And yet I feel with a sad certainty to-day that I
have somehow missed the way, and that God cannot or will not help
me to find it. Are we then bidden and driven to wander? Or is there
indeed some deep and perfect secret of peace and tranquillity,
which we are meant to find? Does it perhaps lie open to our eyes--
as when one searches a table over and over for some familiar
object, which all the while is there before us, plain to touch or
sight?
January 3, 1889.
There is a tiny vignette of Blake's, a woodcut, I think, in which
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.
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