20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to

dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease. CHORUS. Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer in deadly black with hoarse note curse the sons of joy; Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof; Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not; For everything that lives is Holy." And so, as with fire and thunder--"thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire"--is this _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ at length happily consummated; the prophet, as a fervent paranymph, standing by to invoke upon the wedded pair his most unclerical benediction. Those who are not bidden to the bridegroom's supper may as well keep away, lest worse befall them, not having a wedding garment. For us there remains little to say, now that the torches are out, the nuts scattered, the songs silent, and the saffron faded from the veil. We will wish them a quiet life, and an heir who may combine the merits and capacities of either parent. It were pleasant enough, but too superfluous, to dwell upon the beauty of this nuptial hymn; to bid men remark what eloquence, what subtlety, what ardour of wisdom, what splendour of thought, is here; how far it outruns, not in daring alone but in sufficiency, all sayings of minor mystics who were not also poets; how much of lofty love and of noble faith underlies and animates these rapid and fervent words; what greatness of spirit and of speech there was in the man who, living as Blake lived, could write as Blake has written. Those who cannot see what is implied may remain unable to tolerate what is expressed; and those who can read aright need no index of ours.[51] [Illustration] The decorations of this great work, though less large and complete than those of the subsequent prophecies, are full of noble and subtle beauty. Over every page faint fibres and flickering threads of colour weave a net of intricate design. Skies cloven with flame and thunder, half-blasted trees round which huddled forms of women or men cower and cling, strange beasts and splendid flowers, alternate with the engraved text; and throughout all the sunbeams of heaven and fires of hell shed fiercer or softer light. In minute splendour and general effect the pages of Blake's next work fall short of these; though in the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_ the separate designs are fuller and more composed. This poem, written in a sort of regular though quasi-lyrical blank verse, is more direct and lucid in purpose than most of these books; but the style is already laxer, veers more swiftly from point to point, stands weaker on its feet, and speaks with more of a hurried and hysterical tone. With "formidable moral questions," as the biographer has observed, it does assuredly deal; and in a way somewhat formidable. This, we are told, "the exemplary man had good right to do." Exemplary or not, he in common with all men had undoubtedly such a right; and was not slow to use it. Nowhere else has the prophet so fully and vehemently set forth his doctrine of indulgence; too Albigensian or antinomian this time to be given out again in more decorous form. Of pure mythology there is happily little; of pure allegory even less. "The eye sees more than the heart knows;" these words are given on the title-page by way of motto or key-note. Above this inscription a single design fills the page; in it the title is written with characters of pale fire upon cloud and rainbow; the figure of the typical woman, held fast to earth but by one foot, seems to soar and yearn upwards with straining limbs that flutter like shaken flame: appealing in vain to the mournful and merciless Creator, whose sad fierce face looks out beyond and over her, swathed and cradled in bloodlike fire and drifted rain. In the prologue we get a design expressive of plain and pure pleasure; a woman gathers a child from the heart of a blossom as it breaks, and the sky is full of the golden stains and widening roses of a sundawn. But elsewhere, from the frontispiece to the end, nothing meets us but emblems of restraint and error; figures rent by the beaks of eagles though lying but on mere cloud, chained to no solid rock by the fetters only of their own faiths or fancies; leafless trunks that rot where they fell; cold ripples of barren sea that break among caves of bondage. The perfect woman, Oothoon, is one with the spirit of the great western world; born for rebellion and freedom, but half a slave yet, and half a harlot. "Bromion," the violent Titan, subject himself to ignorance and sorrow, has defiled her;[52] "Theotormon," her lover, emblem of man held in bondage to creed or law, will not become one with her because of her shame; and she, who gathered in time of innocence the natural flower of delight, calls now for his eagles to rend her polluted flesh with cruel talons of remorse and ravenous beaks of shame: enjoys his infliction, accepts her agony, and reflects his severe smile in the mirrors of her purged spirit.[53] But he "sits wearing the threshold hard With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desert shore The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money." From her long melodious lamentation we give one continuous excerpt here. Sweet, and lucid as _Thel_, it is more subtle and more strong; the allusions to American servitude and English aspiration, which elsewhere distract and distort the sense and scheme of the poem, are here well cleared away. "I cry Arise, O Theotormon; for the village dog Barks at the breaking day; the nightingale has done lamenting; The lark does rustle in the green corn, and the eagle returns From nightly prey and lifts his golden beak to the pure east; Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions, to awake The sun that sleeps too long. Arise my Theotormon, I am pure Because the night is gone that closed me in its deadly black. They told me that the night and day were all that I could see; They told me that I had five senses to enclose me up, And they enclosed my infinite beam into a narrow circle, And sank my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hotburning Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. Instead of morn arises a bright shadow like an eye In the eastern cloud; instead of night a sickly charnel-house. But Theotormon hears me not: to him the night and morn Are both alike; a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears. And none but Bromion can hear my lamentations. With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk? With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse? With what sense does the bee form cells? have not the mouse and frog Eyes and ears and sense of touch? yet are their habitations And their pursuits as different as their forms and as their joy. Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens, and the meek camel Why he loves man: is it because of eye, ear, mouth or skin, Or breathing nostrils? no: for these the wolf and tiger have. Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave and why her spires Love to curl around the bones of death: and ask the ravenous snake Where she gets poison; and the winged eagle why he loves the sun; And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old. Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent, If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me; How can I be defiled when I reflect thy image pure? Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on, and the soul prey'd on by woe; The new-washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright swan By the red earth of our immortal river; I bathe my wings And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormon's breast. Then Theotormon broke his silence, and he answered; Tell me what is the night or day to one overflowed with woe? Tell me what is a thought? and of what substance is it made? Tell me what is joy? and in what gardens do joys grow? And in what rivers swim the sorrows? and upon what mountains Wave shadows of discontent? and in what houses dwell the wretched Drunken with woe forgotten, and shut up from cold despair? Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth? Tell me where dwell the joys of old? and where the ancient loves? And when will they renew again and the night of oblivion be past? That I might traverse times and spaces far remote and bring Comfort into a present sorrow and a night of pain! Where goest thou, O thought? to what remote land is thy flight? If thou returnest to the present moment of affliction Wilt thou bring comforts on thy wings and dews and honey and balm Or poison from the desert wilds, from the eyes of the envier?" After this Bromion, with less musical lamentation, asks whether for all things there be not one law established? "Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; but knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth to gratify senses unknown, in worlds over another kind of seas?" Are there other wars, other sorrows, and other joys than those of external life? But the one law surely does exist "for the lion and the ox," for weak and strong, wise and foolish, gentle and fierce; and for all who rebel against it there are prepared from everlasting the fires and the chains of hell. So speaks the violent slave of heaven; and after a day and a night Oothoon lifts up her voice in sad rebellious answer and appeal. "O Urizen, Creator of men! mistaken Demon of heaven! Thy joys are tears: thy labour vain, to form man to thine image; How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys Holy, eternal, infinite? and each joy is a Love. Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift? and the narrow eyelids mock At the labour that is above payment? and wilt thou take the ape For thy counsellor, or the dog for a schoolmaster to thy children? * * * * * Does the whale worship at thy footsteps as the hungry dog? Or does he scent the mountain prey, because his nostrils wide Draw in the ocean? does his eye discern the flying cloud As the raven's eye? or does he measure the expanse like the vulture? Does the still spider view the cliffs where eagles hide their young? Or does the fly rejoice because the harvest is brought in? Does not the eagle scorn the earth and despise the treasures beneath? But the mole knoweth what is there, and the worm shall tell it thee." Perhaps there is no loftier note of music and of thought struck anywhere throughout these prophecies. For the rest, we must tread carefully over the treacherous hot ashes strewn about the latter end of this book: which indeed speaks plainly enough for once, and with high equal eloquence; but to no generally acceptable effect. The one matter of marriage laws is still beaten upon, still hammered at with all the might of an insurgent prophet: to whom it is intolerable that for the sake of mere words and mere confusions of thought "she who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot" should be "bound by spells of law to one she loathes," should "drag the chain of life in weary lust," and "bear the wintry rage of a harsh terror driven to madness, bound to hold a rod over her shrinking shoulders all the day, and all the night to turn the wheel of false desire;" intolerable that she should be driven by "longings that wake her womb" to bring forth not men but some monstrous "abhorred birth of cherubs," imperfect, artificial, abortive; counterfeits of holiness and mockeries of purity; things of barren or perverse nature, creatures inhuman or diseased, that live as a pestilence lives and pass away as a meteor passes; "till the child dwell with one he hates, and do the deed he loathes, and the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth ere yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day:" the day whose blinding beams had surely somewhat affected the prophet's own eyesight, and left his eyelids lined with strange colours of fugitive red and green that fades into black. However, all these things shall be made plain by death; for "over the porch is written Take thy bliss, O man! and sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew." On the one hand is innocence, on the other modesty; infancy is "fearless, lustful, happy;" who taught it modesty, "subtle modesty, child of night and sleep?" Once taught to dissemble, to call pure things impure, to "catch virgin joy, and brand it with the name of whore and sell it in the night;" once corrupted and misled, "religious dreams and holy vespers light thy smoky fires: once were thy fires lighted by the eyes of honest morn." Not pleasure but hypocrisy is the unclean thing; Oothoon is no harlot, but "a virgin filled with virgin fancies, open to joy and to delight wherever it appears; if in the morning sun I find it, there my eyes are fixed in happy copulation:" and so forth--further than we need follow. "Is it because acts are not lovely that thou seekest solitude Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?-- Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth! Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing? Till beauty fades from off my shoulders, darkened and cast out, A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity;" as in a later prophecy Ahania, cast out by the jealous God, being the type or embodiment of this sacred natural love "free as the mountain wind." "Can that be love which drinks another as a sponge drinks water? That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the days? * * * * * Such is self-love, that envies all; a creeping skeleton With lamp-like eyes watching around the frozen marriage-bed." But instead of the dark-grey "web of age" spun around man by self-love, love spreads nets to catch for him all wandering and foreign pleasures, pale as mild silver or ruddy as flaming gold; beholds them without grudging drink deep of various delight, "red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first-born beam." No single law for all things alike; the sun will not shine in the miser's secret chamber, nor the brightest cloud drop fruitful rain on his stone threshold; for one thing night is good and for another thing day: nothing is good and nothing evil to all at once. "'The sea-fowl takes the wintry blast for a covering to her limbs, And the wild snake the pestilence, to adorn him with gems and gold; And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their eternal joy. Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! Arise and drink your bliss! For everything that lives is holy.' Thus every morning wails Oothoon, but Theotormon sits Upon the margined ocean, conversing with shadows dire. The daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs." It may be feared that Oothoon has yet to wait long before Theotormon will leave off "conversing with shadows dire;" nor is it surprising that this poem won such small favour; for had it not seemed inexplicable it must have seemed unbearable. Blake, as evidently as Shelley, did in all innocence believe that ameliorated humanity would be soon qualified to start afresh on these new terms after the saving advent of French and American revolutions. "All good things are in the West;" thence in the teeth of "Urizen" shall human deliverance come at length. In the same year Blake's prophecy of _America_ came forth to proclaim this message over again. Upon this book we need not dwell so long; it has more of thunder and less of lightning than the former prophecies; more of sonorous cloud and less of explicit fire. The prelude, though windy enough, is among Blake's nobler myths: the divine spirit of rebellious redemption, imprisoned as yet by the gods of night and chaos, is fed and sustained in secret by the "nameless" spirit of the great western continent; nameless and shadowy, a daughter of chaos, till the day of their fierce and fruitful union. "Silent as despairing love and strong as jealousy, The hairy shoulders rend the links, free are the wrists of fire." At his embrace "she cast aside her clouds and smiled her first-born smile, as when a black cloud shows its lightnings to the silent deep." "Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin's cry; I love thee; I have found thee, and I will not let thee go. Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa, And thou art fallen to give me life in regions of dark death." Then begins the agony of revolution, her frost and his fire mingling in pain; and the poem opens as with a sound and a light of storm. It is throughout in the main a mere expansion and dilution of the "Song of Liberty" which we have already heard; and in the interludes of the great fight between Urizen and Orc the human names of American or English leaders fall upon the ear with a sudden incongruous clash: not perhaps unfelt by the author's ear also, but unheeded in his desire to make vital and vivid the message he came to deliver. The action is wholly swamped by the allegory; hardly is it related how the serpent-formed "hater of dignities, lover of wild rebellion and transgressor of God's Law," arose in red clouds, "a wonder, a human fire;" "heat but not light went from him;" "his terrible limbs were fire;" his voice shook the ancient Druid temple of tyranny and faith, proclaiming freedom and "the fiery joy that Urizen perverted to ten commands;" the "punishing demons" of the God of jealousy "Crouch howling before their caverns deep like skins dried in the wind; They cannot smite the wheat nor quench the fatness of the earth; They cannot smite with sorrows nor subdue the plough and spade; For terrible men stand on the shores, and in their robes I see Children take refuge from the lightnings. * * * * Ah vision from afar! ah rebel form that rent the ancient heavens! * * * * Red flames the crest rebellious And eyes of death; the harlot womb oft opened in vain Heaves in eternal circles, now the times are returned upon thee." "Thus wept the angel voice" of the guardian-angel of Albion; but the thirteen angels of the American provinces rent off their robes and threw down their sceptres and cast in their lot with the rebel; gathered together where on the hills "called Atlantean hills, Because from their bright summits you may pass to the golden world, An ancient palace, archetype of mighty emperies, Rears its immortal pinnacles, built in the forest of God By Ariston the king of beauty for his stolen bride." A myth of which we are to hear no more, significant probably of the rebellion of natural beauty against the intolerable tyranny of God, from which she has to seek shelter in the darkest part of his creation with the angelic or daemonic bridegroom (one of the descended "sons of God") who has wedded her by stealth and built her a secret shelter from the strife of divine things; where at least nature may breathe freely and take pleasure; whither also in their time congregate all other rebellious forces and spirits at war with the Creator and his laws. But the speech of "Boston's angel" we will at least transcribe: not without a wish that he had never since then spoken more incoherently and less musically. "Must the generous tremble and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence, That mock him? who commanded this? what God? what Angel? To keep the generous from experience, till the ungenerous Are unrestrained performers of the energies of nature, Till pity is become a trade and generosity a science That men get rich by; and the sandy desert is given to the strong? What God is he writes laws of peace and clothes him in a tempest? What pitying Angel lusts for tears and fans himself with sighs? What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself In fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay." This is perhaps the finest and clearest passage in the book; and beyond this point there is not much extractable from the clamorous lyrical chaos. Here again besides the mere outward violence of battle, the visible plague and fire of war, we have sight of a subtler and wider revolution. "For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religion Run from their fetters reddening and in long-drawn arches sitting. They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times." Light and warmth and colour and life are shed from the flames of revolution not alone on city and valley and hill, but likewise "Over their pale limbs, as a vine when the tender grape appears; * * * * * The heavens melted from north to south; and Urizen who sat Above all heavens in thunders wrapt, emerged his leprous head From out his holy shrine; his tears in deluge piteous Falling into the deep sublime." Notwithstanding for twelve years it was fated that "angels and weak men should govern o'er the strong, and then their end should come when France received the demon's light:" and the ancient European guardians "slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven, filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair, with fierce disease and lust;" but these gates were consumed in the final fire of revolution that