Chapter 15 - Page 2

to mention something or other, 'Surely you have discovered by this
time that I know of no means whereby I can mention a fact in
conversation.'

He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre-Raphaelite studios,
and early in our acquaintance put into my hands a scrap of note
paper on which he had written some years before an interpretation
of the poem that begins

The fields from Islington to Marylebone
To Primrose Hill and St. John's Wood
Were builded over with pillars of gold
And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

The four quarters of London represented Blake's four great
mythological personages, the Zoas, and also the four elements.
These few sentences were the foundation of all study of the
philosophy of William Blake, that requires an exact knowledge for
its pursuit and that traces the connection between his system and
that of Swedenborg or of Boehme. I recognised certain attributions,
from what is sometimes called the Christian Cabala, of which Ellis
had never heard, and with this proof that his interpretation was
more than phantasy, he and I began our four years' work upon the
Prophetic Books of William Blake. We took it as almost a sign of
Blake's personal help when we discovered that the spring of 1889,
when we first joined our knowledge, was one hundred years from the
publication of 'The Book of Thel,' the first published of the
Prophetic Books, as though it were firmly established that the dead
delight in anniversaries. After months of discussion and reading, we
made a concordance of all Blake's mystical terms, and there was much
copying to be done in the Museum & at Red Hill, where the
descendants of Blake's friend and patron, the landscape painter,
John Linnell, had many manuscripts. The Linnellswere narrow in
their religious ideas & doubtful of Blake's orthodoxy, whom they
held, however, in great honour, and I remember a timid old lady who
had known Blake when a child saying: 'He had very wrong ideas, he
did not believe in the historical Jesus.' One old man sat always
beside us ostensibly to sharpen our pencils, but perhaps really to
see that we did not steal the manuscripts, and they gave us very old
port at lunch and I have upon my dining room walls their present of
Blake's Dante engravings. Going thither and returning Ellis would
entertain me by philosophical discussion, varied with improvised
stories, at first folk tales which he professed to have picked up in
Scotland; and though I had read and collected many folk tales, I did
not see through the deceit. I have a partial memory of two more
elaborate tales, one of an Italian conspirator flying barefoot from
I forget what adventure through I forget what Italian city, in the
early morning. Fearing to be