one sees a ladder set up to the crescent moon from a bald and bare
corner of the globe. There are two figures that seem to be
conversing together; on the ladder itself, just setting his foot to
the lowest rung, is the figure of a man who is beginning to climb
in a furious hurry. "I want, I want," says the little legend
beneath. The execution is trivial enough; it is all done, and not
very well done, in a space not much bigger than a postage-stamp--
but it is one of the many cases in which Blake, by a minute symbol,
expressed a large idea. One wonders if he knew how large an idea it
was. It is a symbol for me of all the vague, eager, intense longing
of the world, the desire of satisfaction, of peace, of fulfilment,
of perfection; the power that makes people passionately religious,
that makes souls so much greater and stronger than they appear to
themselves to be. It is the thought that makes us at moments
believe intensely and urgently in the justice, the mercy, the
perfect love of God, even at moments when everything round us
appears to contradict the idea. It is the outcome of that strange
right to happiness which we all feel, the instinct that makes us
believe of pain and grief that they are abnormal, and will be, must
be, set right and explained somewhere. The thought comes to me most
poignantly at sunset, when trees and chimneys stand up dark against
the fiery glow, and when the further landscape lies smiling, lapt
in mist, on the verge of dreams; that moment always seems to speak
to me with a personal voice. "Yes," it seems to say, "I am here and
everywhere--larger, sweeter, truer, more gracious than anything you
have ever dreamed of or hoped for--but the time to know all is not
yet." I cannot explain the feeling or interpret it; but it has
sometimes seemed to me, in such moments, that I am, in very truth,
not a child of God, but a part of Himself--separated from Him for a
season, imprisoned, for some strange and beautiful purpose, in the