The last line is very significant of Blake. The world which made so decent and respectable a thing out of Christianity, which called success and opportunism the favour of God, and hailed the Prince of this world by the name of Christ, excited Blake's utmost antagonism. He announced definite counter doctrines on his part, and advocated in his vehemence, almost as partial a view of things, as in their own way, did the materialists of his time. "La verite est dans une nuance," Renan has declared, but the swing of the pendulum of opinion must alternate from one extreme to the other before the precise "nuance" can be determined. Blake's noble but often impractical views have yet a practical utility, for only through a knowledge of the extreme, can the mean be discriminated. Of his own personal religion it might be said that certain fantastic and strange tenets he _chose_ to believe because they pleased him, as we may choose to believe in this or that section of the Catholic Church; but the most quintessential, intimate, and spiritual of his views were not beliefs at all, but simply and purely knowledge. He _knew_, by an intuition beyond reason, things outside the ken of ordinary men. The deep melodies of the super-sensible universe reverberated through his soul, and he could never therefore think much of the hum and clamour of this material world. From this intuitive and rapt knowledge of the mystic there is no appeal, for it transcends human experience, and when Blake had it, he was prophet (teller of hidden things) indeed. But when he chose to believe and assert complex and sometimes contradictory doctrines, the affair is different, and we may give or withhold our intellectual sympathy as we will. In any case the spiritual and unorthodox creed which was the lamp of truth to this beautiful soul is worthy of deep reverence, but I cannot altogether agree with Messrs. Ellis and Yeats that a _consistent_ basis of mysticism underlies Blake's writings. Even a system of mystic philosophy requires to be stated comprehensibly and in a recognizable literary form, and the prophetic books (in which the greater part of Blake's views are expressed) have no form nor sequence, and are as chaotic and dim as dreams. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, it is true, have constructed an elaborate, imaginative and very coherent thought-structure out of Blake's prophetic writings, but owing to the looseness, confusion and unintelligible character of the greater part of the symbolic books themselves, the deftly woven web of mysticism which they present to us as Blake's does not carry conviction with it. It is suggestive, deeply sympathetic with Blake--sometimes radiantly illuminating--but seems an independent treatise rather than an exposition. Deeply as all students of Blake must feel themselves indebted to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats for their learned work, and the real help it has afforded to a clearer view of his unique personality, I cannot but think that every man will--nay