went forth upon the world. So ends the poem; and of the decoration we have barely space to say enough. On one page are the visions of the renewed world, on another the emblems of oppression and war: children sleeping nestled in the fleece of a sleeping ram with heavy horns and quiet mouth pressing the soft ground, while overhead shapely branches droop and gracious birds are perched; or what seems the new-born body of Orc cast under the sea, enmeshed in a web of water whose waves are waves of corn when you come to look; maidens and infants that bridle a strong dragon, and behind them a flight of birds through the clouds of a starry moonlit night, where a wild swan with vast wings and stretching neck is bestridden by a spirit looking eagerly back as he clutches the rein; eagles that devour the dead on a stormy sea-beach, while underneath fierce pikes and sharks make towards a wrecked corpse that has sunk without drifting, and sea-snakes wind about it in soft loathsome coils; women and children embrace in bitter violence of loving passion among ripples of fruitful flame, out of which rise roots and grasses of the field and laden branches of the vine. Of all these we cannot hope to speak duly; nor can we hope to give more than a glimpse of the work they illustrate. Throughout the Prophecy of _Europe_ the fervent and intricate splendours of text and decoration are whirled as it were and woven into spreading webs or twining wheels of luminous confusion. The Museum copy, not equal in nobility of colour to some others, is crowded with MS. notes and mottos of some interest and significance. To the frontispiece a passage of Milton is appended; to the first page is prefixed a transcript of some verses by Mrs. Radcliffe concerning a murdered pilgrim, sufficiently execrable and explanatory; and so throughout. These notes will help us at least to measure the amount of connexion between the text and the designs; an amount easily measurable, being in effect about the smallest possible. Fierce fluctuating wind and the shaken light of meteors flutter or glitter upon the stormy ways of vision; serving rather for raiment than for symbol. The outcast gods of star and comet are driven through tempestuous air: "forms without body" leap or lurk under cloud or water; War, a man coated with scales of defiled and blackening bronze, handling a heavy sword-hilt, averts his face from appealing angels; Famine slays and eats her children; fire curls about the caldron in which their limbs are to be sodden for food; starved plague-stricken shapes of women and men fall shrieking or silent as the bell-ringer, a white-haired man with slouched hat drawn down and long straight cassock, passes them bell in hand; a daughter clings to her father in the dumb pain of fear, while he with arms thrust out in repulsion seems to plead against the gathering deluges that "sweep o'er the yellow year;" mildews are seen incarnate as foul flushed women with strenuous limbs contorted, blighting ears of corn with the violent breath of their inflated mouths; "Papal Superstition," with the triple crown on a head broader across cheek and jowl than across the forehead, with bat's wings and bloodlike garments dripping and rent, leers across the open book on his knees; behind his reptile face a decoration as of a cleft mitre, wrought in the shape of Gothic windows that straiten as it ascends, shows grey upon the dead black air; this is "Urizen seen on the Atlantic; and his brazen book that kings and priests had copied on earth, expanded from north to south;" all the creeping things of the prison-house, bloated leaf and dropping spider, crawl or curl above a writhing figure overgrown with horrible scurf of corruption as with network; the gaoler leaves his prisoner fast bound by the ankles, with limbs stained and discoloured; (the motto to this is from "The Two Noble Kinsmen," Act ii., Sc. 1., "The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it," &c.); snakes and caterpillars, birds and gnats, each after their own kind take their pleasure and their prey among the leaves and grasses they defile and devour; flames chase the naked or swooning fugitives from a blazing ruin. The prelude is set in the frame of two large designs; one of the assassin waiting for the pilgrim as he turns round a sharp corner of rock; one of hurricane and storm in which "Horror, Amazement and Despair" appear abroad upon the winds. A sketch of these violent and hideously impossible figures is pasted into the note-book on a stray slip of paper. The MS. mottos are mostly from Milton and Dryden; Shakespeare and Fletcher, Rowe and Mason, are also dragged into service. The prophecy itself is full of melody and mist; of music not wholly unrecognisable and vapour not wholly impermeable. In a lull of intermittent war, the gods of time and space awake with all their children; Time bids them "seize all the spirits of life and bind their warbling joys to our loud strings, bind all the nourishing sweets of earth to give us bliss." Orc, the fiery spirit of revolution, first-born of Space, his father summons to arise; "and we will crown thy head with garlands of the ruddy vine; for now thou art bound; and I may see thee in the hour of bliss, my eldest born." Allegory, here as always, is interfused with myth in a manner at once violent and intricate; but in this book the mere mythologic fancy of Blake labours for the most part without curb or guide. Enitharmon, the universal or typical woman, desires that "woman may have dominion" for a space over all the souls upon earth; she descends and becomes visible in the red light of Orc; and she charges other spirits born of her and Los to "tell the human race that woman's love is sin," for thus the woman will have power to refuse or accede, to starve or satiate the perverted loves and lives of man; "that an eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters, in an allegorical abode where existence hath never come; forbid all joy, and from her childhood shall the little female spread nets in every secret path." To this end the goddess of Space calls forth her chosen children, the "horned priest" of animal nature, the "silver-bowed queen" of desolate places, the "prince of the sun" with his innumerable race "thick as the summer stars; each one, ramping, his golden mane shakes, and thine eyes rejoice because of strength, O Rintrah, furious King." Moon and sun, spirit and flesh, all lovely jealous forces and mysteries of the natural world are gathered together under her law, that throughout the eighteen Christian centuries she may have her will of the world. For so long nature has sat silent, her harps out of tune; the goddess herself has slept out all those years, a dream among dreams, the ghostly regent of a ghostly generation. The angels of Albion, satellites once of the ancient Titan, are smitten now with their own plagues, crushed in their own council-house, and rise again but to follow after Rintrah, the fiery minister of his mother's triumph. Him the chief "Angel" follows to "his ancient temple serpent-formed," ringed round with Druid oaks, massive with pillar and porch built of precious stones; "such eternal in the heavens, of colours twelve, few known on earth, give light in the opaque." "Placed in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelmed In deluge o'er the earth-born man: then bound the flexile eyes Into two stationary orbs concentrating all things: The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heaven of heavens Were bended downward, and the nostril's golden gates shut, Turned outward, barred and petrified against the infinite. Thought changed the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face and hid In forests[54] of night; then all the eternal forests were divided Into earths rolling in circles of space, that like an ocean rushed And overwhelmed all except this finite wall of flesh. Then was the serpent temple formed, image of (the) infinite Shut up in finite revolutions,[55] and man became an Angel; Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crowned." Thus again recurs the doctrine that the one inlet left us for spiritual perception--that namely of the senses--is but one and the least of many inlets and channels of communication now destroyed or perverted by the creative demon; a tenet which once well grasped and digested by the disciple will further his understanding of Blake more than anything else can: will indeed, pushed to the full extreme of its logical results, elucidate and justify much that seems merely condemnable and chaotic. To resume our somewhat halting and bewildered fable: the southern porch of this temple, "planted thick with trees of blackest leaf, and in a vale obscure, enclosed the stone of night; oblique it stood, o'erhung with purple flowers and berries red;" image of the human intellect "once open to the heavens" as the south to the sun; now, as the head of fallen man, "overgrown with hair and covered with a stony roof;" sunk deep "beneath the attractive north," where evil spirits are strongest, where the whirlpool of speculation sucks in the soul and entombs it. Standing on this, as on a watch-tower, the "Angel" beholds Religion enthroned over Europe, and the pale revolution of cloud and fire through the night of space and time; beholds "Albion," the home once of ancient freedom and faith, trodden underfoot by laws and churches, that the God of religion may have wherewithal to "feed his soul with pity." At last begins the era of rebellion and change; the fires of Orc lay hold upon law[56] and gospel; yet for a little while the ministers of his mother have power to fight against him, and she, allied now and making common cause with the God alien to her children, "laughs in her sleep," seeing through the veil and vapour of dreams the subjection of male to female, the false attribute of unnatural power given to women by faith and fear. Not as yet can the Promethean fire utterly dissolve the clouds of Urizen, though the flesh of the ministering angel of religion is already consumed or consuming; nor as yet can the trumpet of revolution summon the dead to judgment. That first blast of summons must be blown by material science, which destroys the letter of the law and the text of the covenant. When the "mighty spirit" of Newton had seized the trumpet and blown it, "Yellow as leaves of Autumn the myriads of Angelic hosts Fell thro' the wintry skies seeking their graves, Rattling their hollow bones in howling and lamentation;" as to this day they do, and did in Blake's time, throughout whole barrowfuls of controversial "apologies" and "evidences." Then the mother-goddess awoke from her eighteen centuries of sleep, the "Christian era" being now wellnigh consummated, and all those years "fled as if they had not been;" she called her children around her, by many monstrous names and phrases of chaotic invocation; comfort and happiness here, there sweet pestilence and soft delusion; the "seven churches of Leutha" seek the love of "Antamon," symbolic of Christian faith reconciled to "pagan" indulgence and divorced from Jewish prohibition; even as we find in the prophet himself equal faith in sensual innocence and spiritual truth. Of "the soft Oothoon" the great goddess asks now "Why wilt thou give up woman's secrecy, my melancholy child? Between two moments bliss is ripe." Last she calls upon Orc; "Smile, son of my afflictions; arise and give our mountains joy of thy red light." "She ceased; for all were forth at sport beneath the solemn moon, Waking the stars of Urizen with their immortal songs, That nature felt thro' all her pores the enormous revelry. Till morning oped her eastern gate; Then every one fled to his station; and Enitharmon wept." But with the dawn of that morning Orc descended in fire, "and in the vineyards of red France appeared the light of his fury." The revolution begins; all space groans; and lion and tiger are gathered together after their prey: the god of time arises as one out of a trance, "And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole Called all his sons to the strife of blood." Our study of the _Europe_ might bring more profit if we could have genuine notes appended to the text as well as to the designs. Such worth or beauty as the poem has burns dim and looms distant by comparison; but there is in it more of either than we have here time or means to indicate. At least the prelude so strangely selected for citation and thrown loose upon the pages of the biography in so crude and inexplicable a manner, may now be seen to have some tangible or presumable sense. The spirit of Europe rises revealed in the advent of revolution, sick of time and travail; pleading with the mother-goddess, Cybele of this mythology; wrapping about her veils of water and garments of cloud, in vain; "the red sun and moon and all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains." Out of her overlaboured womb arise forms and forces of change, fugitive fires of wrath, sonorous shapes of fear; and they take substance in space, but bring to their mother no help or profit, no comfort or light; to the virgin daughter of America freedom has come and fruitful violence of love, but not to the European mother. She has no hope in all the infinity of space and time; "who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band, to compass it with swaddling bands?" By comparison of the two preludes the relations of the two kindred poems may be better understood: the one is plaintive as the voice of a world in pain, and decaying kingdom by kingdom; the other fierce and hopeful as the cry of a nation in travail, whose agony is not that of death, but rather that of birth. _The First Book of Urizen_ is perhaps more shapeless and chaotic at a first glimpse than any other of these prose poems. Clouds of blood, shadows of horror, worlds without form and void, rise and mingle and wane in indefinite ways, with no special purpose or appreciable result. The myth here is of an active but unprolific God, warring with shapes of the wilderness, and at variance with the eternals: beaten upon by Time, who figures always in all his various shapes and actions as the saviour and friend of man. "Earth was not, nor globes of attraction; the will of the Immortal expanded or contracted at will his all-flexible senses. Death was not; but eternal life sprang." (1. Urizen, ii. 1.) Urizen, the God of restraint, creator of prohibition, whose laws are forbearance and abstinence, is for ages divided from Eternity and at war with Time; "long periods in burning fires labouring, till hoary, and age-broken, and aged, in despair and the shadows of death." (1. Urizen, iii. 6.) In time the formless God takes form, creating and assuming feature by feature; bones, heart, eyes, ears, nostrils, throat with tongue, hands with feet; an age of agony being allotted to each of the seven created features; still toiling in fire and beset by snares, which the Time-Spirit kindles and weaves to avert and destroy in its birth the desolate influence of the Deity who forbids and restrains. These transformations of Urizen make up some of Blake's grandest and strangest prophetic studies. First the spinal skeleton, with branchwork of rib and savage nudity of joint and clavicle, shaped mammoth-wise, in grovelling involution of limb. In one copy at least these bones are touched with dim green and gold colour; such a faint fierce tint as one might look for on the cast scales or flakes of dragons left astrand in the ebb of a deluge. Next a huge fettered figure with blind shut eyes overflowing into tears, with convulsed mouth and sodden stream of beard: then bones painfully gathering flesh, twisted forms round which flames break out fourfold, tortured elemental shapes that plunge and writhe and moan. Until Time, divided against himself, brings forth Space, the universal eternal female element, called Pity among the gods, who recoil in fear from the dawn of human creation and division. Of these two divinities, called in the mythology Los and Enitharmon, is born the man-child Orc. "The dead heard the voice of the child and began to awake from sleep; all things heard the voice of the child and began to awake to life." (vii. 5.) Here again we may spare a word or two for that splendid figure (p. 20) of the new-born child falling aslant through cloven fire that curls and trembles into spiral blossoms of colour and petals of feverish light. And the children of Urizen were Thiriel, born from cloud; Utha, from water; Grodna, from earth; Fuzon, "first-begotten, last-born," from fire--"and his daughters from green herbs and cattle, from monsters and worms of the pit. He cursed both sons and daughters; for he saw that no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws one moment." (viii. 3, 4.) Then from his sorrows for these his children begotten on the material body of nature, the web of religion begins to unwind and expand, "throwing out from his sorrowing soul, the dungeon-like heaven dividing" (viii. 6)--and the knotted meshes of the web to involve all races and cities. "The Senses inward rushed shrinking beneath the dark net of infection: till the shrunken eyes, clouded over, discerned not the woven hypocrisy; but the streaky slime in their heavens, brought together by narrowing perceptions, appeared transparent air; for their eyes grew small like the eyes of a man. Six days they shrank up from existence, and the seventh day they rested, and they blessed the seventh day, in sick hope; and forgot their eternal life." (1. Urizen, ix. 1, 2, 3.) Hence grows the animal tyranny of gravitation, and hence also the spiritual tyranny of law; "they lived a period of years, then left a noisome body to the jaws of devouring darkness; and their children wept, and built tombs in the desolate places; and formed laws of prudence and called them the eternal laws of God." (ix. 4, 5.) Seeing these his brethren degraded into life and debased into flesh, the son of the fire, Fuzon, called together "the remaining children of Urizen; and they left the pendulous earth: they called it Egypt, and left it. And the salt ocean rolled englobed." (ix. 8, 9.) The freer and stronger spirits left the world of men to the dominion of earth and water; air and fire were withdrawn from them, and there were left only the heaviness of imprisoning clay and the bitterness of violent sea. This is a hurried and blotted sketch of the main myth, which is worth following up by those who would enter on any serious study of Blake's work; all that is here indicated in dim hints being afterwards assumed as the admitted groundwork of later and larger myths. In this present book (and in it only) the illustrative work may be said almost to overweigh and stifle the idea illustrated. Strange semi-human figures, clad in sombre or in fiery flesh, racing through fire or sinking through water, allure and confuse the fancy of the student. Every page vibrates with light and colour; on none of his books has the artist lavished more noble profusion of decorative work. It is worth observing that while some copies are carefully numbered throughout "First Book," in others the word "First" is erased from every leaf: as in effect the Second Book never was put forth under that title. Next year however the _Book of Ahania_ came out--if one may say as much of a quarto of six leaves which has hardly yet emerged into sight of two or three readers. This we may take--or those may who please--to be the _Second Book of Urizen_. It is among the choicer spoils of Blake, not as yet cast into the public treasury; for the Museum has no copy, though possessing (in its blind confused way) duplicates of _America_, _Albion_, and _Los_. Some day, one must hope, there will at least be a complete accessible collection of Blake's written works arranged in rational order for reference. Till the dawn of that day people must make what shift they can in chaos. In _Ahania_, though a fine and sonorous piece of wind-music, we have not found many separate notes worth striking. Formless as these poems may seem, it is often the floating final impression of power which makes them memorable and valuable, rather than any stray gleam of purple or glitter of pearl on the skirt. Thus the myth runs--to the best of its power; but the tether of it is but short. Fuzon, born of the fiery part of the God of nature, in revolt against his father, divides him in twain as with a beam of fire; the desire of Urizen is separated from him; this divided soul, "his invisible lust," he sees now as she is apart from himself, and calls Sin; seizes her on his mountains of jealousy; kisses and weeps over her, then casts her forth and hides her in cloud, in dumb distance of mysterious space; "jealous though she was invisible." Divided from him, she turns to mere shadow "unseen, unbodied, unknown, the mother of Pestilence." But the beam cast by Fuzon was light upon earth--light to "Egypt," the house of bondage and place of captivity for the outcast human children of Urizen. Thus far the book floats between mere allegory and creative myth; not difficult however to trace to the root of its purport. From this point it grows, if not wilder in words, still mistier in build of limb and shape of feature. Fuzon, smitten by the bow of Urizen, seems to typify dimly the Christian or Promethean sacrifice; the revolted God or son of God, who giving to men some help or hope to enlighten them, is slain for an atonement to the wrath of his father: though except for the mythical sonship Prometheus would be much the nearer parallel. The bow, formed in secresy of the nerves of a slain dragon "scaled and poisonous-horned," begotten of the contemplations of Urizen and destroyed by him in combat, must be another type, half conceived and hardly at all wrought out, of the secret and jealous law of introspective faith divided against itself and the god of its worship, but strong enough to smite the over-confident champion of men even in his time of triumph, when he "thought Urizen slain by his wrath: I am God, said he, eldest of things." (II. 8.) Suddenly the judgment of the jealous wrath of God falls upon him; the rock hurled as an arrow "enters his bosom; his beautiful visage, his tresses that gave light to the mornings of heaven, were smitten with darkness.