leship said to me: Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the effect of drink upon my genius? No, I answered. I ask, he said, because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical insight. Though I had answered no, Ellis had only a few days before used these words: leship drank his genius away.
Ellis, but lately returned from Perugia, where he had lived many years, was another old friend of my fathers but some years youhaleship or my father. leship had found his simplifying image, but in his painting had turned away from it, while Ellis, the son of Alexander Ellis, a once famous man of sce, who erhaps the last man in England to run the circle of the sces without superficiality, had never found that image at all. He ainter and poet, but his painting, which did not i me, showed no influe that of Leighton. He had started perhaps a couple of years too late for Pre?Raphaelite influence, for no great Pre?Raphaelite picture ainted after 1870, a England too soon for that of the French painters.
He was, however, sometimes moving as a poet and still more often an astonishment. I have known him cast something just said into a dozen lines of musical verse, without apparently ceasing to talk; but the work once done he could not or would not amend it, and my father thought he lacked all ambitio he had at times nobility of rhythm??an instinct frandeur??and after thirty years I still repeat to myself his address to Mother Earth: O mother of the hills, five our towers; O mother of the clouds, five our dreams and there are certain whole poems that I read from time to time or try to make others read. There is that poemwhere the manner is unworthy of the matter, being loose and facile, describing Adam and Eve fleeing from Paradise. Adam asks Eve what she carries so carefully and Eve replies that it is a little of the apple core kept for their children. There is that vision of Christ the Less, a too hurriedly written ballad, where the half of Christ, sacrificed to the divine half that fled to seek felicity, wanders wailing through Golgotha; and there is The Saint and the Youth in which I discover no fault at all. He loved plexities??seven silences like dles round her face is a line of his??and whether he wrote well or ill had always a manner, which I would have known from that of any other poet. He would say to me, I am a mathemati with the mathematics left out??his father was a great mathemati??or A woman once said to me, "Mr. Ellis why are your poems like sums?" aainly he loved symbols and abstras. 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 mention a fa versation.
He had a passion for Blake, picked up in Pre?Raphaelite studios, and early in our acquainta 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 Maryleboo Primrose Hill and St. Johns Wood Were builded over with pillars of gold And there Jerusalems pillars stood.
The four quarters of London represented Blakes freat mythological persohe Zoas, and also the four elements. These few sentences were the foundation of all study of the philosophy of William Blake, that requires a knowledge for its pursuit and that traces the e between his system and that of Swedenb or of Boehme. I reised certain attributions, from what is sometimes called the Christian Cabala, of whic