the four elements, the four points of the compass, the four senses (taste and touch counting as one), and so on.  Blake seemed, as it were, to hold his vision in his mind in solution, and to be able to condense it into gaseous, liquid, or solid elements at whatever point he willed.  Thus we feel that the prophetic books contain meaning within meaning, bearing interpretation from many points of view; and to arrive at their full value, we should need to be able—­as Blake was—­to apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession.  It is this very faculty of “fourfold vision” which gives to these books their ever-changing atmosphere of suggestion, elusive and magical as the clouds and colours in a sunset sky, which escape our grasp in the very effort to study them.  Hence, for the majority even of imaginative people, who possess at the utmost “double vision,” they are difficult and often wearisome to read.  They are so, because the inner, living, vibrating ray or thread of connection which evokes these forms and beings in Blake’s imagination, is to the ordinary man invisible and unfelt; so that the quick leap of the seer’s mind from figure to figure, and from picture to picture, seems irrational and obscure.

To this difficulty on the side of the reader, there must in fairness be added certain undeniable limitations on the part of the seer.  These are principally owing to lack of training, and possibly to lack of patience, sometimes also it would seem to defective vision.  So that his symbols are at times no longer true and living, but artificial and confused.

Blake has visions, though clouded and imperfect, of the clashing of systems, the birth and death of universes, the origin and meaning of good and evil, the function and secret correspondences of spirits, of states, of emotions, of passions, and of senses, as well as of all forms in earth and sky and sea.  This, and much more, he attempts to clothe in concrete forms or symbols, and if he fails at times to be explicit, it is conceivable that the fault may lie as much with our density as with his obscurity.  Indeed, when we speak of Blake’s obscurity, we are uncomfortably reminded of Crabb Robinson’s naive remark when recording Blake’s admiration for Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode:  “The parts ... which Blake most enjoyed were the most obscure—­at all events, those which I least like and comprehend.”

Blake’s view of good and evil is the characteristically mystical one, in his case much emphasised.  The really profound mystical thinker has no fear of evil, for he cannot exclude it from the one divine origin, else the world would be no longer a unity but a duality.  This difficulty of “good” and “evil,” the crux of all philosophy, has been approached by mystical thinkers in various ways (such as that evil is illusion, which seems to be Browning’s view), but the boldest of them, and notably Blake and Boehme,