"the general and richly deserved limbo of the modern 'spiritualist' Muse."
But while we thus reject with pity or spurn with disgust and disdain the mass of the ignorant, the morbid, the deranged, the cunning, the unscrupulous, the dupes and the deceivers who compose the "Devil's Own" of equivocal private secretaries attached to the post-mortem spirits, we must not forget that among them, not of them, are two or three genuine seers-genuine whether their visions be of realities or not; genuinely inspired, whether their utterances be of truth or error, and whether they attribute their inspiration to its real source or not. We must not confound a Swedenborg with a Home, a Blake with a Slade, a Wilkinson with a "Revd." Mr. Monk. When we have the good fortune to meet in life, or history, or literature with a great and noble man, let us do our best to study and understand him and his work, however eccentric his life-orbit may be deemed by the world, however startling its aberrations may at first appear to ourselves; nor let us ever fear, rather let us ever be forward to praise, as publicly as we can, all that we find praiseworthy in the man and his work; though our voice calls forth no responsive echo, but a storm of jeers and howls and curses, because the one half of the world has decreed him guilty as a blasphemous infidel, and the other half, more charitable, pronounced him insane.
In carefully and respectfully studying these "Improvisations," I have but adhered to a rule which I stated in some notes on the poems of William Blake (written in 1864, and published at the beginning of 1866, before the appearance of Mr. Swinburne's elaborate and
