desire"--with which we are already very familiar, must have augmented the impression of unique imagination and strangeness to those who had no previous acquaintance with Blake's work.