_must_--interpret Blake for himself. He was too erratic, too emotional, too much the artist, the apostle of discernment and the enemy of reason and science, to have constructed the closely-reasoned, carefully-articulated system of thought which they describe so graphically. Blake was an intuitive mystic, not a systematic or learned one. However, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have appreciated Blake's mysticism, in all its strange convolutions and cloudy gyrations, they have done so not by following his expressed thoughts but by stating from a sympathetic insight denied to others, what he himself left unexpressed. This does not materially concern the student of Blake's art and poetry, but it _does_ deeply concern them that they should ascertain the _main_ opinions which we know he held and the nature of the spiritual insight that obviously moulded his intellect, and hence his art. He had a startlingly naive and original mental perspective, and he focussed profound and virgin thought on Life, Spirit and Art. Virgin thought it was indeed, for tradition had little hold on him, and the social, political and intellectual movements of his time passed by him, washing round the rock on which he sat isolated, but leaving him almost untouched by their influence and atmosphere. He was never swept into the current of contemporary life, but was as removed from the London of his time as if his rooms had been an Alpine tower of silence, instead of being in the very heart and turmoil of the city. He belonged to no particular age. We could never think of him, for instance, like Rossetti or William Morris, as an exile from the middle ages who had fallen upon an uncongenial nineteenth century. He lived apart in a world of spirit, and concerned himself with the great elementary problems of all ages, bringing none of the bias or characteristic mental hamper of his generation to bear upon these considerations. His art necessarily ranges in the same primeval world, not yet thoroughly removed from chaos. Mr. Swinburne, in his eloquent critical essay on Blake, finds him largely pantheistic in his views. There is something in Blake of the rapt indifference to externals, found in the Buddhist. Here is a characteristic assertion of his: "God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man: our Lord is the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its essence is _God_." Here certainly speaks the pantheist.