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WILLIAM BLAKE and certainly not a poet. If there is one point on which the spirit of the poets and the poetic soul in all peoples is on the side of Christianity, it is exactly this one point on which Blake is against Christianity—"was crucified, dead and buried." The spectacle of a God dying is much more grandiose than the spectacle of a man living for ever. The former suggests that awful changes have really entered the alchemy of the universe; the latter is only vaguely reminiscent of hygienic octogenarians and Eno's Fruit Salts. Moreover, to the poet as to the child, death must be dreadful even if it is desirable. To talk (as some modern theosophists do) about death being nothing, the mere walking into another room, to talk like this is not only prosaic and profoundly un-Christian; it is decidedly vulgar. It is against the whole trend of the secret emotions of humanity. It is indecent, like persuading a decent peasant to go without clothes. There is more of the song and music of mankind in a clerk putting on his Sunday clothes than in a fanatic running naked down Cheapside. And there is more real mysticism in nailing down a coffin lid than in pretending, in 179