Present: and the moment his imagination escaped into the past it tended to abstraction, but knew no bounds.

Very soon in his solitary walks he found his way into the country, emerging from London on the south side and exploring as far as Peckham Rye, Dulwich, Streatham, and Sydenham. His first glimpse of the country was to him as our first trip abroad to us. The trees, the hills, the grass and the cattle spoke obliquely to an imagination that already had a bias. He loved them—with discretion. To him London was older than the country. Nature has a way of disguising her great age in an ever renewed youthful present. London’s present drives one to the past. Nature bewitches her children and will not allow them to transcend her. A great city with its pulsing life carries the exuberant spirit in its mighty rhythm, and yet drives it back to the ancient primeval sources concealed in the eternal kingdom of the imagination. Wordsworth, Nature’s lover, soothes and lulls our restlessness and pain, but fails to carry us into the promised land. Blake, the inspired citizen, pierces with his sword through Nature, and will not rest until in England’s green and pleasant land he has built Jerusalem, wherein we may feast as comrades and be satisfied with the wine of eternity.

Little William Blake was not like other children, or he might have romped with his three brothers, John, James, and Robert, and his sister, Catherine. But from the first he was peculiar, sensitive, and liable to visions. His first recorded vision was in Peckham Rye. There he saw a tree filled with angels. He was neither startled nor surprised. It seemed entirely natural, and, childlike, he told his vision to his parents when he reached home. Visions were not in his father’s line of business. In the dark days of popish supremacy there had been idle monks who thrashed and starved themselves till they saw visions. Even the reformed Church of England knew better than that, and a dissenter of the eighteenth century who spent his spare hours from the shop in reading knew precisely what were the things from which he dissented. He must nip William’s visions in the bud, and he would thrash him. Happily, Mrs. Blake stepped between. It was a jarring shock to an over-sensitive child that a heavy penalty awaited the mention of visions. He continued to see them, but he kept them to himself. His brothers and sister were like his father. Robert, who in after years would have understood, was in the middle of his teething, and it did not yet appear what he would be. Hence all things worked together to separate William from his family and to thrust him into the world of imagination.

At this time—he was about nine years old—he became a devourer of books. His mental bias was sufficiently strong to draw to him the books that would nourish him. Percy’s Reliques, which was sure to be among his father’s books, was entirely congenial to him, as later to little Walter Scott. Also Shakespeare and some of the Elizabethans, of whom Ben Jonson was certainly one, were absorbed into his being. Spencer’s Faery Queen and later poets of his own time—Rowley, Thomson, Chatterton—were his daily companions: and above all he adored with passionate idolatry the then famous Ossian of Macpherson.

Swinburne has expressed astonishment that the child Blake could admire such “lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style” as Macpherson supplied to an undiscerning generation. We must remember that in spite of the Highland Society, then meeting in London, Blake had no easy access to the times of Fingal and Ossian, such as we have to-day. There was something in his genius which made him crave for the society of the Celtic heroes and gods. If Macpherson’s poetic stream was muddy, Blake’s thirst was too consuming to allow of criticism. What is disconcerting is that the mature Blake should retain his admiration of Macpherson and bracket him with the greatest poets of any age. We can only say that what we have loved with our whole heart in childhood, and has entered for better or worse into the very tissue of our being, we cannot criticize; and simple, trustful Blake to the end of his days would have reckoned himself guilty of impious disloyalty if he had admitted even to himself that there were spots in his sun.

Blake’s reading had effected an invaluable service for him—it peopled his world of imagination. There was terror in his first approach on the threshold, a terror never forgotten and often reproduced in his designs. But when he was pushed beyond the threshold and its covering shadow, he gradually grew accustomed to the changed lights, and he began to discern its forms and its outlines and its colours. These in their turn reacted on the outer world until he saw it not as a hard unsurpassable fact, but a mirror of the inner things which in reality were the substance, the form, and the foundation. Henceforth he valued the forms and outlines of things because they were a sign and pledge to him of the inner resplendent City which was not only built on an eternal foundation but was actually the home of his spirit. As soon as he apprehended the significance of outline he developed an ardent desire to draw.

This impulse was quickly observed by his father and encouraged by him. William was sent to learn drawing from a Mr Pars, who kept a drawing-school in the Strand. Here he copied plaster casts and odd-and-end plaster bits of the human body, the body itself being left severely alone. A certain amount of technical facility was thus acquired, but his education in art advanced more surely from his desultory wanderings in sale-rooms and in the private galleries of munificent noblemen. At the sale-rooms he bought prints often for a few pence, and his little store of prints was added to by gifts from his father, who also presented him with models of the Gladiator, Hercules, Venus of Medici. In this way he gained his first enthusiastic knowledge of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Martin Hemskerck, Albert Dürer and Julio Romano, who were exactly the right teachers for him. Michael Angelo and the Florentine School believed that drawing was the foundation of all great art. Albert Dürer and his great German successors were of the same opinion. William Blake, the little citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, had known the horror of indefiniteness, and worked through his apprenticeship to joy only when he discovered that the blessed City stood four-square, and was bounded by great walls on its four sides. Hence his selection of prints was instinctive. He knew without being told what helped him to find himself, and he escaped once for all, while still a child, the seductive elegance of his own age.

These were happy years. His mind was already stored with unfashionable knowledge, gleaned chiefly from the robust Elizabethan age, and his spirit, like a mirror, reflected the things he saw with his spiritual eye. His happiness was creative, and he burst into song when he was only eleven in strains that savoured of Ben Jonson, but were wholly fresh and captivating because they were inspired by the first fresh vision of his childhood. There is surely nothing in any language written by a boy of eleven to touch the song: How sweet I roam’d from field to field. It is a sudden spring of sparkling water that can never lose its purity.

Blake remained four years with Pars, and then his father, willing that his son should become an artist, apprenticed him in 1771 to Basire in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We who stand far apart from Blake’s day can see that this was the best thing that could have happened. Had his father been a rich man, able to pay a heavy premium that his son might be taught by one of the popular