Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/293

Rh and professedly inspired men, will hold their proper rank; and the daughters of memory shall become the daughters of inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curbed by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword. Rouse up, O young men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university; who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and his Apostles, that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We, do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.

'Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.'—Numbers xi. 29."

After this strange and grand prelude, which, though taken in the letter it may read like foolishness, is in the spirit of it certainty and truth for all time, we pass again under the shadow and into the land that shifts and slips under our feet. Something however out of the chaos of fire and wind and stormy colour may be caught at by 2