rent thing. You have begun
now the Plotinian ascent from multiplicity to unity, and therefore
begin to perceive in the Many the clear and actual presence of the
One: the changeless and absolute Life, manifesting itself in all
the myriad nascent, crescent, cadent lives. Poets, gazing thus at
the "flower in the crannied wall" or the "green thing that stands in
the way," have been led deep into the heart of its life; there to
discern the secret of the universe.

All the greater poems of Wordsworth and Walt Whitman represent
an attempt to translate direct contemplative experience of
this kind into words and rhythms which might convey its
secret to other men: all Blake's philosophy is but a desperate
effort to persuade us to exchange the false world of "Nature" on
which we usually look--and which is not really Nature at all--for
this, the true world, to which he gave the confusing name of
"Imagination." For these, the contemplation of the World of
Becoming assumes the intense form which we call genius: even
to read their poems is to feel the beating of a heart, the upleap of
a joy, greater than anything that we have known. Yet your own
little efforts towards the attainment of this level of consciousness
will at least give to you, together with a more vivid universe, a
wholly new comprehension of their works; and that of other poets
and artists who have drunk from the chalice of the Spirit of Life.
These works are now observed by you to be the only artistic
creations to which the name of Realism is appropriate; and it is
by the standard of reality that you shall now criticise them,
recognising in utterances which you once dismissed as rhetoric
the desperate efforts of the clear-sighted towards the exact
description of things veritably seen in that simplified state of
consciousness which Blake called "imagination uncorrupt." It
was from those purified and heightened levels of perception to
which the first form of contemplation inducts the soul, that Julian
of Norwich, gazing upon "a little thing, the quantity of an hazel
nut," found in it the epitome of all that was made; for therein she
perceived the royal character of life. So small and helpless in its
mightiest forms, so august even in its meanest, that life in its
wholeness was then realised by her as the direct outbirth of, and
the meek dependant upon, the Energy of Divine Love. She felt at
once the fugitive character of its apparent existence, the
perdurable Reality w