opposite Gate to the American, and his name as a personage in Blake's Myth has been well known to general readers since the first protest was entered against the silent suppression of an allusion to it at the end of a long quotation from Milton in Gilchrist. But Gilchrist did not know what Og meant, or, desiring the public only to enjoy the passage of poetry that led up to this name, quietly dropped it. Mr. Swinburne, though he was indignant, did not tell us what the name meant any more than Gilchrist did, though both perhaps found out by reading a little Swedenborg to prepare their minds for the task, and then reading the closing pages of Vala, Night I (this was seen in MS. by both), and Jerusalem, page 13, line 57; page 48, line 63; page 49, lines 3, 56; page 73, line 16; page 79, line 13; and page 89, line 47; and Milton, page 18, lines 33, 35, 37; page 30, line 33; page 31, line 49; page 37, lines 22, 50, and 51.

In simple eighteenth-century argument, alternatives were credited with convincing power. Mind and matter were alternatives. If we are not in Matter (under which heading Blake included the "corporeal understanding," as those who are technically but not popularly called materialists do), we must be in Mind. We must be in something. We are in nothing else but Mind after death, and had better be in as little else as possible even now.

America is, of course, a mere symbol for all that in Blake's system of divisions he grouped under the West. The idea of dividing the human character under points of the compass he developed from Swedenborg's reading of the use made symbolically of those points in the Bible. In the Visions we have already the expression

Thy soft American plains are mine.

All the references to Washington, and so forth, are merely intended to refer to states of the mind in elementary rebellion. The names are given as "representative." But to what detail of art, imagination, or passion each name of an American hero refers we shall never accurately know, unless by clairvoyant reading of his thoughts in Blake's " Universal Mind."

Among the Ideas of Good and Evil Gilchrist published a couple of verses called Thames and Ohio, from which he gathered that Blake at one time entertained the idea of emigration. The poem, however, does not justify this inference at all. It is practically certain that Blake never entertained the idea for an instant.

This erroneous and non-symbolic way of reading Blake leads further than to the conclusion that he intended to go out of the country. The only honest inference from it is that he went out of his mind. Just such a natural mistake as this is made by Dr. Garnett in his plausible but altogether misconceived monograph. He says (page 57):

It is a more serious matter that the descriptions (he is speaking of Blake's accounts of his designs in the Descriptive Catalogue) are crammed with statements, far more significant than Blake's visions, of a condition of mental disorder, such as that the Greek marbles are copies of the works of the Asiatic patriarchs; that no one painted in oil except by accident before Vandyke; that ancient British heroes dwell to this day on Snowdon "in naked simplicity"-a species of Welsh Mahatmas, as it would appear. It would have been a judicious emendation if any one had suggested the substitution of "lying spirits" when the artist spoke of himself as molested by "blotting and blurring demons."

Dr. Garnett, who has died since this work (The Real Blake) was written, still has power, on account of his wide and well-deserved reputation, to injure the memory of Blake. Therefore this paragraph deserves notice. Blake had many qualities that resembled those of the insane. His visionary imagination, his sporadic anger, his outrageous pride, were like theirs; and his poetic life, lived zealously in a generation that did not share his zeal and with a wife who for long did not sufficiently approve of his over-abundant bodily powers, would have led a weaker and less kindly and lovable man to insanity. His heart, helped by his genius, saved him, while those who did not understand either condemned him. Of these, Dr. Garnett is still one of the most dangerous. It is difficult for any one to realise, while reading his well-balanced pages, that he wrote them without any real knowledge or any attempt to obtain real knowledge of his subject. He writes with an air of scholastic responsibility and moderation, yet was not aware that serious comprehension was here required, thinking that a tone of educated indulgence and mild superiority towards an ill-taught, half-witted enthusiast was all that could be required of him.

With regard to the "Welsh Mahatmas," Snowdon was a name substituted for reasons that may be conjectured for "Mount Gilead" in Vala at Blake's second reading of that MS. (Canaan is to Albion as soul to body, it will be remembered). Gilead or Snowdon is essentially a Western or American symbol, the sense without which poetry cannot be. In Vala, in Night I, line 110, Imagination hovers over

it, and "creates man morning by morning." The universal tent is said a little later to be drawn up above it when man wanders from inspiration. Eden is within (or above). Gilead is on the limit of contraction, Night VIII, line 3, and is, in fact, the ear-the false ear-and the North between West and East.

Snowdon is mentioned in Jerusalem, page 4, line 29, where the man of the non-mystic and entirely individual mindas is Albion with his "western gate" closed and his emanation hidden in jealousy-desires to keep his "mountains" to himself. Snowdon is the last of a set of five names which are evidently intended to correspond with our "five senses.

It is also referred to on page 66, line 59, as trembling when it learns that if man insists on living the purely individual life, and refusing to be commingled by love, he will be adjoined by hate.