--But the rock fell upon the earth, Mount Sinai, in Arabia:" being indeed a type of the moral law of Moses, sent to destroy and suppress the native rebellious energies and active sins of men. Here one may catch fast hold of one thing--the identity of Blake's "Urizen," at least for this time, with the Deity of the earlier Hebrews; the God of the Law and Decalogue rather than of Job or the Prophets. "On the accursed tree of mystery" that shoots up under his heel from "tears and sparks of vegetation" fallen on the barren rock of separation, where "shrunk away from Eternals," alienated from the ancient freedom of the first Gods or Titans, averse to their large and liberal laws of life, the jealous God sat secret--on the topmost stem of this tree Urizen "nailed the corpse of his first-begotten." Thenceforward there fell upon the half-formed races of men sorrow only and pestilence, barren pain of unprofitable fruit and timeless burden of desire and disease. One need not sift the myth too closely; it would be like winnowing water and weighing cloud with scale or sieve. The two illustrations, it may here be said, are very slight--mere hints of a design, and merely touched with colour. In the frontispiece Ahania, divided from Urizen, floats upon a stream of wind between hill and cloud, with haggard limbs and straightened spectral hair; on the last leaf a dim Titan, wounded and bruised, lies among rocks flaked with leprous lichen and shaggy with bloodlike growths of weed and moss. One final glimpse we may take of Ahania after her division--the love of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than useless. Such may be the hinted meaning, or at least some part of it; but the work, it must be said, holds by implication dim and great suggestions of something more than our analytic ingenuities can well unravel by this slow process of suggestion. Properly too Ahania seems rather to represent the divine generative desire or love, translated on earth into sexual expression; the female side of the creative power--mother of all things made. "The lamenting voice of Ahania weeping upon the void and round the Tree of Fuzon. Distant in solitary night her voice was heard, but no form had she; but her tears from clouds eternal fell round the Tree. And the voice cried 'Ah Urizen! Love! Flower of morning! I weep on the verge of non-entity: how wide the abyss between Ahania and thee! I lie on the verge of the deep, I see thy dark clouds ascend; I see thy black forests and floods, a horrible waste to my eyes. Weeping I walk over the rocks, over dens, and through valleys of death. Why dost thou despise Ahania, to cast me from thy bright presence into the world of loneness? I cannot touch his hand; nor weep on his knees; nor hear his voice and bow; nor see his eyes and joy; nor hear his footsteps, and my heart leap at the lovely sound; I cannot kiss the place where his bright feet have trod: but I wander on the rocks with hard necessity. Where is my golden palace? where my ivory bed? where the joy of my morning hour? where the sons of eternity singing to awake bright Urizen my king to arise to the mountain sport, to the bliss of eternal valleys, to awake my king in the morn, to embrace Ahania's joy on the breath of his open bosom; from my soft cloud of dew to fall in showers of life on his harvest? When he gave my happy soul to the sons of eternal joy; when he took the daughters of life into my chambers of love; when I found babes of bliss on my beds and bosoms of milk in my chambers, filled with eternal seed. O! eternal births sung round Ahania in interchange sweet of their joys; swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness, bursting in clouds my odours, my ripe figs and rich pomegranates, in infant joy at thy feet, O Urizen, sported and sang: then thou with thy lap full of seed, with thy hand full of generous fire, walkedst forth from the clouds of morning, on the virgins of springing joy, on the human soul, to cast the seed of eternal science. The sweat poured down thy temples, to Ahania returned in evening; the moisture awoke to birth my mother's joys sleeping in bliss. But now alone over rocks, mountains--cast out from thy lovely bosom--cruel jealousy! selfish fear! self-destroying! how can delight renew in these chains of darkness, where bones of beasts are strewn on the bleak and snowy mountains, where bones from the birth are buried before they see the light?'"--_Ahania_, ch. v., v. 1-14. With the prolonged melody of this lament the _Book of Ahania_ winds itself up; one of the most musical among this crowd of singing shadows. In the same year the last and briefest of this first prophetic series was engraved. The _Song of Los_, broken into two divisions headed _Africa_ and _Asia_, has more affinity to _Urizen_ and _Ahania_ than to _Europe_ and _America_. The old themes of delusion and perversion are once again rehandled; not without vigorous harmonies of choral expression. The illustrations are of special splendour, as though designed to atone for the lean and denuded form in which _Ahania_ had been sent forth. In the frontispiece a grey old giant, clothed from the waist only with heavy raiment of livid and lurid white, bows down upon a Druid altar before the likeness of a darkened sun low-hung in heaven, filled with sombre and fiery forms of things, and shooting out upon each quarter a broad reflected ray like the reflection struck by sunlight from a broad bare sword-blade, but touched also, as with strange infection, with flakes of deadly colour that vibrate upon the starless solid ground of an intolerable night. Less of menace with more of sadness is in the landscape and sky on the title-page: a Titan, with one weighty hand lying on a gigantic skull, rests at the edge of a green sloping moor, himself seeming a grey fragment of moorland rock; brown fire of waste grass or rusted flower stains crag and bent all round him; the sky is all night and fire, bitter red and black. On the first page a serpent, splendid with blood-red specks and scales of greenish blue, darts the cloven flame of its tongue against a brilliant swarm of flies; and again throughout the divided lines a network of fair tortuous things, of flickering leaf and sinuous tendril and strenuous root, flashes and curls from margin to margin. This song is the song of Time, sung to the four harps of the world, each continent a harp struck by Time as by a harper. In brief dim words it celebrates the end of the world of the patriarchs where faith and freedom were one, the advent of the iron laws and ages, when God the Accuser gave his laws to the nations by the hands of the children of time: when to the extreme east was given mere abstract philosophy for faith instead of clear pure belief, and man became slave to the elements, the slave and not the lord of the nature of things; but not yet was philosophy a mere matter of the five senses. Thus they fared in the east; meantime the spirits of the patriarchal world shrank beneath waters or fled in fires, Adam from Eden, Noah from Ararat; and "Moses beheld upon Mount Sinai forms of dark delusion." Over each religion, Indian and Jewish and Grecian, some special demon or god of the mythology is bidden preside; Christianity, the expression of human sorrow, human indulgence and forgiveness, was given as gospel to "a man of sorrows" by the two afflicted spirits who typify man and woman, in whom the bitter errors and the sore needs of either several sex upon earth are reproduced in vast vague reflection; to them therefore the gentler gospel belongs as of right. Next comes Mahometanism, to give some freedom and fair play to the controlled and abused senses; but northwards other spirits set on foot a code of war to satiate their violent delight. So on all sides is the world overgrown with kingdoms and churches, codes and creeds; inspiration is crushed and erased; the sons of Time and Space reign alone; Har and Heva, the spirits of loftier and purer kind who were not as the rest of the Titan brood that "lived in war and lust," are fled and fallen, become as mere creeping things; and the world is ripe to bring forth for its cruel and mournful God the final fruit of reason debased and faith distorted. "Thus the terrible race of Los and Enitharmon gave Laws and Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more And more to Earth, closing and restraining; Till a Philosophy of Five Senses was complete; Urizen wept, and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke." These "terrible sons" of time and space are the presiding demons of each creed or code; the sons of men are in their hands now, for the father and mother of men are fallen gods, oblivious and transformed: and these minor demons are all subservient to the Creator, whose soul, sorrowful but not merciful, animates the whole pained world. So, with cloud of menace and fire of wrath shed out about the deceased gods and the new philosophies, the first part ends. In the second part the clouds have broken and the fire has come forth; revolution has begun in Europe; the ancient lords of Asia are startled from their dens and cry in bitterness of soul for help of the old oppressions; for councillors and for taxes, for plagues and for priests, "to turn man from his path; to restrain the child from the womb; to cut off the bread from the city, that the remnant may learn to obey: that the pride of the heart may fail; that the lust of the eye may be quenched; that the delicate ear in its infancy may be dulled, and the nostrils closed up; to teach mortal worms the path that leads from the gates of the grave." At their cry Urizen arose, the lord of Asia from of old, ever since he cast down the patriarchal law and set up the Mosaic code; "his shuddering waving wings went enormous above the red flames," to contend with the rekindled revolution, "the thick-flaming thought-creating fires of Orc;" "His books of brass, iron, and gold Melted over the land as he flew, Heavy-waving, howling, weeping. And he stood over Judea, And stayed in his ancient places, And stretched his clouds over Jerusalem. For Adam, a mouldering skeleton, Lay bleached on the garden of Eden; And Noah, as white as snow, On the mountains of Ararat." Thus, with thunder from eastward and fire from westward, the God of jealousy and the Spirit of freedom met together; earth shrank at the meeting of them. "Forth from the dead dust rattling bones to bones Came; shaking, convulsed, the shivering clay breathes; And all flesh naked stands; Fathers and Friends; Mothers and Infants; Kings and Warriors; The Grave shrieks with delight, and shakes Her hollow womb, and clasps the solid stem; Her bosom swells with wild desire; And milk and blood and glandous wine In rivers rush and shout and dance On mountain, dale and plain. The Song of Los is ended. Urizen wept." So much for the text; which has throughout a contagious power of excitement in the musical passion of its speech. For these books, above all, it is impossible to read continuously and not imbibe a certain half-nervous enjoyment from their long cadences and tempestuous undulations of melody. Such passion went to the writing of them that some savour of that strong emotion infects us also in reading pages which seem still hot from the violent touch of the poet. The design of Har and Heva flying from their lustful and warlike brethren across green waste land before a late and thunder-coloured sky, he grasping her with convulsive fear, she looking back as she runs with lifted arm and flame-like hair and fiery flow of raiment; and that succeeding where they reappear fallen to mere king and queen of the vegetable world, themselves half things of vegetable life; are both noble if somewhat vehement and reckless. In this latter, the deep green-blue heaven full of stars like flowers is set with sweet and deep effect against the darkening green of the vast lily-leaves supporting the fiery pallor of those shapely chalices which enclose as the heart of either blossom the queen lying at her length, and the king sitting with bright plucked-out pistil in hand by way of sceptre or sword; and below them the dim walls of the world alone are wholly black: his robes of soft shot purple and red, her long chrysalid shell or husk of tarnished gold, are but signs of their bondage and fall from deity; they are fallen to be mere flowers. More might be said of the remaining designs; the fierce glory of sweeping branches and driven leaves in a strong wind, the fervent sky and glimmering hill, the crouching figures above and under, the divine insane luxuriance of cloudy and flowery colour which makes twice luminous the last page of the poem; the strange final design where a spirit with huge childlike limbs and lifted hair seems to smite with glittering mallet the outer rim of a huger blood-red sun; but for this book we have no more space; and much laborious travel lies ahead of us yet. [Illustration] With the _Song of Los_ the first or London series of prophecies came to a close not unfit or unmelodious. As their first word had been Revelation, their last was Revolution. We have now to deal with the two later and larger books written at Felpham, but not put forth till 1804. To one of these at least we must allow some tolerably full notice. The _Milton_ shall here take precedence. This poem, though sufficiently vexatious to the human sense at first sight, is worth some care and some admiration. Its preface must here be read in full. "The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient and consciously and professedly inspired men, will hold their proper rank; and the daughters of memory shall become the daughters of inspiration. Shakespeare and Milton were both curbed by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword. Rouse up, O young men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university; who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and his Apostles, that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations, those worlds of eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord. And did those feet in ancient time Walk over England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic mills? Bring me my bow of burning gold; Bring me my arrows of desire; Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold; Bring me my chariot of fire. I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land. 'Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets.'--Numbers xi. 29." After this strange and grand prelude, which, though taken in the letter it may read like foolishness, is in the spirit of it certainty and truth for all time, we pass again under the shadow and into the land that shifts and slips under our feet. Something however out of the chaos of fire and wind and stormy colour may be caught at by fits and stored up for such as can like it. Thus the poem opens, with not less fervour and splendour of sound than usual. "Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet's Song! Record the journey of immortal Milton thro' your realms Of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose His burning thirst and freezing hunger! Come into my hand, By your mild power descending down the Nerves of my right arm From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his Paradise And in it caused the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms In likeness of himself." (Observe here the answer by anticipation to the old foolish charge of madness and belief in mere material visions; a charge indeed refuted and confuted at every turn we take. Thus, and no otherwise, did Blake believe in his dead visitors and models: as spectres formed into new and significant shape by God, after his own likeness; _not_ called up as by some witch of Endor and reclothed with the rags and rottenness of their dead old bodies; creatures existing within the brain and imagination of the workman, not as they were once externally and by accident, but as they will be for ever by the essence and substance of their nature. For the "vegetated shadow" or "human vegetable" no mystic ever had deeper or subtler contempt than Blake; nor was ever a man less likely to care about raising or laying it after death.) "Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetated Beneath your land of shadows; of its sacrifices, and Its offerings: even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God, Became its prey; a curse, an offering, and an atonement For Death Eternal, in the heavens of Albion, and before the gates Of Jerusalem his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah." Let the Sufis of the West make what construction they can of that doctrine. We will help them, before passing on, with another view of the Atonement, taken from _The Everlasting Gospel_. "But when Jesus was crucified, Then was perfected his galling pride. In three days he devoured his prey, _And still he devours the body of clay_; For dust and clay is the serpent's meat, Which never was meant for man to eat." That is, the spirit must be eternally at work consuming and destroying the likeness of things material and the religions made out of them. This over-fervent prophet of freedom for the senses as well as the soul would have them free, one may say, only for the soul's sake: talking as we see he did of redemption from the body and salvation by the spirit at war with it, in words which literally taken would hardly have misbecome a monk of Nitria. Returning to the _Milton_, we are caught again in the mythologic whirlpools and cross-currents of symbol and doctrine; our ears rung deaf and dazed by the hammers of Los (Time) and our eyes bewildered by the wheels and woofs of Enitharmon (Space): "her looms vibrate with soft affections, weaving the Web of Life out from the ashes of the Dead." This is a fragment of the main myth, whose details Los and Enitharmon themselves for the present forbid our following out. "The Three Classes of men regulated by Los's hammer, and woven By Enitharmon's Looms, and spun beneath the Spindle of Tirzah: The first: The Elect from before the foundation of the World; The second: The Redeemed. The Third: the Reprobate and formed To destruction from the mother's womb." Into the myth of the harrow and horses of Palamabron, more Asiatic in tone than any other of Blake's, and full of the vast proportion and formless fervour of Hindoo legends, we will not haul any reluctant reader. Let him only take enough by way of extract to understand how thoroughly one vein of fiery faith runs through all the prophetic books, and one passionate form of doctrine is enforced and beaten in upon the disciple again and again; not hitherto with much material effect. "And in the midst of the Great Assembly Palamabron prayed; O God, protect me from my friends that they have not power over me; Thou hast given me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies." Then the wrath of Rintrah, the most fiery of the spirits who are children of Time, having entered by lot into Satan, who was of the Elect from the first, "seeming a brother, being a tyrant, even thinking himself a brother while he is murdering the just," "with incomparable mildness," believing "that he had not oppressed"--a symbolic point much insisted on-- "He created Seven deadly Sins, drawing out his infernal scroll Of moral laws and cruel punishments upon the clouds of Jehovah, To pervert the divine voice in its entrance to the earth With thunders of war and trumpet's sound, with armies of disease; Punishments and deaths mustered and numbered; saying, I am God alone, There is no other; let all obey my principles of moral individuality I have brought them from the uppermost innermost recesses Of my Eternal Mind; transgressors I will rend off for ever; As now I rend this accursed Family from my covering." This is the Satan of Blake, sufficiently unlike the Miltonic. Of himself he cannot conceive evil and bring forth