of its kind, and shows a quality that teaching did not improve afterwards. The engraving measures 10 inches by 5, and may be seen in the Print Room of the British Museum. It is in the title that he gave to this that, if we can believe it to be all belonging to 1773, we find how early in life Blake began to form his philosophic system. The full title of the print, a representation of which is here given, is:

Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion, engraved by W. Blake, 1773, from an old Italian drawing. Michelangelo pinxit. This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all Ages.

"Rocks of Albion" are symbolic. By them Blake here, and throughout his life, meant the "hard, cold, restrictive portions of mind that forbid imagination and say that the five senses are the only gates by which truth can reach man. In religion they mean the literal sense of Scripture that is symbolised as a tomb in which the inspired Word, or Christ, is laid. Joseph of Arimathea is the "Just Man" of whom we shall hear soon in the "Argument" of Heaven and Hell. He takes the form of a mythic personage later in Blake's poetic life, and is called "Los," the "friend of Albion," the spirit of poetry and probity. "Albion" is the ideal man, not a human being, but the abstract of manhood who, when inspired, becomes Christendom, and finally Christ, that ideal Christ whose essence is inspired imagination, whose limbs and members are ideas, when ideas are incarnate in living persons, and who died and was laid in the rocks when inspiration, entering fact, turned it to symbol, became dead in it for a time, while only the literal meaning of that symbol was apparent,-and arose when it was revealed. In these few words on Blake's early engraving is told something of the central tenets of a religion that he gave his life to developing through art, myth, and poetry.

That he should have gone so far into symbolic Christianity already will seem even more amazing than it is unless we remember that he had been accustomed at home to hear Swedenborgian talk, in which the Scriptures were treated always as having a symbolic meaning. Unless we go to Swedenborg's own works and see what he has to say, we cannot form any picture to ourselves of either the character or the power of Blake's mind, and we shall at one moment over-estimate him, while at another we shall do him very much less than justice.

Swedenborg, whom Blake may have met in the streets as an old man, had only died in 1772, a year before the date of this design of Joseph of Arimathea. He had lived to a great age, having been born as long ago as 1688, and his great Symbolic Dictionary of the Bible was published in Latin during the years 1749 to 1756, being completed the year before Blake's birth. It is called Heavenly Secrets, if that be a sufficient rendering of Arcana Calestia, its original title, by which it is still known, even in translations. This, and the Apocalypse Revealed, and the treatise On Divine Love and Wisdom, seem all to have been owned by Blake's father, though they were not studied by Blake himself till later. The Symbolic Dictionary is the work of which it may be said that Swedenborg stands or falls by it. A good English

translation nicely bound in slate-coloured boards may be bought now in Bloomsbury Street, near the British Museum, at the offices of the Swedenborg Society. There are twelve volumes, none of them much more than an inch in thickness, and the cost of each (at the office) is 2s. 3d. The last, containing an index which is a dictionary in itself, is the most necessary to readers of Blake, but all are full of suggestions by which, partly through direct analogy, partly through mere acceptance, and partly through positive opposition, interpretations of Blake's myth are to be sought. Here again, to most of us, the general morality and the sweet religious tone of Swedenborg are the most attractive qualities, while we admire his amazing lucidity, and the perfect if prolix manner in which he has set forth his views, even if we withhold our assent from his claim that he could interpret the arbitrary symbols in which, as Scripture itself informs us, all who were not in the secret must expect to find the Word hopelessly and purposely hidden, that seeing we might see and not perceive, and hearing we might hear and not understand, lest we should see with our eyes, and hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts, and be converted and healed. We are at first inclined to deny that Swedenborg had any special means of knowing more about the matter than we could conjecture without his help. There are so many religious maniacs, that we are tempted to set him down as one of them when we learn that he claimed to have been directly and plainly taught by angels, and to have been specially permitted to give that teaching to the world. On the other hand, even if every tenth man had delirium tremens, we should not doubt the reality of the retriever that

goes out shooting with us or with our friends and comes to the whistle.

Blake accepted at once the angels and a very large portion of the doctrine of Swedenborg. But when he came to look into it a little later, as he tells us, he found it fatally incomplete. He accounted for this by saying, not as a profane jest, but in sober seriousness, that Swedenborg had received his teaching from angels only, while he ought to have consulted devils also. This was in 1790. After 1804 he wrote Devils are False Religions. One Swedenborgian idea Blake had accepted on the mere hearsay of home teaching, and adopted without any hesitation already, and he never abandoned it. As time passed it was more and more approved by his imagination, and its importance to us, now that we are all trying to understand him, consists in the fact that it changed every idea that he would otherwise have found in religion, and affected his standard of poetry and directed the flight of his poetic imagination.