In the Bible, as will be remembered, Zelophahad's last daughter (he had five, and no sons) was "Tirzah," called by Blake "the mother of our mortal part"-the feminine spiritual cause of generation. The feminine spirits, the parts of the human mind (or "Daughters" of "Albion ") that "control our vegetative powers," are the sub-conscious powers that are opposed to imagination as much as the conscious reasoning powers are (the " Sons" of " Albion "). They are united into Tirzah and her sisters on Mount Gilead (Jerusalem, page 5, line 40). On page 36, line 12, page 48, line 64, page 68, line 8, page 79, lines 12, 13, Snowdon or Gilead is mentioned, from which we learn that Gilead is a sense that ought to aid vision and the brotherhood which forms the magic circle of visionaries, but under the influence of physical moods and the power of the sub-conscious to draw us down to the mortal limits of our individual bodies it joins with Og-the selfish centre, the man of scales-the mood that defends a belief in "the hard substance of things, while in the ideal Snowdon's powers still keep a place of meeting for bards in naked simplicity, not clothed in futile arguments.

These few references should not have been beyond the capacity of Dr. Garnett, but his crowning wonder is to be found in the fact that he refers to Swedenborg on the same page as that from which the above quotation is taken. The man who has turned the pages of both Swedenborg and Blake and yet writes as Dr. Garnett wrote, has a gift of mental isolation from all that belongs to Blake that is quite his own.

Our minds being now at rest about those " Welsh Mahatmas," we may perhaps spare a moment to look sufficiently closely at a few passages of Blake's work in order to see in what sense it is to be gathered that we may conclude from the little poem of two stanzas, Thames and Ohio, that Blake really had "at one moment a passing project of emigrating to America," as Gilchrist supposed; see vol. i. of his Life and Works of Blake, page 373, second edition. Here is the poem:

Why should I care for the men of the Thames
And the cheating waters of chartered streams,
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into mine ear?

Though born on the cheating banks of Thames,
Though his waters bathed my infant limbs,
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me;
I was born a slave, but I go to be free.

In going to America bodily it is evident that we go by a western port from England. Therefore anything that Blake has to say about the Western gate may be appropriately consulted now.

We first hear of it vaguely, in the rejected preface to Europe, as a gate by which man could “ pass out," if he would

But he will not,

For stolen fruit is sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.

To "pass out" means to go out from the limitations of egotism into brotherhood, and also from those of the flesh into that spiritual world where all are brothers and commingle completely when we embrace. The nearest approach to anything like such commingling that may be enjoyed in the body is when marriage makes two persons "one flesh," to use the Biblical expression. Blake does not consider that form of unity at all equal to spiritual embracements, "which are comminglings, and not a pompous high priest entering at a secret place" (Jerusalem, page 69, line 44).

"Stolen fruit" is called "stolen" because abstracted from the "all things in common" that is the rule respecting mental joys in eternity, and "bread eaten in secret means eaten behind the veil, the flesh, that "curtain on the bed of our desire," as we are told in the Book of Thel.

Blake, of course, like all other thinkers, was obliged to philosophise from his own experiences, and to read those of other people by their light, and he did not always remember

how peculiar his experience as a visionary was. He declared to Crabb Robinson that all men might have it. He knew that these visions of his, that other people said were invisible, actually taught him thoughts, partly by their appearance, as masqueraders teach, and partly by their words, when they spoke their dream-speeches like dream-actors. He knew that in certain conditions of mind they vanished from him, and that his capacity for either art or poetry was apt to vanish with them, and that doubt and despair tended to cause this vanishing. He found also that arguments, scientific formulæ, and the assumption made by thinkers of his day that no one can experience correctly who experiences abnormally, drove his instructive visions away. This setting up of the average as the standard is done in no part of mental life except the philosophic. It may be called the Great Rationalistic Assumption, for it is no more than an assumption, and, being quite unsupported, a push will topple it over. When it falls, half of most men's Rationalism will fall with it-the negative half. Blake's mind was really entirely rationalistic. But his mental experience led him to believe that he was at times able to get out of the body. By this he meant out of the part of his mind that he recognised to be a direct product of the five senses. He then entered into a state that we cannot always distinguish from trance-the "celestial mind," as Swedenborg calls it-in which he was able to communicate with some small portion of other minds than his own, by something like what we know as "thought transference." Yet others were shut from him when in their ordinary work-a-day individual state, and twice shut when he himself was in this state. Their "western gates" were closed. They were "Men of the Thames." Why," Blake asks himself in his verse, "should he care for them?" He had only to leave off attending to any one in this common-sense state of mind, and he was free of the disadvantages of it. He would be like one of those spirits of sympathy and rebellion from egotism that he called symbolically" Americans." And to go to America meant to him to go to sympathy, to vision, to communism of the mind, to freedom of the imagination from all prohibitions. This was the sense in which Blake “ contemplated emigration," not only "at one time," but habitually. No one has ever suggested that he intended to encourage the emigration of a large number of Welshmen; this exhortation

Place the tribes of Llewellyn in America for a hiding-place,