With a blue sky spread over with wings,
And a mild Sun that mounts & sings;
With trees & fields full of Fairy elves,
And little devils who fight for themselves—­

* * * * *

With Angels planted in Hawthorn bowers,
And God Himself in the passing hours.[72]

It is not surprising that he said, in speaking of Lawrence and other popular artists who sometimes patronisingly visited him, “They pity me, but ’tis they are the just objects of pity, I possess my visions and peace.  They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.”  The strength of his illumination at times intoxicated him with joy, as he writes to Hayley (October 23, 1804) after a recurrence of vision which had lapsed for some years, “Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.”  This is the “divine madness” of which Plato speaks, the “inebriation of Reality,” the ecstasy which makes the poet “drunk with life."[73]

In common with other mystics, with Boehme, St Teresa, and Madame Guyon, Blake claimed that much of his work was written under direct inspiration, that it was an automatic composition, which, whatever its source, did not come from the writer’s normal consciousness.  In speaking of the prophetic book Milton, he says—­

I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without pre-meditation and even against my will.  The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.

Whatever may be their source, all Blake’s writings are deeply mystical in thought, and symbolic in expression, and this is true of the (apparently) simple little Songs of Innocence, no less than of the great, and only partially intelligible, prophetic books.  To deal at all adequately with these works, with the thought and teaching they contain, and the method of clothing it, would necessitate a volume, if not a small library, devoted to that purpose.  It is possible, however, to indicate certain fundamental beliefs and assertions which lie at the base of Blake’s thought and of his very unusual attitude towards life, and which, once grasped, make clear a large part of his work.  It must be remembered that these assertions were for him not matters of belief, but of passionate knowledge—­he was as sure of them as of his own existence.

Blake founds his great myth on his perception of unity at the heart of things expressing itself in endless diversity.  “God is in the lowest effects as [in] the highest causes.  He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak....  Everything on earth is the word of God, and in its essence is God."[74]

In the Everlasting Gospel, Blake emphasises, with more than his usual amount of paradox, the inherent divinity of man.  God, speaking to Christ as the highest type of humanity, says—­