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WILLIAM BLAKE Before Christianity existed there was a European school of optimist mystics; among whom the great name is Plato. And ever since there have been movements and appearances in Europe of this healthier heathen mysticism, which did not shrink from the shapes of things or the emphatic colours of existence. Something of the sort was in the Nature worship of Renaissance philosophers; something of the sort may even have been behind the strange mixture of ecstacy and animality in the isolated episode of Luther. This solid and joyful occultism appears at its best in Swedenborg; but perhaps at its boldest and most brilliant in William Blake.

The present writer will not, in so important a matter, pretend to the absurd thing called impartiality; he is personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed. William Blake, in his rationalist and highly Protestant age, was frequently reproached for his tenderness towards Catholicism; but it would have surprised him very much to be told that he would join it. But 208