Blake, of whom I am very fond and speak about all the time, his first vision was that of a tree of angels, at the age of eight or nine. So he came into the family, and he told his parents he’d just seen a tree full of angels. His father, to make him a sensible boy, prepared to give him a sound thrashing. Fortunately for Blake, his mother interceded and saved him. Maybe that’s what mothers are for, to protect us from our violent fathers. Nevertheless, he wasn’t thrashed, but the father wanted to make him a reasonable, sound, solid citizen; and he was seeing angels in a tree. That’s the earliest thought we have of Blake, of anything said about Blake, and the last thought is said about a neighbor woman who was present at his deathbed. Then she went home, and she told her relatives she had just been at the death not of a man but a blessed angel. That’s what Blake taught all his life: “We become what we behold.” And here a neighbor could say she saw the death not of a man but a blessed angel. No, he didn’t become it immediately. And undoubtedly there were unnumbered moments in his life in the seventy years that he lived where there were many, many an unangelic moment, if you read the story of Blake carefully; but in the end, he fulfilled what he beheld. All through his greatest poem, Jerusalem, that one thought permeates the entire hundred plates. “They become what they behold.” We do, every one of us.796 ¶2