The remainder of the book consists of five distinct, but kindred prose compositions, not all following consecutively, each entitled a 'Memorable Fancy.' Half dream, half allegory, these wild and strange fragments defy description or interpretation. It would hardly occur, indeed, that they were allegorical, or that interpretation was a thing to be expected or attempted, but for an occasional sentence like the following:—'I, in my hand, brought the skeleton of a body which in the mill was Aristotle's Analytics:' and we are sometimes tempted to exclaim with the angel who conducts the author to the mill: 'Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.' Throughout these 'Memorable Fancies,' there is a mingling of the sublime and grotesque better paralleled in art than literature—in that Gothic art with the spirit of which Blake was so deeply penetrated; where corbels of grinning and distorted faces support solemn overarching grandeurs, and quaint monsters lurk in foliaged capital or nook.
In the second 'Memorable Fancy,' of which we give a brief sample or two, he sees Isaiah and Ezekiel in a vision:—
* * * Then I asked: 'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?'
He replied, 'All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.'
Then Ezekiel said: 'The philosophy of the East taught the first principles of human perception; some nations held one principle for the origin and some another; we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle, and all the others merely derivative; which was the cause of our despising the priests and philosophers of other countries, and prophesying that all gods would at last be proved to originate in ours, and to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius. It was this that our great poet, King David, desired so fervently and invoked so pathetically, saying, "By this he conquers enemies, and governs kingdoms;" and we so loved our God, that we cursed in His name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled. From these opinions, the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the Jews.'
