ancy.

This was more than one hundred years ago. What would William
Blake think of our new world,--would it seem to him to resemble his
New Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty?--our world
where young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the sea
without their stockings? Well! at Felpham they do not tease them
with stockings.

What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary
influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against
puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his
guilelessness and purity of heart.

There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalf
of the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by the
fact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather than
for the happiness of the world at large. This could never be said of
William Blake. A more unselfish devotion to the spiritual interests
of the race than that which inspired him from beginning to end could
hardly be imagined. But he held it as axiomatic that the spiritual
interests of the race can only be genuinely served by means of the
intellectual and moral freedom of the individual. And certainly in his
own work we have a beautiful and anarchical freedom.

No writer or artist ever succeeded in expressing more completely the
texture and colour of his thoughts. Those strange flowing-haired old
men who reappear so often in his engravings, like the "splendid and
savage old men" of Walt Whitman's fancy, seem to incorporate the
very swing and sweep of his elemental earth-wrestling; while those
long-limbed youths and maidens, almost suggestive of El Greco in
the way their bodies are made, yearn and leap upwards towards the
clear air and the cloudless blue sky, in a passion of tumultuous
escape, in an ecstasy of resurrection.

It is extraordinary how Blake's peculiar use of very simple rhymes,
with the same words repeated over and over again, enhances the
power of his poetry--it does more than enhance it--it is the body of
its soul. One approaches here the very mystery of style, in the poetic
medium, and some of its deepest secrets. Just as that "metaphysic in
sensuality" which is the dominant impulse in the genius of Remy de
Gourmont expresses itself in constant echoes and reiterated
liturgical repetitions--such as his famous "fleur hypocrite, fleur du
silence"--until one feels that the "refrain" in poetry has become, in
an especial sense, his predomi