that
preaching against the Philistine, which is as the preaching of the Middle
Ages against the Saracen.

He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that
imagination was the first emanation of divinity, 'the body of God,' 'the
Divine members,' and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw, that
the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations,
and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and righteous alike,
which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness of sins commanded
by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the
observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to
the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing
interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of
beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all
hearts. He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and
that nothing is unholy except things that do not live--lethargies, and
cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the
root they grew from in old times. Passions, because most living, are most
holy--and this was a scandalous paradox in his time--and man shall enter
eternity borne upon their wings.

And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to _Vala_, had
he carried them beyond the first faint pencillings, the first faint washes
of colour, would have been a pretty scandal to his time and to our time.
The sensations of this 'foolish body,' this 'phantom of the earth and
water,' were in themselves but half-living things, 'vegetative' things,
but passion that 'eternal glory' made them a part of the body of God.

This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time, for
it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came into his
head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to any utility.
Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a better
time--Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say--that they have troubled the
energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking whether they
were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world, instead of
believing that all beautiful things have 'lain burningly on the Divine
hand.' But when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray of an
inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and not merely
when one reads the _Son