This was an offhand and unintelligent method of accounting for so rare a spirit. The spectacle of a man who might, had he chosen, have enjoyed riches, honour, admiration and glory, but who instead, like his great Master, cared not at all for lordship in this world, but much for the preservation of the kingdom of the spirit that is not of this world, did a great deal to earn for Blake the name of madman. The world has always regarded the voluntarily poor with suspicion and misapprehension. Then, again, Blake was one of those who lived very near the veil which shrouds the great unexplored spiritual forces. Death, as we know, seemed to him but the "passing from one room to another." To raise the veil, to look forth on the cause of phenomena, on the visions of eternal imagination, to strain to the uttermost that he might hear the reverberations of the unmeasured mighty stream of Divine power, to bathe within that stream, and let it bear him onward as it would--these were to him the real purposes of life, and being so, formed other reasons why the world, all engrossed as it is with wealth and position, and "here" and "now," looked at him askance. To-day, however, there is an undercurrent of popular opinion--a small stream, but strong--that recognizes him for what he is, and his name is sacred as that of the great High Priest of Spiritual Art, to those who compose it. It is noticeable that none of those who were personally acquainted with him, save perhaps Crabb Robinson, ever gave credence to the prevailing notion that he was mad: strongly do they condemn such a verdict. He was eccentric, abnormally developed on the spiritual side, and undisciplined in thought and speech. The mystic in him finally all but destroyed the poet, though it never arrested the magnificent development of his artistic genius. Again, much that is strange and difficult of apprehension in Blake may be traced to the fact that his mind lacked the firm basis, the just and right power of thinking, that comes from a sound education. As a matter of fact, capriciously self-educated as he was, his ignorance of ordinary rudimentary knowledge was as extraordinary as his acquaintance with much that is caviar to the ordinary intellect. "Celui qui a l'imagination sans erudition a des ailes et n'a pas de pieds." And so it was with Blake. But it does not detract one iota from the illuminating quality of the thoughts which flash as it were from a heaven in his brain in times of creative inspiration. Blake on the wing has a strange beauty, a swift, direct and strenuous flight that thrills and awes the imaginative spectator. It is only when this wild wonderful creature is caught and entangled in theories and systems and human reasoning, that we may not give him our intellectual adherence.