Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/441

 Rh always entertained for him I have already referred to. Even so well-balanced a mind as Cary's (the translator of Dante) abandoned, after he came to know him, the notion he had taken up of his 'madness,' and simply pronounced him an 'enthusiast.' Evidently this was the light in which he was regarded throughout life by all who had personal relations with him: Paine at one time, Cromek at another, Hayley at another; the first two, men of sufficiently un-visionary, the last of sufficiently commonplace, intellect. So, too, by honest, prosaic John Thomas Smith who had known Blake as a young man. He commences a notice of him with the declaration à propos of what he calls this 'stigma of eccentricity.' 'I believe it has been invariably the custom of every age, whenever a man has been found to depart from the usual mode of thinking, to consider him of deranged intellect, and not unfrequently, stark, staring mad.' And he quotes Cowper's words, when writing to Lady Hesketh, speaking of a dancing master's advertisement;—'The author of it had the good hap to be crazed, or he had never produced anything half so clever; for you will ever observe that they who are said to have lost their wits, have more than other people.' 'I could see in Blake's wild enthusiasm and extravagance,' writes another of his personal friends, 'only the struggle of an ardent mind to deliver itself of the bigness and sublimity of its own conceptions,' Even shrewd Allan Cunningham, a man who lived in an atmosphere of common sense, had, it is evident, spontaneously adopted a similar conclusion, and writes of Blake in a manner that tacitly assumes his sanity. 'Blake's misfortune,' says he, 'was that of possessing this precious gift (imagination) in excess. His fancy overmastered him, until he at length confounded "the mind's eye" with the corporeal organ, and dreamed himself out of the sympathies of actual life,' And again: 'Painting, like poetry, has followers the body of whose genius is light compared to the length of its wings, and who, rising above the ordinary sympathies of our nature, are, like