destruction; the absolute Spirit of Evil is alien from this mythology; he must enter into the body of a law or system and put on the qualities of spirits strange to himself (Rintrah); he is divided, inconsistent, a mystery and error to himself; he represents Monotheism with its stringent law and sacerdotal creed, Jewish or Christian, as opposed to Pantheism whereby man and God are one, and by culture and perfection of humanity man makes himself God. The point of difference here between Blake and many other western Pantheists is that in his creed self-abnegation (in the mystic sense, not the ascetic--the Oriental, not the Catholic) is the highest and only perfect form of self-culture: and as Satan (under "names divine"--see the Epilogue to the _Gates of Paradise_) is the incarnate type of Monotheism, so is Jesus the incarnate type of Pantheism. To return to our myth; the stronger spirit rears walls of rocks and forms rivers of fire round them; "And Satan, _not having the Science of Wrath but only of Pity_,[57] Rent them asunder; and Wrath was left to Wrath, and Pity to Pity." This is Blake's ultimate conception of active evil; not wilful wrong-doing by force of arm or of spirit; but mild error, tender falsehood innocent of a purpose, embodied in an external law of moral action and restrictive faith, and clothed with a covering of cruelty which adheres to and grows into it (Decalogue and Law). A subtle and rather noble conception, developing easily and rapidly into what was once called the Manichean doctrine as to the Old Testament. "If the guilty should be condemned, he must be an Eternal Death, And one must die for another throughout all Eternity; Satan is fallen from his station and can never be redeemed, But must be new-created continually moment by moment, And therefore the class of Satan shall be called the Elect, and those Of Rintrah the Reprobate, and those of Palamabron the Redeemed; For he is redeemed from Satan's law, the wrath falling on Rintrah. And therefore Palamabron cared not to call a solemn Assembly Till Satan had assumed Rintrah's wrath in the day of mourning, In a feminine delusion[58] of false pride self-deceived." The words of the text recur not unfrequently in the prophetic books. A single final act of redemption by sacrifice and oblation of one for another is not admitted as sufficient, or even possible. The favourite dogma is this, of the eternity of sacrifice; endless redemption to be bought at no less a price than endless self-devotion. To this plea of "an Eternal" before the assembly succeeds the myth of Leutha "offering herself a ransom for Satan:"[59] a myth, not an allegory; for of allegory pure and simple there is scarcely a trace in Blake. "I formed the Serpent Of precious stones and gold turned poison on the sultry waste. To do unkind things with kindness; with power armed, to say The most irritating things in the midst of tears and love; These are the stings of the Serpent." This whole myth of Leutha is splendid for colour, and not too subtle to be thought out: the imaginative action of the poem plays like fire and palpitates like blood upon every line, as the lips of caressing flame and the tongues of cleaving light in which the text is set fold and flash about the margins. "The Elect shall meet the Redeemed, on Albion's rocks they shall meet, Astonished at the Transgressor, in him beholding the Saviour. And the Elect shall say to the Redeemed; We behold it is of Divine Mercy alone, of free gift and Election, that we live; Our Virtues and cruel Goodnesses have deserved Eternal Death." Forgiveness of sin and indulgence, the disciple perceives, is not enough for this mythology; it must include forgiveness of virtue and abstinence, the hypocritic holiness made perfect in the body of death for six thousand years under the repressive and restrictive law called after the name of the God of the Jews, who "was leprous." Thus prophesies Blake, in a fury of supra-Christian dogmatism. Here ends the "Song of the Bard" in the First Book. "Many condemned the high-toned song, saying, Pity and Love are too venerable for the imputation of guilt. Others said, If it is true!" Let us say the same, and pass on: listening only to the Bard's answer:-- "I am inspired! I know it is Truth! for I sing According to the Inspiration of the Poetic Genius Who is the Eternal all-protecting divine Humanity To whom be Glory and Power and Dominion evermore. Amen." Then follows the incarnation and descent into earth and hell of Milton, who represents here the redemption by inspiration, working in pain and difficulty before the expiration of the six thousand Satanic years. His words are worth quoting:-- "When will the Resurrection come, to deliver the sleeping body From corruptibility? O when, Lord Jesus, wilt thou come? Tarry no longer; for my soul lies at the gates of death: I will arise and look forth for the morning of the grave: I will go down to the sepulchre and see if morning breaks. I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate And I be seized and given into the hands of my own selfhood." This grand dogma, that personal love and selfishness make up the sin which defies redemption, is in a manner involved in that former one of the necessary "eternity of sacrifice," for "I in my selfhood am that Satan; I am that Evil One; He is my Spectre." Now by the light of these extracts let any student examine the great figure at p. 13, where "he beheld his own Shadow--and entered into it." Clothed in the colours of pain, crowned with the rays of suffering, it stands between world and world in a great anguish of transformation and change: Passion included by Incarnation. Erect on a globe of opaque shadow, backed by a sphere of aching light that opens flower-wise into beams of shifting colour and bitter radiance as of fire, it appeals with a doubtful tortured face and straining limbs to the flat black wall and roof of heaven. All over the head is a darkness not of transitory cloud or night that will some time melt into day; recalling that great verse: "Neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night." "As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps, Else he would wake; so seemed he entering his Shadow; but With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence Entering, they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body Which now arose and walked with them in Eden, as an Eighth Image, Divine tho' darkened, and tho' walking as one walks In Sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him." The whole passage is full of a deep and dim beauty which grows clearer and takes form of feature to those only who bring with them eyes to see and patience to desire it. Take next this piece of cosmography, worth comparing with Dante's vision of the worlds:-- "The nature of infinity is this; That everything has its Own vortex: and when once a traveller thro' Eternity Has passed that vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind His path into a globe itself enfolding, like a sun Or like a moon or like a universe of starry majesty, While he keeps onward in his wondrous journey thro' the earth, Or like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent: As the eye of man views both the east and west encompassing Its vortex, and the north and south, with all their starry host; Also the rising and setting moon he views surrounding His cornfields and his valleys of five hundred acres square; Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent To the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade; Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth A vortex not yet passed by the traveller thro' Eternity." One curious piece of symbolism may be extracted from the myth, as the one reference to anything actual:-- "Then Milton knew that the Three Heavens of Beulah were beheld By him on earth in his bright pilgrimage of sixty years In those three Females whom his Wives, and those three whom his Daughters Had represented and contained, that they might be resumed By giving up of Selfhood." But of Milton's flight, of the cruelties of Ulro, of his journey above the Mundane Shell, which "is a vast concave earth, an immense hardened shadow of all things upon our vegetated earth, enlarged into dimension and deformed into indefinite space," we will take no more account here; nor of the strife with Urizen, "one giving life, the other giving death, to his adversary;" hardly even of the temptation by the sons and daughters of Rahab and Tirzah, when "The twofold Form Hermaphroditic, and the Double-sexed, The Female-male and the Male-female, self-dividing stood Before him in their beauty and in cruelties of holiness." (Compare the beautiful song "To Tirzah," in the Songs of Experience.) This Tirzah, daughter of Rahab the holy, is "Natural Religion" (Theism as opposed to Pantheism), which would fain have the spiritual Jerusalem offered in sacrifice to it. "Let her be offered up to holiness: Tirzah numbers her: She numbers with her fingers every fibre ere it grow: Where is the Lamb of God? where is the promise of his coming? Her shadowy sisters form the bones, even the bones of Horeb Around the marrow; and the orbed scull around the brain; She ties the knot of nervous fibres into a white brain; She ties the knot of bloody veins into a red-hot heart; She ties the knot of milky seed into two lovely heavens, Two yet but one; each in the other sweet reflected; these Are our Three Heavens beneath the shades of Beulah, land of rest." Here and henceforward the clamour and glitter of the poem become more and more confused; nevertheless every page is set about with jewels; as here, in a more comprehensible form than usual:-- "God sent his two servants Whitfield and Wesley; were they prophets? Or were they idiots and madmen? 'Show us Miracles'? Can you have greater Miracles than these? Men who devote Their life's whole comfort to entire scorn, injury, and death?" Take also these scraps of explanation mercifully vouchsafed us:-- "Bowlahoola is named Law by Mortals: Tharmas founded it Because of Satan: * * * * But Golgonooza is named Art and Manufacture by mortal men. In Bowlahoola Los's Anvils stand and his Furnaces rage. Bowlahoola thro' all its porches feels, tho' too fast founded Its pillars and porticoes to tremble at the force Of mortal or immortal arm; * * * The Bellows are the Animal Lungs; the Hammers the Animal Heart; The Furnaces the Stomach for digestion;" (Here we must condense instead of transcribing. While thousands labour at this work of the Senses in the halls of Time, thousands "play on instruments stringed or fluted" to lull the labourers and drown the painful sound of the toiling members, and bring forgetfulness of this slavery to the flesh: a myth of animal life not without beauty, and to Blake one of great attraction.) "Los is by mortals named Time, Enitharmon is named Space; But they depict him bald and aged who is in eternal youth All-powerful, and his locks flourish like the brows of morning; He is the Spirit of Prophecy, the ever-apparent Elias. Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment." At least this last magnificent passage should in common charity and sense have been cited in the biography, if only to explain the often-quoted words Los and Enitharmon. Neither blindness to such splendour of symbol, nor deafness to such music of thought, can excuse the omission of what is so wholly necessary for the comprehension of extracts already given, and given (as far as one can see) with no available purpose whatever. The remainder of the first book of the _Milton_ is a vision of Nature and prophecy of the gathering of the harvest of Time and treading of the winepress of War; in which harvest and vintage work all living things have their share for good or evil. "How red the sons and daughters of Luvah! here they tread the grapes, Laughing and shouting, drunk with odours; many fall o'erwearied, Drowned in the wine is many a youth and maiden; those around Lay them on skins of Tigers and of the spotted Leopard and the wild Ass Till they revive, or bury them in cool grots, making lamentation. This Winepress is called War on Earth; it is the printing-press Of Los, there he lays his words in order above the mortal brain As cogs are formed in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel." All kind of insects, of roots and seeds and creeping things--"all the armies of disease visible or invisible"--are there; "The slow slug; the grasshopper that sings and laughs and drinks (Winter comes, he folds his slender bones without a murmur);" wasp and hornet, toad and newt, spider and snake, "They throw off their gorgeous raiment; they rejoice with loud jubilee Around the winepresses of Luvah, naked and drunk with wine. There is the nettle that stings with soft down; and there The indignant thistle whose bitterness is bred in his milk; Who feeds on contempt of his neighbour; there all the idle weeds That creep around the obscure places show their various limbs Naked in all their beauty, dancing round the winepresses. But in the winepresses the human grapes sing not nor dance, They howl and writhe in shoals of torment, in fierce flames consuming;" tortured for the cruel joy and deadly sport of Luvah's sons and daughters; "They dance around the dying and they drink the howl and groan; They catch the shrieks in cups of gold, they hand them one to another; These are the sports of love, and these the sweet delights of amorous play; Tears of the grape, the death-sweat of the cluster; the last sigh Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah." Take also this from the speech of Time to his reapers. "You must bind the sheaves not by nations or families, You shall bind them in three classes; according to their classes So shall you bind them, separating what has been mixed Since men began to be woven into nations. * * * * * The Elect is one class; you Shall bind them separate; they cannot believe in eternal life Except by miracle and a new birth. The other two classes, The Reprobate[60] who never cease to believe, and the Redeemed Who live in doubts and fears, perpetually tormented by the Elect, These you shall bind in a twin bundle for the consummation." The constellations that rise in immortal order, that keep their course upon mountain and valley, with sound of harp and song, "with cups and measures filled with foaming wine;" that fill the streams with light of many visions and leave in luminous traces upon the extreme sea the peace of their passage; these too are sons of Los, and labour in the vintage. The gorgeous flies on meadow or brook, that weave in mazes of music and motion the delight of artful dances, and sound instruments of song as they touch and cross and recede; the trees shaken by the wind into sound of heavy thunder till they become preachers and prophets to men; these are the sons of Los, these the visions of eternity; and we see but as it were the hem of their garments. A noble passage follows, in which are resumed the labours of the sons of time in fashioning men and the stations of men. They make for doubts and fears cabinets of ivory and gold; when two spectres "like lamps quivering" between life and death stand ready for the blind malignity of combat, they are taken and moulded instead into shapes fit for love, clothed with soft raiment by softer hands, drawn after lines of sweet and perfect form. Some "in the optic nerve" give to the poor infinite wealth of insight, power to know and enjoy the invisible heaven, and to the rich scorn and ignorance and thick darkness. Others build minutes and hours and days; "And every moment has a couch of gold for soft repose (A moment equals a pulsation of the artery) And every minute has an azure tent with silken veils, And every hour has a bright golden gate carved with skill, And every day and night has walls of brass and gates of adamant Shining like precious stones and ornamented with appropriate signs, And every month a silver-paved terrace builded high, And every year invulnerable barriers with high towers, And every age is moated deep, with bridges of silver and gold, And every Seven Ages are encircled with a flaming fire." There is much more of the same mythic sort concerning the duration of time, the offices of the nerves (_e.g._, in the optic nerve sleep was transformed to death by Satan the father of sin and death, even as we have seen sensual death re-transformed by Mercy into sleep), and such-like huge matters; full, one need not now repeat, of subtle splendour and fanciful intensity. But enough now of this over-careful dredging in such weedy waters; where nevertheless, at risk of breaking our net, we may at every dip fish up some pearl. At the opening of the second book the pearls lie close and pure. From this (without explanation or reference) has been taken the lovely and mutilated extract at p. 197 of the _Life_. Thus it stands in Blake's text:-- "Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring; The lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn Appears, listens silent; then, springing from the waving corn-field, loud He leads the choir of day: trill--trill--trill--trill-- Mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse, Re-echoing against the lovely blue and shining heavenly shell His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather On throat, and breast, and wing, vibrate with the effluence divine. All nature listens to him silent; and the awful Sun Stands still upon the mountains, looking on this little bird With eyes of soft humility, and wonder, love, and awe. Then loud, from their green covert, all the birds began their song,-- The thrush, the linnet and the goldfinch, robin and the wren, Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the mountains; The nightingale again essays his song, and through the day And through the night warbles luxuriant; every bird of song Attending his loud harmony with admiration and love. (This is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.) Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours, And none can tell how from so small a centre come such sweets, Forgetting that within that centre eternity expands Its ever-during doors that Og and Anak fiercely guard.