ence of the influence of the dead upon us were almost identical with those of Auguste Comte, as was most of his philosophy. The circle of joined hands at a séance, the man exists not but by brotherhood" of Blake's formula, and the mystic "Humanity" of Comte are all phases of the same thing, as is the French writer's epigram: "Il y a toujours quelqu'un qui aura plus d'esprit que qui que ce soit, c'est tout-le-monde." The thing is multiple personality,—a subject whose psychology is yet in its infancy. The language in which Blake spoke was picturesque, and disguised the Positivism of the ideas, as Positivism, on the other hand, disguises its own truth by the distressingly unpicturesque nature of the way in which it is presented.

The letter already referred to of Blake to Hayley, with whom he was not yet acquainted at the time of Robert's death, written a few years later, when Hayley had just lost a son, gives a view of the spiritual communications from Robert that might have been written by Comte himself, if he had been educated in the Swedenborgian school. Blake is enclosing a drawing that he has made of Hayley's son. The letter is dated Lambeth, May 6, 1800:

DEAR SIR-I am very sorry for your immense loss, which is a repetition of what all feel in this valley of misery and happiness mixed. I send the shadow of the departed angel and hope that the likeness is improved. The lips I have again lessened, as you advised, and done a good many other softenings to the whole. I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish all to partake of, since it is a source of immortal joy, even in this world. By it I am the companion of angels. May you continue to be so more and more, and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.

I have also sent a proof of Pericles for your remarks, thanking you for the kindness with which you express them, and feeling heartily your grief with a brother's sympathy.-I remain, etc.

Some small portion of Blake's ideas of life and death may be sketched as follows:-Just as while the generations run on there is seen a personal tendency to take shape which is a spiritual influence that survives the disappearance of a man's features when they are melted down in his own seed, and is capable of blending with other features in an equally nonexistent state in a woman's seed, and as it depends on and

yet stamps and moulds mental faculties, when these are still non-existent, so there is something personal that survives by joining in brotherhood the non-existence of each of us through death. In fact, it only becomes free to be fully alive when it ceases to be obliged to work at forming and feeding a mortal body at all. The chief qualities of the framework that is called a mortal body are time and space. The mind, free from these, is necessarily immortal, and is even immortal before it gets free from them. Therefore, the immortal part of the mind (for much of the mind is as mortal as the body, and is only used to keep the body alive and teach it to propagate) is able during life to have communication with immortality, which is the whole mind of those who, being dead, no longer waste mentality on corporeal needs.

The conditions of identity are different after death. Minds merge themselves in Mind, as when a sheep-pen is removed the particular portion of the meadow where the sheep were confined merges in the acres around. Yet a characteristic living mind turning itself toward the general mind can communicate with a sympathetic mind merged in the mass. Memory is existence in Time; Imagination is existence in Eternity; Contraries vivify; Space without motion is not yet alive; Space with motion is not space only, but is partly Time; Space without place is barren; Place is an idea, an imagination; Space is Nature.

This is only a free sketch of a small portion of Blake's creed, not quoted from any particular passages of his, but it may be enough to put us on our guard against reading him in a rough and ready sense which should attribute to him either materialistic spiritualism or Positivist metaphysics.

We must, as Swedenborg warns us, immerse our minds in contemplative celestial light for some time before they will work in any other than the corporeal manner, whose space and time are its essence, for the corporeal is the manner that our own essence habitually needs for its own purposes, and only habit can conquer habit.

By whatever means of communication Blake received his idea from Robert, even if memory of him produced a vision during waking hours exactly like a dream, and this vision spoke as our dreams do, and told him what to do, the result was that he had a new occupation. It was now possible to print the pictorial poems, and tint them, as his Islander in the Moon had suggested.

After the partnership with Parker was broken off and

the removal completed, Blake gave a large amount of his time in Poland Street to this work, writing little at first, but reading Swedenborg and Lavater when not producing his Songs of Innocence.

