"touched to fine issues,"
meeting for the first time, as it may often happen, this
century-buried incarnation of their own most evasive dreams.

I myself, who now jot down these fragmentary notes upon him, had
the privilege once of witnessing the illumination--I can call it by no
other name--produced upon the mind of the greatest novelist of
America and the most incorrigibly realistic, by a chance encounter
with the "Songs of Innocence."

One of the most obvious characteristics of our age is its cult of
children. Here--in the passion of this cult--we separate ourselves
altogether, both from our mediaeval ancestors who confined their
devotion to the divine child, and from the classical ages, who kept
children altogether in the background.

"When I became a man," says the apostle, "I put away childish
things," and this "putting away of childish things" has always been a
special note of the temper and attitude of orthodox Protestants for
whom these other Biblical words, spoken by a greater than St. Paul,
about "becoming as little children," must seem a sort of pious
rhetoric.

When one considers how this thrice accursed weight of Protestant
Puritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the perverted
superstitions that have darkened man's history, a superstition which,
though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a
"business asset," altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned in
Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in
us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of
generations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiest
signs of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith and
Pagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in the
House" into the clear sunlight of an almost religious appreciation.

Let me not, however, be misunderstood. It would be a grievous and
ludicrous mistake to associate the child-cult which runs like a thread
of filmy star-light through the work of William Blake with the
somewhat strained and fantastic attitude of child-worship which
inspires such poetry as Francis Thompson's "Love in Dian's Lap,"
and gives a ridiculous and affected air to so many of our little ones
themselves. The child of Blake's imagination is the immortal and
undying child to be found in the heart of every man and every
woman. It is the child spoken of in some of his most beautiful
passages, by Nietzsche himself--the child who will