[61] First ere the morning breaks joy opens in the flowery bosoms, Joy even to tears, which the sun rising dries; first the wild thyme And meadow-sweet downy and soft waving among the reeds, Light springing on the air, lead the sweet dance; they wake The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak, the flaunting beauty Revels along upon the wind; the white-thorn, lovely May, Opens her many lovely eyes; listening, the rose still sleeps, None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower, The pink, the jessamine, the wallflower, the carnation, The jonquil, the mild lily, opes her heavens; every tree And flower and herb soon fill the air with an innumerable dance, Yet all in order sweet and lovely; men are sick with love. Such is a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon." This Beulah is "a place where contrarieties are equally true;" "it is a pleasant lovely shadow where no dispute can come because of those who sleep:" made to shelter, before they "pass away in winter," the temporary emanations "which trembled exceedingly neither could they live, because the life of man was too exceeding unbounded." Of the incarnation and descent of Ololon, of the wars and prophecies of Milton, and of all the other Felpham visions here put on record, we shall say no more in this place; but all these things are written in the Second Book. The illustrative work is also noble and worth study in all ways. One page for example is covered by a design among the grandest of Blake's. Two figures lie half embraced, as in a deadly sleep without dawn of dream or shadow of rest, along a bare slant ledge of rock washed against by wintry water. Over these two stoops an eagle balanced on the heavy-laden air, with stretching throat and sharpened wings, opening beak, and eyes full of a fierce perplexity of pity. All round the greenish and black slope of moist sea-cliff the weary tidal ripple plashes and laps, thrusting up as it were faint tongues and listless fingers tipped with foam. On an earlier page, part of the text of which we have given, crowd and glitter all shapes and images of insect or reptile life, sprinkling between line and margin keen points of jewel-coloured light and soft flashes as of starry or scaly brilliance. The same year 1804 saw the huge advent of _Jerusalem_. Of that terrible "emanation," hitherto the main cornerstone of offence to all students of Blake, what can be said within any decent limit? or where shall any traveller find a rest for feet or eyes in that noisy and misty land? It were a mere frenzy of discipleship that would undertake by force of words to make straight these crooked ways or compel things incoherent to cohere. _Supra hanc petram_--and such a rock it is to begin any church-building upon! Many of the unwary have stumbled over it and broken their wits. Seriously, one cannot imagine that people will ever read through this vast poem with pleasure enough to warrant them in having patience with it. [Illustration] Several things, true in the main of all the prophetic books, are especially true and memorable with regard to those written or designed during the "three years' slumber" at Felpham. They are the results of intense and active solitude working upon the capricious nerves and tremulous brain of a man naturally the most excitable and receptive of men. They are to be read by the light of his earlier work in the same line; still more perhaps by the light of those invaluable ten letters printed in Vol. II. of the _Life_, for which one can hardly give thanks enough. The incredible fever of spirit under the sting and stress of which he thought and laboured all his life through, has left marks of its hot and restless presence as clearly on this short correspondence as on the voluminous rolls of prophecy. The merit or demerit of the work done is never in any degree the conscious or deliberate result of a purpose. Possessed to the inmost nerve and core by a certain faith, consumed by the desire to obey his instinct of right by preaching that faith, utterly regardless of all matters lying outside of his own inspiration, he wrote and engraved as it was given him to do, and no otherwise. As to matter and argument, the enormous _Jerusalem_ is simply a fervent apocalyptic discourse on the old subjects--love without law and against law, virtue that stagnates into poisonous dead matter by moral isolation, sin that must exist for the sake of being forgiven, forgiveness that must always keep up with sin--must even maintain sin that it may have something to keep up with and to live for. Without forgiveness of sins, the one thing necessary, we lapse each man into separate self-righteousness and a cruel worship of natural morality and religious law. For nature, oddly enough as it seems at first sight, is assumed by this mystical code to be the cruellest and narrowest of absolute moralists. Only by worship of imaginative impulse, the grace of the Lamb of God, which admits infinite indulgence in sin and infinite forgiveness of sin--only by some such faith as this shall the world be renewed and redeemed. This may be taken as the rough result, broadly set down, of the portentous book of revelation. Never, one may suppose, did any Oriental heretic drive his deductions further or set forth his conclusions in obscurer form. Never certainly did a man fall to his work with keener faith and devotion. Sin itself is not so evil--but the remembrance and punishment of sin! "Injury the Lord heals; but vengeance cannot be healed." Next or equal in hatefulness to the division of qualities into evil and good (see above, _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_) is the separation of sexes into male and female: hence jealous love and personal desire, that set itself against the mystical frankness of fraternity: hence too (contradictory as it may seem till one thinks it out) the hermaphroditic emblem is always used as a symbol seemingly of duplicity and division, perplexity and restraint. The two sexes should not combine and contend; they must finally amalgamate and be annihilated.[62] All this is of course more or less symbolic, and not to be taken in literal coarseness or folly of meaning. The whole stage is elemental, the scheme one of patriarchal vapour, and the mythologic actors mere Titans outlined in cloud. Reserving this always, we shall not be far out in interpreting Blake's dim creed somewhat as above. One distinction it is here possible to make, and desirable to keep in mind: Blake at one time speaks of Nature as the source of moral law, "the harlot virgin-mother," "Rahab," "the daughter of Babylon," origin of religious restrictions and the worship of abstinence; mother of "the harlot modesty," and spring of all hypocrisies and prohibitions; to whom the religious and moral of this world would fain offer up in sacrifice the spiritual Jerusalem, the virgin espoused, named among men Liberty, forbidding nothing and enjoying all, but therefore clean and not unclean: by whom comes indulgence, after whom follows redemption. At another time this same prophet will plead for freedom on behalf of "natural" energies, and set up the claims of nature to energetic enjoyment and gratification of all desires, against the moral law and government of the creative and restrictive Deity--"Urizen, mistaken Demon of Heaven." With a like looseness of phrase he uses and transposes the words "God" and "Satan," even to an excess of laxity and consequent perplexity; not, it may be suspected, without a grain of innocent if malign pleasure at the chance of inflicting on men of conventional tempers bewilderment and offence. But as to this question of the term "Nature" the case seems to lie thus: when, as throughout the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, he uses it in the simple sense of human or physical condition as opposed to some artificial state of soul or belief, he takes it as the contrary of conventional ideas and habits (of religion and morality as vulgarly conceived or practised); but when, as throughout the _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_, he speaks of nature as opposed to inspiration, it must be taken as the contrary of that higher and subtler religious faith which he is bent on inculcating, and which itself is the only perfect opposite and efficient antagonist to the conventional faith and (to use another of his quasi-technical terms) the "deistical virtue" which he is bent on denying. Blake, one should always remember, was not infidel but heretic; his belief was peculiar enough, but it was not unbelief; it was farther from that than most men's. To him, though for quite personal reasons and in a quite especial sense, much of what is called inspired writing was as sacred and infallible as to any priest of any church. Only before reading he inverted the book. "Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white." (_Everlasting Gospel_, MS.) Thus, by his own showing, in the recorded words of Christ he found authority for his vision and sympathy with his faith; in the published creed of reason or rationalism, he found negation of his belief and antipathy to his aims. Hence in his later denunciation he brackets together the Churches of Rome and England with the Churches of Ferney and Lausanne; it was all uninspired--all "nature's cruel holiness--the deceits of natural religion"; all irremediably involved, all inextricably interwoven with the old fallacies and the old prohibitions. [Illustration] Such points as these do, above most others, deserve, demand, and reward the trouble of clearing up; and these once understood, much that seemed the aimless unreflecting jargon of crude or accidental rhetoric assumes a distinct if unacceptable meaning. It is much otherwise with the external scheme or literal shell of the _Jerusalem_. Let no man attempt to define the post or expound the office of the "terrible sons and daughters." These, with all their flock of emanations and spectrous or vegetating shadows, let us leave to the discretion of Los; who has enough on his hands among them all. Neither let any attempt to plant a human foot upon the soil of the newly-divided shires and counties, partitioned though they be into the mystic likeness of the twelve tribes of Israel. Nor let any questioner of arithmetical mind apply his skill in numbers to the finding of flaws or products in the twelves, twenty-fours, and twenty-sevens which make up the sum of their male and female emanations. In earnest, the externals of this poem are too incredibly grotesque--the mythologic plan too incomparably tortuous--to be fit for any detailed coherence of remark. Nor indeed were they meant to endure it. Such things, and the expression of such things, as are here treated of, are not to be reasoned out; the matter one may say is above reasoning; the manner (taken apart from the matter) is below it: the spirit of the work is too strong and its form too faulty for any rule or line. It will upon the whole suffice if this be kept in mind; that to Blake, in a literal perhaps as well as a mystical sense, Albion was as it were the cradle and centre of all created existence; he even calls on the Jews to recognize it as the parent land of their history and their faith. Its incarnate spirit is chief among the ancient giant-gods, Titans of his mythology, who were lords of the old simple world and its good things, its wise delights and strong sweet instincts, full of the vigorous impulse of innocence; lords of an extinct kingdom, superseded now and transformed by the advent of moral fear and religious jealousy, of pallid faith and artificial abstinence. In this manner Albion is changed and overthrown; hence at length he dies, stifled and slain by his children under the new law. His one friend, not misled or converted to the dispensations of bodily virtue and spiritual restraint, but faithful from of old and even after his change and conversion to moral law, is Time; whose Spectre, or mere outside husk and likeness, is indeed (as it must needs be) fain to range itself on the transitory side of things, fain to follow after the fugitive Emanation embodied in these new forms of life and allied to the faith and habit of the day against the old liberty;[63] but for all the desire of his despair and fierce entreaties to be let go, he is yet kept to work, however afflicted and rebellious, and compelled to labour with Time's self at the building up within every man of that spiritual city which is redemption and freedom for all men (ch. i.). All the myth of this building of "Golgonooza," (that is, we know, inspired art by which salvation must come) is noticeable for sweet intricacy of beauty; only after a little some maddening memory (surely not pure inspiration this time, but rather memory?) of the latter chapters of Ezekiel, with their interminable inexplicable structures and plans, seizes on Blake's passionate fancy and sets him at work measuring and dividing walls and gates in a style calculated to wear out a hecatomb of scholiasts, for whole pages in which no subtilized mediaeval intellect, though trained under seraphic or cherubic doctors, could possibly find one satisfactory hair to split. For it merely trebles the roaring and rolling confusion when some weak grain of symbolism is turned up for a glimpse of time in the thick of a mass of choral prose consisting of absolute fancy and mere naked sound. Not that there is here less than elsewhere of the passion and beauty which redeem so much of these confused and clamorous poems. The merits and attractions of this book are not such as can be minced small and served up in fragments. To do justice to its melodious eloquence and tender subtlety, we should have to analyze or transcribe whole sections: to give any fair notion of the grandeur and variety of its decorations would take up twice the space we can allow to it. Let this brief prologue stand as a sample of the former qualities. "Reader! lover of books! lover of heaven And of that God from whom all things are given; Who in mysterious Sinai's awful cave To Man the wondrous art of writing gave; Again he speaks in thunder and in fire, Thunder of thought and flames of fierce desire; Even from the depths of Hell his voice I hear Within the unfathomed caverns of my ear; Therefore I print; nor vain my types shall be; Heaven, Earth, and Hell henceforth shall live in harmony." "We who dwell on earth," adds the prophet, speaking of the measure and outward fashion of his poem, "can do nothing of ourselves; everything is conducted by Spirits no less than digestion or sleep." It is to be wished then that the spirits had on this occasion spoken less like somnambulists and uttered less indigested verse. For metrical oratory the plea that follows against ordinary metre may be allowed to have some effective significance; however futile if applied to purer and more essential forms of poetry. It will be enough to understand well and bear well in mind once for all that the gist of this poem, regarded either as a scheme of ethics or as a mythological evangel, is simply this: to preach, as in the Saviour's opening invocation, the union of man with God:--("I am not a God afar off;--Lo! we are One; forgiving all evil; not seeking recompense"): to confute the dull mournful insanity of disbelief which compels "the perturbed man" to avert his ear and reject the divine counsellor as a "Phantom of the over-heated brain." This perverted humanity is incarnate in Albion, the fallen Titan, imprisoned by his children; the "sons of Albion" are daemonic qualities of force and faith, the "daughters" are reflex qualities or conditions which emanate from these. As thus; reason supplants faith, and law, moral or religious, grows out of reason; Jerusalem, symbol of imaginative liberty, emanation of his unfallen days, is the faith cast out by the "sons" or spirits who substitute reason for faith, the freedom trodden under by the "daughters" who substitute moral law for moral impulse: "Vala," her Spectre, called "Tirzah" among men, is the personified form in which "Jerusalem" becomes revealed, the perverted incarnation, the wrested medium or condition in which she exists among men. Thus much for the scheme of allegory with which the prophet sets out; but when once he has got his theogony well under way and thrown it well into types, the antitypes all but vanish: every condition or quality has a god or goddess of its own; every obscure state and allegorical gradation becomes a personal agent: and all these fierce dim figures threaten and complain, mingle and divide, struggle and embrace as human friends or foes. The main symbols are even of a monotonous consistency; but no accurate sequence of symbolic detail is to be looked for in the doings and sayings of these contending giants and gods. To those who will remember this distinction and will make allowance for the peculiar dialect and manner of which some account has already been taken, this poem will not seem so wholly devoid of reason or of charm. For its great qualities are much the same in text as in design: plenteous, delicate, vigorous. There is a certain real if rough and lax power of dramatic insight and invention shown even in the singular divisions of adverse symbol against symbol; in such allegories as that which opposes the "human imagination in which all things exist"--do actually exist to all eternity--and the reflex fancy or belief which men confound with this; nay, which they prefer to dwell in and ask comfort from. These two the poet calls the "states" of Beulah and Jerusalem. As the souls of men are attracted towards that "mild heaven" of dreams and shadows where only the reflected image of their own hopes and errors can abide, the imagination, most divine and human, most actual and absolute, of all things, recedes ever further and further among the clouds of smoke, vapours of "abstract philosophy," and is caught among the "starry wheels" of religion and law, whose restless and magnetic revolution attracts and absorbs her. "O what avail the loves and tears of Beulah's lovely daughters? They hold the immortal form in gentle bands and tender tears, But all within is opened into the deeps"-- the deeps of "a dark and unknown night" in which "philosophy wars against imagination." Here also the main myth of the _Europe_ is once more rehandled; to "create a female will," jealous, curious, cunning, full of tender tyranny and confusion, this is "to hide the most evident God in a hidden covert, even in the shadows of a woman and a secluded holy place, that we may pry after him as after a stolen treasure, hidden among the dead and mured up from the paths of life." Thus is it with the Titan Albion and all his race of mythologic men, when for them "Vala supplants Jerusalem," the husk replaces the fruit, the mutable form eclipses the immutable substance. But into these darker parts of the book we will not go too deep. Time, patience, and insight on the part of writer and reader might perhaps clear up all details and lay bare much worth sight and study; but only at the expense of much labour and space. It is feasible, and would be worth doing; but not here. If the singular amalgam called Blake's works should ever get published, and edited to any purpose, this will have to be done by an energetic editor with time enough on his hands and wits enough for the work. We meantime will gather up a few strays that even under these circumstances appear worth hiving. In the address (p. 27) to the Jews, &c., Blake affirms that "Britain was the primitive seat of the patriarchal religion": therefore, in a literal as well as in a mystical sense, Jerusalem was the emanation of the giant Albion. (This it should seem was, according to the mythology, before the visible world was created; in the time when all things were in the divine undivided world of the gods.) "Ye are united, O ye inhabitants of Earth, in one Religion: the most Ancient, the Eternal, and the Everlasting Gospel. The Wicked will turn it to Wickedness; the Righteous, to Righteousness." If there be truth in the Jewish tradition, he adds further on, that man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in heaven and earth, "and they were separated from him by cruel sacrifices; and when compulsory cruel sacrifices had brought Humanity into a feminine tabernacle in the loins of Abraham and David, the Lamb of God, the Saviour, became apparent on earth as the prophets had foretold: the return of Israel is a return to mental sacrifice and war," to noble spiritual freedom and labour, which alone can supplant "corporeal war" and violence of error. The second address (p. 52) "to the Deists" is more singular and more eloquent. Take a few extracts given not quite at random. "He," says Blake, "who preaches natural religion or morality is a flatterer who means to betray, and to perpetuate tyrant pride and the laws of that Babylon which he foresees shall shortly be destroyed with the spiritual and not the natural sword; he is in the state named Rahab." The prophet then enforces his law that "man is born a spectre or Satan and is altogether an Evil," and "must continually be changed into his direct contrary." Those who persuade him otherwise are his enemies. For "man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus he will have the religion of Satan." Again, "Will any one say, Where are those who worship Satan under the name of God?