He also proceeded, with the emulation that was so inherent in him, to outdo his own Songs of Innocence by beginning to add the Songs of Experience to them, though these rather bitter rhymes can hardly have belonged to an early period of this secluded and almost solitary section of his life, the years immediately following Robert's death.

That time is divided-so far as we can learn-in this way. Robert's death in 1787 closes a period that is practically given to art exclusively, and that lasted from the breaking off of the Poetical Sketches in 1776, with only The Island in the Moon and such Songs of Innocence as were written in it at the close and thought too good for its pages.

The troubles over the partnership and its dissolution, with the removal to No. 28 Poland Street, shared the year 1788 with readings from Swedenborg and the writing of the Book of Thel. The revelation of the method for printing the Songs of Innocence is now received, and these and the Book of Thel are put on copper, with the "first stereo" of the Ghost of Abel-1788-1789. Blake now writes the part of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell aimed at Swedenborg, and begins to put it on copper. While doing so he reads Lavater's Aphorisms, and annotates them. (These annotations are given in full in the next chapter. As in the case of the notes to Swedenborg, only just the few lines necessary to understand what Blake was referring to in his note are given from the annotated author.) Then the Proverbs of Hell are written and added. This brings Blake's personal work up to 1790, and closes a period. Gilchrist notes the Flight into Egypt, Christ blessing little Children, and Death and Hell teem with Life (afterwards, he says, engraved in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, leaf 10, as painted in 1790). The reference seems incorrect; page 10 has the Devil reading the Proverbs of Hell from a scroll for its pictorial portion.

After this year Blake's style began to change because he was less solitary. He did a long series of fifty plates from designs by Chodowiecki for Elements of Morality by Mary Wollstonecraft, and this brought him continually to Johnson's shop, where he met the authoress and also Dr. Price, Dr. Priestley, Godwin, and Tom Paine. Here

came Fuseli, who met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time in 1790.

Blake had struggled through his bereavement and his business disappointments alone, and had struggled through them into poetry, into "believing vision" along with his wife, into an increasing love for her, and the beginning of his great myth, of which the first trace is the mention in Thel of the "Eternal Gates' Terrific Porter" who opened the "Northern Bar." We are to know this porter as for many years the laborious spirit inhabiting Blake, who is called Urthona and Los under different aspects, as told in all the later poems.

Blake was now thirsting for a little "jostling in the street," though he admits that "great things" are not done by it. He threw himself with delight into the revolutionary talk that he heard at Johnson's, and, as usual, was not satisfied unless he could outshine every one else. He came amongst them with his Song of Liberty in his hand, and walked out from them into the streets of London with a cap of Liberty on his head. It was a very unsafe thing to do. The mob might have lynched him in the name of order. We do not hear that any other of Johnson's guests defied public opinion in this way.

Blake persuaded himself for a while that he was finding friends. Friendship-the half-way house between selfhood (all evil) and eternal brotherhood, the "multiple personality," the ultimate good-was his ideal all through life, yet it was only in his later years that his exuberant character and terrific self-love could be toned down enough to make any friendship safe from resentment and quarrel, dearly as he loved every human being that came near him and said a few kind words to him. He, in fact, was so eager for unity with his fellows that, in spite of his mental contempt for people, he would respond from the heart to the merest civility. He studied Lavater's Aphorisms at this time with the serious intention of educating himself in the art of friendship, as his naïve and shrewd marginal notes show on almost every page.

One touch seems to have roused him particularly. He could not have sat still with quiet pulses when learning that these Aphorisms were composed (by the hundred) during a single autumn while Lavater was moving about from place to place.

Here was a record to pull down! The Proverbs of Hell were probably written as an "out-doing" of this, in some

limited time; perhaps half-an-hour. There is nothing, even in their concentration, that would oblige Blake to pause and meditate. He became stupid when he thought slowly. Consideration was done by him unconsciously, when he did not know that he was thinking at all. Then, in a state of excitement, the result came tearing forth in "human form," -that is, in living utterance of poetic picturesqueness.