Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/169

 engraved books, he lived anew the first fresh, happy experiences of conception, as in the high hour of inspiration.

Smith tells us that Blake 'was inspired with the splendid grandeur of this figure, "The Ancient of Days," by the vision which he declared hovered over his head at the top of his staircase' in No. 13, Hercules Buildings, and that he has been frequently heard to say that it made a more powerful impression upon his mind than all he had ever been visited by.' On that same staircase it was Blake, for the only time in his life, saw a ghost. When talking on the subject of ghosts, he was wont to say they did not appear much to imaginative men, but only to common minds, who did not see the finer spirits. A ghost was a thing seen by the gross bodily eye, a vision, by the mental. 'Did you ever see a ghost?" asked a friend. 'Never but once,' was the reply. And it befel thus. Standing one evening at his garden-door in Lambeth, and chancing to look up, he saw a horrible grim figure, 'scaly, speckled, very awful,' stalking down stairs towards him. More frightened than ever before or after, he took to his heels, and ran out of the house.

It is hard to describe poems wherein the dramatis personæ are giant shadows, gloomy phantoms; the scene, the realms of space; the time, of such corresponding vastness, that eighteen hundred years pass as a dream:—

More apart from humanity even than the America, it is hard to trace out any distinct subject, any plan or purpose in the Europe, or to determine whether it mainly relate to the past, present, or to come. And yet its incoherence has a grandeur about it as of the utterance of a man whose eyes are fixed on strange and awful sights, invisible to bystanders. To use an expression of Blake's own, on a subsequent