ABSTRACT
Cagliostro, being a man of mean spirituality, separated himself from Catholicism by rearing against it a blazing pageant of mystical paganism, of triangles, secret seals, Eleusinian initiation, and all the vulgar refinements of a secret society. William Blake had something of that haughty and oligarchic element in his mysticism which marked the old pagan secret societies and which marks the Theosophists and oriental initiates. There was in him, besides the beneficent wealth of Swedenborg, some touch of Cagliostro and the Freemasons. Yeats could conceive of the saint expressing his vision in terms of light or nothingness, or in abstractions, but he could not grasp the mystic's vision of nature transformed. Yeats goes on about Poetical Sketches: 'The poems mark an epoch in English literature, for they were the first opening of the long-sealed well of English poetry, and not the works of Cowper and Thompson and Chatterton, being the true heralds of one modern poetry of nature and enthusiasm.