--where are they? Listen. Every religion that preaches vengeance for sin is the religion of the enemy and avenger, and not of the forgiver of sin: and their God is Satan named by the Divine Name." This, he says, must be at root the religion of all who deny revelation and adore nature;[64] for mere nature is Satanic. Adam the first man was created at the same time with Satan, when the earth-giant Albion was cast into a trance of sleep: the first man was a part of the universal fluent nature made opaque; the first fiend, a part contracted; and only by these qualities of opacity and contraction can man or devil have separate natural existence. Those, the prophet adds in his perverse manner, who profess belief in natural virtue are hypocrites; which those cannot be who "pretend to be holier than others, but confess their sins before all the world." _Therefore_ there was never a religious hypocrite! "Rousseau thought men good by nature; he found them evil, and found no friend. Friendship cannot exist without forgiveness of sins continually." And so forth. At p. 66 is a passage recalling the myth of the "Mental Traveller," and which seems to bear out the interpretation we gave to that misty and tempestuous poem. This part of the prophecy, describing the blind pitiful cruelty of divided qualities set against each other, is full of brilliant and noble passages. Even the faint symbolic shapes of Tirzah and all her kind assume now and then a splendour of pathos, utter words of stately sound, complain and appeal even to some recognizable purpose. So much might here be cited that we will prefer to cite nothing but this slight touch of myth. In the world of time "they refuse liberty to the male: not like Beulah, Where every female delights to give her maiden to her husband." The female searches sea and land for gratification to the male genius, who in return clothes her in gems and gold and feeds her with the food of Eden: hence all her beauty beams. But this is only in the "land of dreams," where dwell things "stolen from the human imagination by secret amorous theft:" and when the spectres of the dead awake in that land, "all the jealousies become murderous:--forming a commerce to sell loves with moral law; an equal balance, not going down with decision: therefore--mutual hate returns and mutual deceit and mutual fear." In fact, the divorce batteries are here open again. The third address "to the Christians" is too long to transcribe here; and should in fairness have been given in the biography. Its devout passion and beauty of words might have won notice, and earned tolerance for the more erratic matter in which it lies embedded. "What is the joy of heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What are the pains of hell but ignorance, bodily lust, idleness, and devastation of the things of the spirit?" Mental gifts, given of Christ, "always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrite as sins; but that which is a sin in the sight of cruel man is not so in the sight of our kind God." Every Christian after his ability should openly engage in some mental pursuit; for "to labour in knowledge is to build up Jerusalem; and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders." A little before he has said: "I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination." God being a spirit, and to be worshipped in spirit and in truth, are not all his gifts spiritual gifts? "The Christians then must give up the religion of Caiaphas, the dark preacher of death, of sin, of sorrow, and of punishment, typified as a revolving wheel, a devouring sword; and recognize that the labours of Art and Science alone are the labours of the Gospel." As to religion, "Jesus died because he strove against the current of this wheel--opposing nature; it is natural religion. But Jesus is the bright preacher of life, creating nature from this fiery law, by self-denial and forgiveness of sin." So speaks to the prophet "a Watcher and a Holy One;" bidding him "Go therefore, cast out devils in Christ's name, Heal thou the sick of spiritual disease; Pity the evil; for thou art not sent To smite with terror and with punishments Those that are sick. * * * * But to the publicans and harlots go: Teach them true happiness; but let no curse Go forth out of thy mouth to blight their peace. For hell is opened to heaven; thine eyes behold The dungeons burst, the prisoners set free. England, awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy sister calls; Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death And chase her from thy ancient walls? Thy hills and valleys felt her feet Gently upon their bosoms move; Thy gates beheld sweet Zion's ways; Then was a time of joy and love. And now the time returns again; Our souls exult; and London's towers Receive the Lamb of God to dwell In England's green and pleasant bowers." Much might also be said, had one leave of time, of the last chapter; of the death of the earth-giant through jealousy, and his resurrection when the Saviour appeared to him revealed in the likeness and similitude of Time: of the ultimate deliverance of all things, chanted in a psalm of high and tidal melody; a resurrection wherein all things, even "Tree, Metal, Earth and Stone," become all "Human forms identified; living, going forth, and returning wearied Into the planetary lives of years, months, days, and hours: reposing And then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality. And I heard the name of their emanations: they are named Jerusalem." We will add one reference, to pp. 61-62, where God shows to Jerusalem in a vision "Joseph the carpenter in Nazareth, and Mary his espoused wife." Through the vision of their story the forgiveness of Jerusalem also, when she has gone astray from her Lord, is made manifest to her. "And I heard a voice among the reapers saying, 'Am I Jerusalem the lost adulteress? or am I Babylon come up to Jerusalem?' And another voice answered saying, 'Does the voice of my Lord call me again? am I pure through his mercy and pity? am I become lovely as a virgin in his sight, who am indeed a harlot drunken with the sacrifice of idols?--O mercy, O divine humanity, O forgiveness and pity and compassion, if I were pure I should never have known thee: if I were unpolluted I should never have glorified thy holiness, or rejoiced in thy great salvation.'" The whole passage--and such are not so unfrequent as at first glimpse they seem--is, if seen with equal eyes, whether its purport be right or wrong, "full of wisdom and perfect in beauty." But we will dive after no more pearls at present in this huge oyster-bed; and of the illustrations we can but speak in a rough swift way. These are all generally noble: that at p. 70 is great among the greatest of Blake's. Spires of serpentine cloud are seen before a strong wind below a crescent moon; Druid pillars enclose as with a frame this stormy division of sky; outside them again the vapour twists and thickens; and men standing on desolate broken ground look heavenward or earthward between the pillars. Of others a brief and admirable account is given in the _Life_, more final and sufficient than we can again give; but all in fact should be well seen into by those who would judge fitly of Blake's singular and supreme gift for purely imaginative work. Flowers sprung of earth and lit from heaven, with chalices of floral fire and with flower-like women or men growing up out of their centre; fair large forms full of labour or of rest; sudden starry strands and reaches of breathless heaven washed by drifts of rapid wind and cloud; serrated array of iron rocks and glorious growth of weedy lands or flowering fields; reflected light of bows bent and arrows drawn in heaven, dividing cloud from starlit cloud; stately shapes of infinite sorrow or exuberant joy; all beautiful things and all things terrible, all changes of shadow and of light, all mysteries of the darkness and the day, find place and likeness here: deep waters made glad and sad with heavy light that comes and goes; vast expansion of star-shaped blossom and swift aspiration of laborious flame; strong and sweet figures made subject to strange torture in dim lands of bondage; mystic emblems of plumeless bird and semi-human beast; women like the daughters of giants, with immense shapeliness and vigour of lithe large limbs, clothed about with anguish and crowned upon with triumph; their deep bosoms pressed against the scales of strong dragons, their bodies and faces strained together in the delight of monstrous caresses; similitudes of all between angel and reptile that divide illimitable spaces of air or defile the overlaboured furrows upon earth. It is easier to do complete justice to the minor prophecies than to give any not inadequate conception of this great book, so vast in reach, so repellent in style, so rich, vehement, and subtle beyond all other works of Blake; the chosen crown and treasured fruit of his strange labours. Extracts of admirable beauty might be gathered up on all hands, more eligible it may be than any here given; none I think more serviceable by way of sample and exposition, as far as such can at all be attained. That the book contains much of a personal kind referring in a wild dim manner to his own spiritual actions and passions, is evident: but even by the new light of the Felpham correspondence one can hardly see where to lay finger on these passages and separate them decisively from the loose floating context. Not without regret, yet not with any sense of wilful or scornful oversight, we must be content now to pass on, and put up with this insufficient notice. The only other engraved work of a prophetic kind did not appear for eighteen years more. This last and least in size, but not in worth, of the whole set is so brief that it may here be read in full. THE GHOST OF ABEL. A REVELATION IN THE VISIONS OF JEHOVAH. SEEN BY WILLIAM BLAKE. To Lord Byron in the Wilderness.--What dost thou here, Elijah? Can a Poet doubt the Visions of Jehovah? Nature has no Outline: But Imagination has. Nature has no Time; but Imagination has. Nature has no Supernatural, and dissolves; Imagination is Eternity. SCENE.--_A rocky Country._ EVE _fainted over the dead body of_ ABEL _which lays near a grave_. ADAM _kneels by her_. JEHOVAH _stands above_. JEHOVAH. Adam! ADAM. It is in vain: I will not hear thee more, thou Spiritual Voice. Is this Death? JEHOVAH. Adam! ADAM. It is in vain; I will not hear thee Henceforth. Is this thy Promise that the Woman's Seed Should bruise the Serpent's Head? Is this the Serpent? Ah! Seven times, O Eve, thou hast fainted over the Dead. Ah! Ah! (EVE _revives_.) EVE. Is this the Promise of Jehovah? O it is all a vain delusion, This Death and this Life and this Jehovah. JEHOVAH. Woman, lift thine eyes. (A VOICE _is heard coming on_.) VOICE. O Earth, cover not thou my blood! cover not thou my blood! (_Enter the_ GHOST of ABEL.) EVE. Thou visionary Phantasm, thou art not the real Abel. ABEL. Among the Elohim a Human Victim I wander: I am their House, Prince of the Air, and our dimensions compass Zenith and Nadir. Vain is thy Covenant, O Jehovah: I am the Accuser and Avenger Of Blood; O Earth, cover not thou the blood of Abel. JEHOVAH. What vengeance dost thou require? ABEL. Life for Life! Life for Life! JEHOVAH. He who shall take Cain's life must also die, O Abel; And who is he? Adam, wilt thou, or Eve, thou, do this? ADAM. It is all a vain delusion of the all-creative Imagination. Eve, come away, and let us not believe these vain delusions. Abel is dead, and Cain slew him; We shall also die a death And then--what then? be as poor Abel, a Thought; or as This? O what shall I call thee, Form Divine, Father of Mercies, That appearest to my Spiritual Vision? Eve, seest thou also? EVE. I see him plainly with my mind's eye: I see also Abel living; Tho' terribly afflicted, as we also are: yet Jehovah sees him Alive and not dead; were it not better to believe Vision With all our might and strength, tho' we are fallen and lost? ADAM. Eve, thou hast spoken truly; let us kneel before his feet. (_They kneel before_ JEHOVAH.) ABEL. Are these the sacrifices of Eternity, O Jehovah? a broken spirit And a contrite heart? O, I cannot forgive; the Accuser hath Entered into me as into his house, and I loathe thy Tabernacles. As thou hast said so is it come to pass: My desire is unto Cain And he doth rule over me: therefore my soul in fumes of blood Cries for vengeance: Sacrifice on Sacrifice, Blood on Blood. JEHOVAH. Lo, I have given you a Lamb for an Atonement instead Of the Transgressor, or no Flesh or Spirit could ever live. ABEL. Compelled I cry, O Earth, cover not the blood of Abel. (ABEL _sinks down into the grave, from which arises_ SATAN _armed in glittering scales with a crown and a spear_.) SATAN. I will have human blood and not the blood of bulls or goats, And no Atonement, O Jehovah; the Elohim live on Sacrifice Of men: hence I am God of men; thou human, O Jehovah. By the rock and oak of the Druid, creeping mistletoe and thorn, Cain's city built with human blood, not blood of bulls and goats, Thou shalt thyself be sacrificed to me thy God on Calvary. JEHOVAH. Such is my will--(_Thunders_)--that thou thyself go to Eternal Death In self-annihilation, even till Satan self-subdued put off Satan Into the bottomless abyss whose torment arises for ever and ever. (_On each side a Chorus of Angels entering sing the following._) The Elohim of the Heathen swore Vengeance for Sin! Then thou stood'st Forth, O Elohim Jehovah, in the midst of the darkness of the oath all clothed In thy covenant of the forgiveness of Sins. Death, O Holy! is this Brotherhood? The Elohim saw their oath eternal fire; they rolled apart trembling over the Mercy-Seat, each in his station fixed in the firmament, by Peace, Brotherhood, and Love. _The Curtain falls._ (1822. W. Blake's original stereotype was 1788.) On the skirt of a figure, rapid and "vehemently sweeping," engraved underneath (recalling that vision of Dion made memorable by one of Wordsworth's nobler poems) are inscribed these words--"The Voice of Abel's Blood." The fierce and strenuous flight of this figure is as the motion of one "whose feet are swift to shed blood," and the dim face is full of hunger and sorrowful lust after revenge. The decorations are slight but not ineffective; wrought merely in black and white. This small prose lyric has a value beyond the value of its occasional beauty and force of form; it is a brief comprehensible expression of Blake's faith seen from its two leading sides; belief in vision and belief in mercy. Into the singular mood of mind which made him inscribe it to the least imaginative of all serious poets we need by no means strive to enter; but in the trustful admiration and the loyal goodwill which this quaint inscription seems to imply, there must be something not merely laughable: as, however rough and homespun the veil of eccentric speech may seem to us at first, we soon find it interwoven with threads of such fair and fervent colour as make the stuff of splendid verse; so, beyond all apparent aberrations of relaxed thought which offend us at each turn, a purpose not ignoble and a sense not valueless become manifest to those who will see them. Here then the scroll of prophecy is finally wound up; and those who have cared to unroll and decipher it by such light as we can attain or afford may now look back across the tempest and tumult, and pass sentence, according to their pleasure or capacity, on the message delivered from this cloudy and noisy tabernacle. The complete and exalted figure of Blake cannot be seen in full by those who avert their eyes, smarting and blinking, from the frequent smoke and sudden flame. Others will see more clearly, as they look more sharply, the radical sanity and coherence of the mind which put forth its shoots of thought and faith in ways so strange, at such strange times. Faith incredible and love invisible to most men were alone the springs of this turbid and sonorous stream. In Blake, above all other men, the moral and the imaginative senses were so fused together as to compose the final artistic form. No man's fancy, in that age, flew so far and so high on so sure a wing. No man's mind, in that generation, dived so deep or gazed so long after the chance of human redemption. To serve art and to love liberty seemed to him the two things (if indeed they were not one thing) worth a man's life and work; and no servant was ever trustier, no lover more constant than he. Knowing that without liberty there can be no loyalty, he did not fear, whether in his work or his life, to challenge and to deride the misconstruction of the foolish and the fraudulent. It does not appear that he was ever at the pains to refute any senseless and rootless lie that may have floated up during his life on the muddy waters of rumour, or drifted from hand to hand and mouth to mouth along the putrescent weed-beds of tradition. Many such lies, I am told, were then set afloat, and have not all as yet gone down. One at least of these may here be swept once for all out of our way. Mr. Linnell, the truest friend of Blake's age and genius, has assured me--and has expressed a wish that I should make public his assurance--that the legend of Blake and his wife, sitting as Adam and Eve in their garden, is simply a legend--to those who knew them, repulsive and absurd; based probably, if on any foundation at all, on some rough and rapid expression of Blake's in the heat and flush of friendly talk, to the effect (it may be) that such a thing, if one chose to do it, would be in itself innocent and righteous,--wrong or strange only in the eyes of a world whose views and whose deeds were strange and wrong. So far Blake would probably have gone; and so far his commentators need not fear to go. But one thing does certainly seem to me loathsome and condemnable; the imputation of such a charge as has been brought against Blake on this matter, without ground and without excuse. The oral flux of fools, being as it is a tertian or quotidian malady or ague of the tongue among their kind, may deserve pity or may not, but does assuredly demand rigid medical treatment. The words or thoughts of a free thinker and a free speaker, falling upon rather than into the ear of a servile and supine fool, will probably in all times bring forth such fruit as this. By way of solace or compensation for the folly which he half perceives and half admits, the fool must be allowed his little jest and his little lie. Only when it passes into tradition and threatens to endure, is it worth while to set foot on it. It seems that Blake never cared to do this good office for himself; and in effect it can only seem worth doing on rare occasions to any workman who respects his work. This contempt, in itself noble and rational, became injurious when applied to the direct service of things in hand. Confidence in future friends, and contempt of present foes, may have induced him to leave his highest achievements impalpable and obscure. Their scope is as wide and as high as heaven, but not as clear; clouds involve and rains inundate the fitful and stormy space of air through which he spreads and plies an indefatigable wing. There can be few books in the world like these; I can remember one poet only whose work seems to me the same or similar in kind; a poet as vast in aim, as daring in detail, as unlike others, as coherent to himself, as strange without and as sane within. The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable form of a possible and universal Republic is equally requisite and adorable as the temporal and spiritual queen of ages as of men. To each all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable or endurable. From the fresh free ground of either workman nothing is excluded that is not exclusive. The words of either strike deep and run wide and soar high. They are both full of faith and passion, competent to love and to loathe, capable of contempt and of worship. Both are spiritual, and both democratic; both by their works recall, even to so untaught and tentative a student as I am, the fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic poetry of the East. Their casual audacities of expression or speculation are in effect wellnigh identical. Their outlooks and theories are evidently the same on all points of intellectual and social life. The divine devotion and selfless love which make men martyrs and prophets are alike visible and palpable in each. It is no secret now, but a matter of public knowledge, that both these men, being poor in the sight and the sense of the world, have given what they had of time or of money, of labour or of love, to comfort and support all the suffering and sick, all the afflicted and misused, whom they had the chance or the right to succour and to serve. The noble and gentle labours of the one are known to those who live in his time; the similar deeds of the other deserve and demand a late recognition. No man so poor and so obscure as Blake appeared in the eyes of his generation ever did more good works in a more noble and simple spirit. It seems that in each of these men at their birth pity and passion, and relief and redress of wrong, became incarnate and innate. That may well be said of the one which was said of the other: that "he looks like a man." And in externals and details the work of these two constantly and inevitably coheres and coincides. A sound as of a sweeping wind; a prospect as over dawning continents at the fiery instant of a sudden sunrise; a splendour now of stars and now of storms; an expanse and exultation of wing across strange spaces of air and above shoreless stretches of sea; a resolute and reflective love of liberty in all times and in all things where it should be; a depth of sympathy and a height of scorn which complete and explain each other, as tender and as bitter as Dante's; a power, intense and infallible, of pictorial concentration and absorption, most rare when combined with the sense and the enjoyment of the widest and the highest things; an exquisite and lyrical excellence of form when the subject is well in keeping with the poet's tone of spirit; a strength and security of touch in small sweet sketches of colour and outline, which bring before the eyes of their student a clear glimpse of the thing designed--some little inlet of sky lighted by moon or star, some dim reach of windy water or gentle growth of meadow-land or wood; these are qualities common to the work of either. Had we place or time or wish to touch on their shortcomings and errors, it might be shown that these too are nearly akin; that their poetry has at once the melody and the laxity of a fitful storm-wind; that, being oceanic, it is troubled with violent groundswells and sudden perils of ebb and reflux, of shoal and reef, perplexing to the swimmer or the sailor; in a word, that it partakes the powers and the faults of elemental and eternal things; that it is at times noisy and barren and loose, rootless and fruitless and informal; and is in the main fruitful and delightful and noble, a necessary part of the divine mechanism of things. Any work or art of which this cannot be said is superfluous and perishable, whatever of grace or charm it may possess or assume. Whitman has seldom struck a note of thought and speech so just and so profound as Blake has now and then touched upon; but his work is generally more frank and fresh, smelling of sweeter air, and readier to expound or expose its message, than this of the prophetic books. Nor is there among these any poem or passage of equal length so faultless