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 WILLIAM BLAKE anyone else, because he has something to say about everything. The very quickness of his mind makes the slowness of his narrative. For he finds sermons in stones, in all the paving-stones of the street he plods along. Every fact or phrase that occurs in the immediate question carries back his mind to the ages and the initial power. Because he is original he is always going back to the origins.

Take, for instance, Blake's verse rather than his pictorial art. When the average sensible person reads Blake's verse, he simply comes to the conclusion that he cannot understand it. But in truth he has a much better right to offer this objection to Blake than to most of the slightly elusive or eccentric writers to whom he also offers it. Blake is obscure in a much more positive and practical sense than Browning is obscure—or, in another manner, Mr Henry James is obscure. Browning is generally obscure through an almost brutal eagerness to get to big truths, which leads him to smash a sentence and leave only bits of it. Mr Henry James is obscure because he wishes to trace tiny truths by a dissection for which human language (even in his 129