is immortal, and with something more significant than the immortality awarded to him in the sayings of rhetoric; he is perdurable because he is not completed.  His humours are strangely matched with perpetuity.  But, indeed, he is not worthy to die; for there is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal.  I protest I do not laugh at man or woman in the world.  I thank my fellow mortals for their wit, and also for the kind of joke that the French so pleasantly call une joyeusete; these are to smile at.  But the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the man or woman in a book, in fiction, or on the stage in a play.

That narrow house—­there is sometimes a message from its living windows.  Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes that are apt to express none but common things.  There are allusions unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances.  Far from me and from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain of our inflicting.  To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish and the stolid—­“wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?”

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in union or in antithesis.  They assuredly have an inseverable union in the art of literature.  The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the virginal fruit of thought—­whereas one would hardly consent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs—­is to forgo Innocence and Experience at once and together.  Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men’s histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other men’s summaries and conclusions.  Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble isolation of man from man—­of his uniqueness.  But if I had a mind to forgo that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past.  Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must borrow.  Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history.