In one of his note books Blake said, "the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative; it is an endeavor to restore what the ancients call the golden age." Not only is the nature of Blake's work visionary, he claimed to have actually seen visions early in childhood. The first time he saw God was when he was only four; God put his head to the windows, and set to screaming. Four years later, he saw a tree filled with angels. Naturally, such things looked fantastic to the people around that when he told of this to his father, he narrowly escaped thrashing. Another occasion he ran home crying that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree. He saw, too, angels among the hay-makers, and to a traveler who was talking of the splendour of a foreign city, he said, do you call it splendid...