This idea was that the Bible is a secret writing that inspiration contrived and that inspiration only can read. As men of business, when describing certain stocks and shares that they wish to buy or sell, conceal these under the names of animals, countries, and articles of furniture or food, and yet, when they read the documents in which these things are written, see only the financial meaning of the words through their knowledge of the "code," and not for one instant picture to themselves the actual articles of commerce, of utility, of landscape, or geography which, to an outsider, would seem to be the subject of their correspondence, so Swedenborg assures us the angels read the Old Testament (through our eyes), seeing in its apparently matter-of-fact histories a prolonged gospel relating only the sacred things of the story of Christ's birth, growth, and character.

Blake adopted the code idea as not merely true of the Bible, but as containing the essence of the highest poetry wherever found. Inspiration he took to be truly one of the intellectual powers of man, high above that lower faculty called reason, which is a mere "ratio of the five senses," and not properly intellectual at all. Allegory," as he wrote after he had used it for thirty years, "which is addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry." This passage occurs in a letter to his friend and patron Mr. Butts, dated July 1803.

Not from any single sentence, but from all the many allusions he makes to such matters, we can gather what he meant by "intellectual powers," and why he demanded of all those of us who had any that we should understand his allegories and visions. It is evident enough that in his final poems, where all these names occur, the symbolic relationship of Albion, Joseph of Arimathea, and Los-that is to say, of an impersonation, a person, and a myth-must be altogether hidden from the "corporeal understanding" or every-day

common sense.

His theory seems to have been that there was not, as science teaches, matter from all eternity, but that there was mind. Our own minds were portions of this before the disadvantage of birth caused the five senses to claim too much of our attention through that corporeal understanding which is composed from a mixture of their teachings from moment to moment with a mingled memory of what they have recorded since they began to inform us. It follows, of course, that inspiration is a perception of that eternal mind to which we have a perfect right, whether we are good or wicked men, and to attain such inspiration is the duty of all who can do so, while to strive towards it is the universal duty.

The exact time when Blake formed this opinion is not certain. It relieved him of the necessity which Swedenborg felt of hearing imaginative interpretations of Biblical symbols from angels who were invariably, Swedenborg says, the souls of the dead. It did not require of others that they should go to such source for similar interpretation. At the same time, it did not invalidate such authority, for into this world of imagination, this region of eternal mind, we shall all enter after death, and it is not surprising if some are allowed partly to return so as to communicate to us mentally what neither we now, nor they when in life, could fully know. During our period of "sleep our mortal seventy years -the clamorousness of bodily sensations and thoughts interferes with our hearing of the divine voice, and there is no reason why we should not attend to what the dead have to say if they are allowed to speak to us.

We all know that memory is bodily as well as mental. The scrapings upon hills in Scotland, made in ancient times by glaciers that crept downhill past their upright rocky portions, are their memory of the ice-fields of the past. When our brains are in such a state that the motion of substance caused by the disturbance aroused by any mental act of

perception leaves no scraping signature on the impressionable wall past which the disturbance moves, we have no memory. Memory may be called a scar's consciousness, as perception is that of a blow. But when we look for as accurate and convenient a figure in which to describe an intention, the difficulty is greater; and when we wish to describe a tendency to form an intention, it is still further increased. Even the last of these three stages is, however, readily conceived as the virtual velocity of the glacier before it began to move.

Blake, who had never been to school, had probably never heard so technical an expression as "virtual velocity," coined a term for it himself. It was mind in a state of patience. He accounted for motion by the idea that mind is eternal, but patience is not. Patience removed, mind moves; the circle of Destiny begins, and all that our consciousness perceives is generated. As a result, Man (as he called primæval mind, afterwards altering the name to Albion on reconsidering the engraving now before us when writing a quarter of a century later)-Man the eternal went through changes, became the creator, produced matter by a contraction of intellect, produced error, entered into it himself, became one of us (who are naturally a mass of error), and on leaving the state of error and returning to that of mind, now become imaginative instead of patient, he taught us all how to do the same; and, in fact, did it in us, and does it in us only, and when we ourselves do it. This is Christendom. We are the Saviour and the saved.

In an article on Magic published in a volume of meditations, called by the Blakean title Ideas of Good and Evil, by the former collaborator of the present writer, Mr. W. B. Yeats, all who are interested in it may find an account of certain experiences that caused Mr. Yeats to form a belief in the objective existence of a general memory, which is not that of any individual, which exists as it were in the air, and on which, by means of magical invocations or symbols, we can draw at will. Events are recorded in the air, not the respirable air, the astral, and magic gives us ingress to that reservoir of unspoken history.

Blake's theory went further. He held that all imaginations are accompanied by a movement of an unknown something that never forgets its own movements, and unites us to one another. He held that those of us who cultivate this faculty of imagination enrich that vast store, and ultimately go to dwell in the part of it usually called "heaven," but that