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WILLIAM BLAKE
207

where, 'is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.' What is said here, transmuted by an instinct wholly an artist's into a great defence of the reality of imagination in art, is a form of the central doctrine of the mystics, formulated by Swedenborg in something very like Blake's language, though with errors or hesitations which is what Blake sets himself to point out in his marginalia to Swedenborg. As, in those marginalia, we see Blake altering every allusion to God into an allusion to 'the Poetic Genius,' so, always, we shall find him understanding every promise of Christ, or Old Testament prophecy, as equally translatable into terms of the imaginative life, into terms of painting, poetry, or music. In the rendering of vision he required above all things that fidelity which can only be obtained through 'minutely particular' execution. 'Invention depends Altogether upon Execution or Organisation; as that is right or wrong, so is the Invention perfect or imper-