John Woolman and William Blake were both prophets, and so is Mildred Young. In this essay of appreciation Mildred Young wonders how John Woolman and William Blake might have met in 1772 on Woolman’s visit to Britain. “But it is not for the sake of imaginary encounters that I have put these two names together; it is because they bring before us, in their so different styles of speech, the same human landscape, and bore into our minds with similar reflections upon that landscape and our own place in it. Insight and mercy are the two words to express both Woolman and Blake.”

Both Woolman and Blake spent lives witnessing the plight of the poor, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, and both wrote in their own styles in their attempts to raise the consciousness of their fellow men. Mildred Young reads both authors with an appreciation of that witness, and she draws clear parallels between their obsessions.

“George Fox once referred to 'that which binds and chains and gives to see over the world.' Woolman and Blake had both submitted to a binding and chaining in tasks laid on them not by their own choice, and in submission to the task they each found freedom.”