and so noble as his "Voice out of the Sea," or as his dirge over President Lincoln--the most sweet and sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church of the world. But in breadth of outline and charm of colour, these poems recall the work of Blake; and to neither poet can a higher tribute of honest praise be paid than this. We have now done what in us lay to help the works of a great man on their way towards that due appreciation and that high honour of which in the end they will not fail. Much, it need not be repeated, has been done for them of late, and admirably done; much also we have found to do, and have been compelled to leave undone still more. If it should now appear to any reader that too much has been made of slight things, or too little said of grave errors, this must be taken well into account: that praise enough has not as yet been given, and blame enough can always be had for the asking; that when full honour has been done and full thanks rendered to those who have done great things, then and then only will it be no longer an untimely and unseemly labour to map out and mark down their shortcomings for the profit or the pleasure of their inferiors and our own; that however pleasant for common palates and feeble fingers it may be to nibble and pick holes, it is not only more profitable but should be more delightful for all who desire or who strive after any excellence of mind or of achievement to do homage wherever it may be due; to let nothing great pass unsaluted or unenjoyed; but as often as we look backwards among past days and dead generations, with glad and ready reverence to answer the noble summons--"Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers who were before us." Those who refuse them that are none of their sons; and among all these "famous men, and our fathers," no names seem to demand our praise so loudly as theirs who while alive had to dispense with the thanksgiving of men. To them doubtless, it may be said, this is now more than ever indifferent; but to us it had better not be so. And especially in the works and in the life of Blake there is so strong and special a charm for those to whom the higher ways of work are not sealed ways that none will fear to be too grudging of blame or too liberal of praise. A more noble memory is hardly left us; and it is not for his sake that we should contend to do him honour. THE END. BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. FOOTNOTES: [1] Gilchrist's "Life of Blake." [2] It may be as well set down here as at any further stage of our business, that the date of Blake's birth appears, from good MS. authority, to have been the 20th of November (1757), not the 28th; that he was the second of five children, not four; James, the hosier in Broad Street, being his junior, not, as the biography states, his senior by a year and a half. The eldest son was John, a favourite child who came to small good, enlisted, and died it seems in comparative youth; of him Mr. Gilchrist evidently had not heard. In some verses of the Felpham period (written in 1801, printed in vol. ii. p. 189 of the "Life and Selections") Blake makes mention, hitherto unexplained, of "my brother John the evil one," which may now be comprehensible enough. [3] Our greatest poet of the later days may be cited as a third witness. Through the marvellous last book of the _Contemplations_ the breath and sound of the sea is blown upon every verse; when he heard as it were the thunder and saw as it were the splendour of revelation, it was amid the murmur and above the motion of the Channel; pres du dolmen qui domine Rozel, A l'endroit ou le cap se prolonge en presqu'ile. [4] W. B. Scott. The few and great words cited above occur, it will be observed, in a poem affording throughout no inapt allegory of Blake's life and works. More accurate and more admirable expression was never given to a theme so pregnant and so great. The whole "fable" may be well applied by students of the matter in hand to the history of Blake's relations with minor men of more turn for success; which, as Victor Hugo has noted in his royal manner, is so often "a rather hideous thing." [5] It appears that some effort, laudable if wholly sincere, and not condemnable if partly coloured by personal feeling, has been made to rebut the charges brought against Stothard and Cromek by the biographer of Blake. What has been written in the text is of course based upon the assumption that Mr. Gilchrist has given an account of the matter as full and as fair as it was assuredly his desire to make it. As junior counsel (so to speak) on behalf of Blake, I have followed the lead of his biographer; for me in fact nothing remained but to revise and restate, with such clearness and brevity as I could, the case as laid down by him. This, finding on the face of it nothing incoherent or incredible, I have done; whether any man can disprove it remains to be seen. Meantime we are not left to our own choice in the matter of epithets. There is but one kind of phrase that will express such things and the doers of such things. Against Stothard no grave charge has been brought; none therefore can be refuted. Any reference to subsequent doings or sufferings of his must be unspeakably irrelevant to the matter in hand. Against Cromek a sufficiently heavy indictment has been laid; one which cannot be in the least degree lightened by countercharges of rash violence on Blake's part or blind hastiness on Mr. Gilchrist's. One thing alone can avail him in the way of whitewash. He is charged with theft; prove that he did not steal. He is charged with breach of contract; prove that his contract was never broken. He is charged with denying a commission given by him; prove that he did not deny it. For no man, it is to be feared, will now believe that Blake, sleeping or waking, forged the story of the commission or trumped up the story of the contract. That point of the defence the counsel for Cromek had best give up with all convenient speed; had better indeed not dream at all of entering upon it. Again: he is charged, as above, with adding to his apparent perfidy a superfetation of insolence, an accretion or excrescence of insult. Prove that he did not write the letter published by Mr. Cunningham in 1852. It is undoubtedly deplorable that any one now living should in any way have to suffer for the misdoings of a man, whom, were it just or even possible, one would be willing to overlook and to forget. But time is logical and equable; and this is but one among many inevitable penalties which time is certain to bring upon such wrong-doers in the end; penalties, or rather simple results of the thing done. Had this man either dealt honestly or while dealing dishonestly been but at the pains to keep clear of Walter Scott and William Blake, no writer would have had to disturb his memory. But now, however strong or sincere may be our just sense of pity for all to whom it may give pain, truth must be spoken; and the truth is that, unless the authorities cited can be utterly upset and broken down by some palpable proof in his favour, Cromek was what has been stated. Mr. Gilchrist also, in the course of his fair and lucid narrative, speaks once of "pity." Pity may be good, but proof is better. Until such proof come, the best that can be done for Cromek is to let well alone. Less could not have been said of him than equitable biography has here been compelled to say; no more need be said now and for ever, if counsel will have the wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie. This advice, if they cannot refute what is set down without more words, we must give them; [Greek: me kinei Kamarinan]. The waters are muddy enough without that. Vague and vain clamour of deprecation or appeal may be plaintive but is not conclusive. As to any talk of cruelty or indelicacy shown in digging up the dead misdeeds of dead men, it is simply pitiable. Were not reason wasted on such reasoners it might be profitable (which too evidently it is not) to reply that such an argument cuts right and left at once. Suppress a truth, and you suggest a lie; and a lie so suggested is the most "indelicate" of cruelties possible to inflict on the dead. If, for pity's sake or contempt's or for any other reason, the biographer had explained away the charges against Cromek which lay ready to his hand, he must have left upon the memory of Scott and upon the memory of Blake the stain of a charge as grave as this: if Cromek was honest, they were calumniators. To one or two the good name of a private man may be valuable; to all men the good name of a great man must be precious. This difference of value must not be allowed to weigh with us while considering the evidence; but the fact seems to be that no evidence in disproof of the main charges has been put forward which can be seriously thought worth sifting for a moment. This then being the sad case, to inveigh against Blake's biographer is utterly idle and hardly honest. If the stories are not true, any man's commentary which assumes their truth must be infinitely unimportant. If the stories are true, no remark annexed to the narrative can now blacken the accused further. Those alone who are responsible for the accusation brought can be convicted of unfairness in bringing it; Mr. Gilchrist, it must be repeated, found every one of the charges which we now find in his book, given under the hand and seal of honourable men. These he found it, as I do now, necessary to transcribe in a concise form; adding, as I have done, any brief remarks he saw fit to make in the interest of justice and for the sake of explanation. Let there be no more heard of appeal against this exercise of a patent right, of invective against this discharge of an evident duty. Disproof is the one thing that will now avail; and to anything short of that no one should again for an instant listen. [6] It is to be regretted that the share taken in this matter by Flaxman, who defended Stothard from the charge of collusion with Cromek, appears to have alienated Blake from one of his first friends. Throughout the MS. so often cited by his biographer, he couples their names together for attack. In one of his rough epigrams, formless and pointless for the most part, but not without value for the sudden broken gleams of light they cast upon Blake's character and history, he reproaches both sculptor and painter with benefits conferred by himself and disowned by them: and the blundering stumbling verses thus jotted down to relieve a minute's fit of private anger are valuable as evidence for his sincere sense of injury. To F. AND S. "I found them blind: I taught them how to see; And now they know neither themselves nor me. 'Tis excellent to turn a thorn to a pin, A fool to a bolt, a knave to a glass of gin." Whether or not he had in fact thus utilized his rivals by making the most out of their several qualities, may be questionable. If so, we must say he managed to scratch his own fingers with the pin, to miss his shot with the bolt, and to spill the liquor extracted from the essence of knavery. The following dialogue has equal virulence and somewhat more sureness of aim. MR. STOTHARD TO MR. CROMEK. "For fortune's favour you your riches bring; But fortune says she gave you no such thing. Why should you prove ungrateful to your friends, Sneaking, and backbiting, and odds-and-ends?" MR. CROMEK TO MR. STOTHARD. "Fortune favours the brave, old proverbs say; But not with money; that is not the way: Turn back, turn back; you travel all in vain; Turn through the iron gate down Sneaking Lane." For the "iron gate" of money-making the brazen-browed speaker was no unfit porter. The crudity of these rough notes for some unfinished satire is not, let it be remembered, a fair sample of Blake's capacity for epigram; and it would indeed be unfair to cite them but for their value as to the matter in hand. [7] Since writing the lines above I have been told by Mr. Seymour Kirkup that one picture at least among those exhibited at this time was the very noblest of all Blake's works; the "Ancient Britons." It appears to have dropped out of sight, but must be still hidden somewhere. Against the judgment of Mr. Kirkup there can be no appeal. The saviour of Giotto, the redeemer of Dante, has power to pronounce on the work of Blake. I allow what I said to stand as I said it at first, only that I may not miss the chance of calling attention to the loss and paying tribute to the critic. [8] Written in 1863. Mr. Landor died Sept. 17th, 1864. [9] Since the lines above were written, I have been informed by a surviving friend of Blake, celebrated throughout Italy as over England, in a time nearer our own, as (among other things) the discoverer of Giotto's fresco in the Chapel of the Podesta, that after Blake's death a gift of L100 was sent to his widow by the Princess Sophia, who must not lose the exceptional honour due to her for a display of sense and liberality so foreign to her blood. At whose suggestion it was made is not known, and worth knowing. Mrs. Blake sent back the money with all due thanks, not liking to take or keep what (as it seemed to her) she could dispense with, while many to whom no chance or choice was given might have been kept alive by the gift; and, as readers of the "Life" know, fell to work in her old age by preference. One complaint only she was ever known to make during her husband's life, and that gently. "Mr. Blake" was so little with her, though in the body they were never separated; for he was incessantly away "in Paradise"; which would not seem to have been far off. Mr. Kirkup also speaks of the courtesy with which, on occasion, Blake would waive the question of his spiritual life, if the subject seemed at all incomprehensible or offensive to the friend with him: he would no more obtrude than suppress his faith, and would practically accept and act upon the dissent or distaste of his companions without visible vexation or the rudeness of a thwarted fanatic. It was in the time of this intimacy (see note at p. 58) that Mr. Kirkup also saw, what seems long since to have dropped out of human sight, the picture of _The Ancient Britons_; which, himself also an artist, he thought and thinks the finest work of the painter: remembering well the fury and splendour of energy there contrasted with the serene ardour of simply beautiful courage; the violent life of the design, and the fierce distance of fluctuating battle. [10] The direct cause of Blake's death, it appears from a MS. source, "was the mixing of the gall with the blood." It may be worth remark, that one brief notice at least of Blake's death made its way into print; the "Literary Gazette" (No. 552; the "Gentleman's Magazine" published it in briefer form but nearly identical words as far as it went) of August 18, 1827, saw fit to "record the death of a singular and very able man," in an article contributed mainly by "the kindness of a correspondent," who speaks as an acquaintance of Blake, and gives this account of his last days, prefaced by a sufficiently humble reference to the authorities of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Lawrence. "Pent, with his affectionate wife, in a close back-room in one of the Strand courts, his bed in one corner, his meagre dinner in another, a ricketty table holding his copper-plates in progress, his colours, books (among which his Bible, a Sessi Velutello's Dante, and Mr. Carey's translation, were at the top), his large drawings, sketches, and MSS.; his ankles frightfully swelled, his chest disordered, old age striding on, his wants increased, but not his miserable means and appliances; even yet was his eye undimmed, the fire of his imagination unquenched, and the preternatural never-resting activity of his mind unflagging. He had not merely a calmly resigned, but a cheerful and mirthful countenance. He took no thought for his life, what he should eat or what he should drink; nor yet for his body, what he should put on; but had a fearless confidence in that Providence which had given him the vast range of the world for his recreation and delight. Blake died last Monday; died as he had lived, piously, cheerfully, talking calmly, and finally resigning himself to his eternal rest like an infant to its sleep. He has left nothing except some pictures, copper-plates, and his principal work, a series of a hundred large designs from Dante.... He was active" (the good correspondent adds, further on) "in mind and body, passing from one occupation to another without an intervening minute of repose. Of an ardent, affectionate, and grateful temper, he was simple in manner and address, and displayed an inbred courteousness of the most agreeable character." Finally, the writer has no doubt that Mrs. Blake's "cause will be taken up by the distributors of those funds which are raised for the relief of distressed artists, and also by the benevolence of private individuals": for she "is left (we fear, from the accounts which have reached us) in a very forlorn condition, Mr. Blake himself having been much indebted for succour and consolation to his friend Mr. Linnell the painter." The discreet editor, "when further time has been allowed him for inquiry, will probably resume the matter:" but, we may now more safely prophesy, assuredly will not. [11] Of course, there can be no question here of bad art: which indeed is a non-entity or contradiction in terms, as to speak of good art is to run into tautology. It is assumed, to begin with, that the artist has something to say or do worth doing or saying in an artistic form. [12] Observe especially in Chaucer's most beautiful of young poems that appalling passage, where, turning the favourite edgetool of religious menace back with point inverted upon those who forged it, the poet represents men and women of religious habit or life as punished in the next world, beholding afar off with jealous regret the salvation and happiness of Venus and all her servants (converse of the Hoersel legend, which shows the religious or anti-Satanic view of the matter; though there too there is some pity or sympathy implied for the pagan side of things, revealing in the tradition the presence and touch of some poet): expressly punished, these monks and nuns, for their continence and holiness of life, and compelled after death to an eternity of fruitless repentance for having wilfully missed of pleasure and made light of indulgence in this world; which is perfect Albigeois. Compare the famous speech in _Aucassin et Nicolette_, where the typical hero weighs in a judicial manner the respective attractions of heaven and hell; deciding of course dead against the former on account of the deplorably bad company kept there; priests, hermits, saints, and such-like, in lieu of knights and ladies, painters and poets. One may remark also, the minute this pagan revival begins to get breathing-room, how there breaks at once into flower a most passionate and tender worship of nature, whether as shown in the bodily beauty of man and woman or in the outside loveliness of leaf and grass; both Chaucer and his anonymous southern colleague being throughout careful to decorate their work with the most delicate and splendid studies of colour and form. Either of the two choice morsels of doctrinal morality cited above would have exquisitely suited the palate of Blake. He in his time, one need not doubt, was considerably worried and gibbered at by "monkeys in houses of brick," moral theorists, and "pantopragmatic" men of all sorts; what can we suppose he would have said or done in an epoch given over to preachers (lay, clerical, and mixed) who assert without fear or shame that you may demand, nay are bound to demand, of a picture or poem what message it has for you, what may be its moral utility or material worth? "Poetry must conform itself to" &c.; "art must have a mission and meaning appreciable by earnest men in an age of work," and so forth. These be thy gods, O Philistia. [13] I will not resist the temptation to write a brief word of comment on this passage. While my words of inadequate and now of joyless praise were in course of printing, I heard that a mortal illness had indeed stricken the illustrious poet, the faultless critic, the fearless artist; that no more of fervent yet of perfect verse, no more of subtle yet of sensitive comment, will be granted us at the hands of Charles Baudelaire: that now for ever we must fall back upon what is left us. It is precious enough. We may see again as various a power as was his, may feel again as fiery a sympathy, may hear again as strange a murmur of revelation, as sad a whisper of knowledge, as mysterious a music of emotion; we shall never find so keen, so delicate, so deep an unison of sense and spirit. What verse he could make, how he loved all fair and felt all strange things, with what infallible taste he knew at once the limit and the licence of his art, all may see at a glance. He could give beauty to the form, expression to the feeling, most horrible and most obscure to the senses or souls of lesser men. The chances