Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/207

William Blake and his Illustrations. we forget how imperfect and incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in Giotto.

The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge's opium cloud; as Villiers De L'Isle Adam's candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake's anger against causes and purposes he but half understood; as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.

II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE

As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his designs to The Divine Comedy, he was very certain that he and Dante represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal enmity. 197