Ellis why are your poems like sums?"' and certainly he loved
symbols and abstractions. He said once, when I had asked him not
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.
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