WILLIAM BLAKE
the room shook with his singing. All his songs were in praise of God, and apparently new: all his songs were songs of innocence. Every now and then he would stop and cry out to his wife, "Not mine! Not mine!" in a sort of ecstatic explanation. He truly seemed to wait for the opening of the door of death as a child waits for the opening of the cupboard on his birthday. He genuinely and solemnly seemed to hear the hoofs of the horses of death as a baby hears on Christmas eve the rheindeer-hooves of Santa Claus. He was in his last moments in that wonderful world of whiteness in which white is still a colour. He would have clapped his hands at a white snowflake and sung as at the white wings of an angel at the moment when he himself turned suddenly white with death.
And now, after a due pause, someone will ask and we must answer a popular question which, like many popular questions, is really a somewhat deep and subtle one. To put the matter quite simply, as the popular instinct would put it, "Was William Blake mad?" It is easy
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