Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/184

 160 literally, as he apprehended them. Just as, in the designs which his hand drew as best it could, according to its limited and partly false knowledge, from the visions which his imagination saw with perfect clearness, he was often unable to translate that vision into its real equivalent in design, so in his attempts to put these other mental visions into words he was hampered by an equally false method, and often by reminiscences of what passed for 'picturesque' writing in the work of his contemporaries. He was, after all, of his time, though he was above it, and just as he only knew Michelangelo through bad reproductions, and could never get his own design wholly free, malleable, and virgin to his 'shaping spirit of imagination,' so, in spite of all his marvellous lyrical discoveries, made when his mind was less burdened by the weight of a controlling message, he found himself, when he attempted to make an intelligible system out of the 'improvisations of the spirit,' and to express that system with literal accuracy, the half-helpless captive of formal words, conventional rhythms, a language not drawn direct from its source. Thus we find,