where his genius is most characteristic and admirable. He
can come chanting his strange gnomic tunes upon tears and upon
sleep, upon the loveliness of children, upon life and death, upon the
wonder of dews and clouds and rain and the soft petals of flowers
which these nourish, without--even for one moment--falling into
sentiment or pathos.

All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of the
power of splendid and terrible anger. His invectives and
vituperations bite and flay like steel whips. The "buyers and sellers"
in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance. He was afraid
of no man living--nor of any man's god.

Working with his own hands, composing his poems, illustrating
them, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his own
workshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the
"great" and the "little" vulgar.

He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having something
about him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance"
which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser,
kindlier and more human a shield for an artist's freedom, than the
sarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde.

Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road," and gave all
obscurantists and oppressors to ten million cart-loads of horned
devils!

It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many miles
from that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-like
fantasies, a fairy's funeral. That funeral must have been followed
after Blake's death by many others; for there are no fairies in
Felpham now. But Blake's cottage is there still--to be seen by any
who care to see it--and the sands by the sea's edge are the "yellow
sands," flecked with white foam and bright green sea-weed of
Ariel's song; and on the sea-banks above grow tufts of Homeric
Tamarisk.

It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe,
"Nature's sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the
metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still
tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy
oysters for his cat, William Blake--in mind and imagination a
contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman--should have been
asserting the artist's right (why should we not say the individual's
right, artist or no artist?) to live as he pleases, according to the
morals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his own
absolute humour and f