of things parted us once and again; the admiration of some years, at last in part expressed, brought me near him by way of written or transmitted word; let it be an excuse for the insertion of this note, and for a desire, if so it must be, to repeat for once the immortal words which too often return upon our lips; "Ergo in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale!" [14] There are exceptions, we are told from the first, to all rules; and the sole exception to this one is great enough to do all but establish a rival rule. But, as I have tried already to say, the work--all the work--of Victor Hugo is in its essence artistic, in its accident alone philanthropic or moral. I call this the sole exception, not being aware that the written work of Dante or Shelley did ever tend to alter the material face of things; though they may have desired that it should, and though their unwritten work may have done so. Accidentally of course a poet's work may tend towards some moral or actual result; that is beside the question. [15] The reader who cares to remember that everything here set down is of immediate importance and necessity for the understanding of the matter in hand (namely, the life of Blake, and the faith and works which made that life what it was) may as well take here a word of comment. It will soon be necessary for even the very hack-writers and ingenious people of ready pens and wits who now babble about Balzac in English and French as a splendid specimen of their craft, fertile but faulty, and so forth--to understand that they have nothing to do with Balzac; that he is not of their craft, nor of any but the common craft of all great men--the guild of godlike things and people; that a shelf holding "all Balzac's novels--forty volumes long," is not "cabin-furniture" for any chance "passenger" to select or reject. Error and deficiency there may be in his work; but none such as they can be aware of. Of poetic form, for example, we know that he knew nothing; the error would be theirs who should think his kind of work the worse for that. Among men equally great, the distinctive supremacy of Balzac is this; that whereas the great men who are pure artists (Shakespeare for instance) work by implication only, and hardly care about descending to the level of a preacher's or interpreter's work, he is the only man not of their kind who is great enough to supply their place in his own way--to be their correlative in a different class of workmen; being from his personal point of view simply impeccable and infallible. The pure artist never asserts; he suggests, and therefore his meaning is totally lost upon moralists and sciolists--is indeed irreparably wasted upon the run of men who cannot work out suggestions. Balzac asserts; and Balzac cannot blunder or lie. So profound and extensive a capacity of moral apprehension no other prose writer, no man of mere analytic faculty, ever had or can have. This assuredly, when men become (as they will have to become) capable of looking beyond the mere clothes and skin of his work, will be always, as we said, his great especial praise; that he was, beyond any other man, the master of morals--the greatest direct expounder of actual moral fact. Once consent to forget or overlook the mere _entourage_ and social habiliment of Balzac's intense and illimitable intellect, you cannot fail of seeing that he of all men was fittest to grapple with all strange things and words, and compel them by divine violence of spiritual rape to bring forth flowers and fruits good for food and available for use. [16] Could God bring down his heart to the making of a thing so deadly and strong? or could any lesser daemonic force of nature take to itself wings and fly high enough to assume power equal to such a creation? Could spiritual force so far descend or material force so far aspire? Or, when the very stars, and all the armed children of heaven, the "helmed cherubim" that guide and the "sworded seraphim" that guard their several planets, wept for pity and fear at sight of this new force of monstrous matter seen in the deepest night as a fire of menace to man-- "Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?" We may add another cancelled reading to show how delicately the poem has been perfected; although by an oversight of the writer's most copies hitherto have retained some trace of the rough first draught, neglecting in one line a change necessary to save the sense as well as to complete the sentence. "And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet Could fetch it from the furnace deep And in thy horrid ribs dare steep? In what clay and in what mould Were thine eyes of fury rolled?" Having cancelled this stanza or sketched ghost of a stanza, Blake in his hurry of rejection did not at once remember to alter the last line of the preceding one; leaving thus a stone of some size and slipperiness for editorial feet to trip upon, until the recovery of that nobler reading-- "What dread hand _framed thy_ dread feet?" Nor was this little "rock of offence" cleared from the channel of the poem even by the editor of 1827, who was yet not afraid of laying hand upon the text. So grave a flaw in so short and so great a lyric was well worth the pains of removing and is yet worth the pains of accounting for; on which ground this note must be of value to all who take in verse with eye and ear instead of touching it merely with eyelash and finger-tip in the manner of sand-blind students. [17] Compare the passage in _Ahania_ where the growth of it is defined; rooted in the rock of separation, watered with the tears of a jealous God, shot up from sparks and fallen germs of material seed; being after all a growth of mere error, and vegetable (not spiritual) life; the topmost stem of it made into a cross whereon to nail the dead redeemer and friend of men. [18] Compare again in the _Vision of the Last Judgment_ (v. 2, p. 163), that definition of the "Divine body of the Saviour, the true Vine of Eternity," as "the Human Imagination, who appeared to me as coming to judgment among his saints, and throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be established." The whole of that subtle and eloquent rhapsody is about the best commentary attainable on Blake's mystical writings and designs. It is impossible to overstate the debt of gratitude due from all students of Blake to the transcriber and editor of the _Vision_, whose indefatigable sense and patient taste have made it legible for all. To have extracted it piecemeal from the chaos of notes jotted down by Blake in the most inconceivable way, would have been a praiseworthy labour enough; but without addition or omission to have constructed these abortive fragments into a whole so available and so admirable, is a labour beyond praise. [19] This exquisite verse did not fall into its place by chance; the poem has been more than once revised. Its opening stanza stood originally thus:-- "Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep Thou wilt every secret keep; Sleep, sleep, beauty bright, Thou shalt taste the joys of night." Before recasting the whole, Blake altered the second line into-- "Canst thou any secret keep?" The gist of the song is this; the speaker, watching a girl newly-born, compares her innocuous infancy with the power that through beauty will one day be hers, her blameless wiles and undeveloped desires with the strong and subtle qualities now dormant which the years will assuredly awaken within her; seeing as it were the whole woman asleep in the child, he smells future fruit in the unblown bud. On retouching his work, Blake thus wound up the moral and tune of this song in a stanza forming by its rhymes an exact antiphonal complement to the end of the first _Cradle Song_. "When thy little heart does wake, Then the dreadful lightnings break From thy cheek and from thine eye, O'er the youthful harvests nigh; Infant wiles and infant smiles Heaven and earth of peace beguiles." The epithet "infant" has supplanted that of "female," which was perhaps better: as to the grammatical licence, Blake followed in that the Elizabethan fashion which made the rule of sound predominate over all others. The song, if it loses simplicity, seems to gain significance by this expansion of the dim original idea; and beauty by expression of the peril latent in a life whose smiles as yet breed no strife between friends, kindle no fire among the unripe shocks of growing corn; but whose words shall hereafter be as very swords, and her eyes as lightning; _teterrima belli causa_. [20] "His," the good man's: this lax piece of grammar (shifting from singular to plural and back again without much tangible provocation) is not infrequent with Blake, and would hardly be worth righting if that were feasible. A remarkable instance is but too patent in the final "chorus" of the _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. Such rough licence is given or taken by old poets; and Blake's English is always beautiful enough to be pardonable where it slips or halts: especially as its errors are always those of a rapid lyrical style, never of a tortuous or verbose ingenuity: it stammers and slips occasionally, but never goes into convulsions like that of some later versifiers. [21] Such we must consider, for instance, the second _Little Boy Lost_, which looks at first more of a riddle and less worth solution than the haziest section of the prophetic books. A cancelled reading taken from the rough copy in the _Ideas_ will at all events make one stanza more amenable to reason: "I love myself; so does the bird That picks up crumbs around the door." Blake was rather given to erase a comparatively reasonable reading and substitute something which cannot be confidently deciphered by the most daring self-reliance of audacious ingenuity, until the reader has found some means of pitching his fancy for a moment in the ordinary key of the prophet's. This uncomfortable little poem is in effect merely an allegoric or fabulous appeal against the oppression of formulas (or family "textualism" of the blind and unctuous sort) which refuse to single and simple insight, to the outspoken innocence of a child's laughing or confused analysis, a right to exist on any terms: just as the companion poem is an appeal, so vague as to fall decidedly flat, against the externals of moral fashion. Both, but especially the _Girl_, have some executive merit: not overmuch. To the surprising final query, "Are such things done on Albion's shore?" one is provoked to respond, "On the whole, not, as far as we can see;" but the "Albion" of Blake's verse is never this weaving and spinning country of our working days; it is rather some inscrutable remote land of Titanic visions, moated with silent white mist instead of solid and sonorous surf, and peopled with vague pre-Adamite giants symbolic of more than we can safely define or conceive. An inkling of the meaning may, if anything can, be extracted from some parts of the _Jerusalem_; but probably no one will try. [22] With more time and room to work in, we might have noticed in these less dramatic and seemingly less original poems of the second series which take up from the opposite point of view matters already handled to such splendid effect in the _Songs of Innocence_, a depth and warmth of moral quality worth remark; infinite tenderness of heart and fiery pity for all that suffer wrong; something of Hugo's or Shelley's passionate compassion for those who lie open to "all the oppression that is done under the sun"; something of the anguish and labour, the fever-heat of sleepless mercy and love incurable which is common to those two great poets. The second _Holy Thursday_ is doubtless far enough below the high level of the first; but the second _Chimney-sweeper_ as certainly has a full share of this passionate grace of pain and pity. Blake's love of children never wrung out into his work a more pungent pathos or keener taste of tears than in the last verse of this poem. It stood thus in the first draught: "And because I am happy and dance and sing They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God and his priest and king, Who wrap themselves up in our misery." The quiet tremulous anger of that, its childish sorrow and contempt, are no less true than subtle in effect. It recalls another floating fragment of verse on social wrongs which shall be rescued from the chaos of the _Ideas_: "There souls of men are bought and sold, And milk-fed infancy, for gold; And youths to slaughter-houses led, And maidens, for a bit of bread." [23] This verse is of course to be read as one made up of rough but regular anapaests; the heavier accents falling consequently upon every third syllable--that is, upon the words _if_, _not_, and _him_. The next line is almost as rough, and seems indeed to slip into the solid English iambic; but may also be set right by giving full attention to accent. [24] A strange and rather beautiful, if grotesque, evidence of the unity of faith and feeling to which Blake and his wife had come by dint of living and thinking so long together, is given by one of the stray notes in this same book: which we transcribe at full on account of its great biographical value as a study of character. Space might have been found for it in the Life, if only to prove once again how curiously the nature and spiritual habits of a great man leave their mark or dye upon the mind nearest to his own. "SOUTH MOLTON STREET. "_Sunday, August, 1807._--My wife was told by a spirit to look for her fortune by opening by chance a book which she had in her hand; it was Bysshe's 'Art of Poetry.' She opened the following:-- 'I saw 'em kindle with desire, While with soft sighs they blew the fire; Saw the approaches of their joy, He growing more fierce and she less coy; Saw how they mingled melting rays, Exchanging love a thousand ways. Kind was the force on every side; Her new desire she could not hide, Nor would the shepherd be denied. The blessed minute he pursued, Till she, transported in his arms, Yields to the conqueror all her charms. His panting breast to hers now joined, They feast on raptures unconfined, Vast and luxuriant; such as prove The immortality of love. For who but a Divinity Could mingle souls to that degree And melt them into ecstasy? Now like the Phoenix both expire, While from the ashes of their fire Springs up a new and soft desire. Like charmers, thrice they did invoke The God, and thrice new vigour took.'--_Behn._ "I was so well pleased with her luck that I thought I would try my own, and opened the following:-- 'As when the winds their airy quarrel try, Jostling from every quarter of the sky, This way and that the mountain oak they bear, His boughs they scatter and his branches tear; With leaves and falling mast they spread the ground; The hollow valleys echo to the sound; Unmoved, the royal plant their fury mocks, Or, shaken, clings more closely to the rocks: For as he shoots his towering head on high, So deep in earth his fixed foundations lie.'--_Dryden's Virgil._" Nothing is ever so cynical as innocence, whether it be a child's or a mystic's. As a poet, Blake had some reason to be "well pleased" with his wife's curious windfall; for those verses of the illustrious Aphra's have some real energy and beauty of form, visible to those who care to make allowance, first for the conventional English of the time, and secondly for the naked violence of manner natural to that she-satyr, whose really great lyrical gifts are hopelessly overlaid and encrusted by the rough repulsive husk of her incredible style of speech. Even "Astraea" must however have fair play and fair praise; and the simple truth is that, when writing her best, this "unmentionable" poetess has a vigorous grace and a noble sense of metre to be found in no other song-writer of her time. One song, fished up by Mr. Dyce out of the weltering sewerage of Aphra's unreadable and unutterable plays, has a splendid quality of verse, and even some degree of sentiment not wholly porcine. Take four lines as a sample, and Blake's implied approval will hardly seem unjustifiable:-- "From thy bright eyes he took those fires Which round about in sport he hurled; But 'twas from mine he took desires Enough to undo the amorous world." The strong and subtle cadence of that magnificent fourth verse gives evidence of so delicate an ear and such dexterous power of hand as no other poet between the Restoration date and Blake's own time has left proof of in serious or tragic song. Great as is Dryden's lyrical work in more ways than one, its main quality is mere strength of intellect and solidity of handling--the forcible and imperial manner of his satires; and in pure literal song-writing, which (rather than any 'ode' or such-like mixed poem) may be taken as the absolute and final test of a poet's lyrical nature, he never came near this mark. Francois Villon and Aphra Behn, the two most inexpressibly non-respectable of male or female Bohemians and poets, were alike in this as well; that the supreme gift of each, in a time sufficiently barren of lyrical merit, was the gift of writing admirable songs; and this, after all, has perhaps borne better fruit for us than any gift of moral excellence. [25] Another version of this line, with less of pungent and brilliant effect, has yet a touch of sound in it worth preserving: some may even prefer it in point of simple lyrical sweetness: "She played and she melted in all her prime: Ah! that sweet love should be thought a crime." [26] On closer inspection of Blake's rapid autograph I suspect that in the second line those who please may read "the ruddy limbs and flowering hair," or perhaps "flowery;" but the type of flame is more familiar to Blake. Compare further on "A Song of Liberty." [27] Other readings are "soothed" and "smiled"--readings adopted after the insertion of the preceding stanza. As the subject is a child not yet grown to standing and walking age, these readings are perhaps better, though less simple in sound, than the one I have retained. [28] Here and throughout to the end, duly altering metre and grammar with a quite laudable care, Blake has substituted "my father" for the "priests;" not I think to the improvement of the poem, though probably with an eye to making the end cohere rather more closely with the beginning. This and the "Myrtle" are shoots of the same stock, and differ only in the second grafting. In the last-named poem the father's office was originally thus; "Oft my myrtle sighed in vain To behold my heavy chain: Oft my father saw us sigh, And laughed at our simplicity." Here too Blake had at first written, "Oft the priest beheld us sigh;" he afterwards cancelled the whole passage, perhaps on first remarking the rather too grotesque confusion of a symbolic myrtle with a literal wife; and the last stanza in either form is identical. The simple subtle grace of both poems, and the singular care of revision bestowed on them, are equally worth notice. [29] Those who insist on the tight lacing of grammatical stays upon the "pained loveliness" of a muse's over-pliant body may use if they please Blake's own amended reading; in which otherwise the main salt of the poem is considerably diluted as by tepid water: the angel (one might say) has his sting blunted and the best quill of his pinion pulled out. "And without one word said Had a peach from the tree; And still as a maid," &c. [30] We may find place here for another fairy song, quaint in shape and faint in colour, but with the signet of Blake upon it; copied from a loose scrap of paper on the back of which is a pencilled sketch of Hercules throttling the serpents, whose twisted limbs make a sort of spiral cradle around and above the child's triumphant figure: an attendant, naked, falls back in terror with sharp recoil of drawn-up limbs; Alcmena and Amphitryon watch the struggle in silence, he grasping her hand. "A fairy leapt upon my knee Singing and dancing merrily; I said, 'Thou thing of patches, rings, Pins, necklaces, and such-like things, Disgracer of the female form, Thou paltry gilded poisonous worm!' Weeping, he fell upon my thigh, And thus in tears did soft reply: 'Knowest thou not, O fairies' lord, How much by us contemned, abhorred, Whatever hides the female form That cannot bear the mortal storm? Therefore in pity still we give Our lives to make the female live; And what would turn into disease We turn to what will joy and please.'" Even so dim and slight a sketch as this may be of worth as indicating Blake's views of the apparent and the substantial form of things, the primary and the derivative life; also as a sample of his roughest and readiest work. [31] Lest the kingdom of love left under the type of a woman should be over powerful for a nation of hard fighters and reasoners, such as Blake conceived the "ancients" to be. Compare for his general style of fancies on classic matters the prologue to "Milton" and the Sibylline Leaves on Homer and Virgil. To his half-trained apprehension Rome seemed mere violence and Greece mere philosophy. [32] Let the reader take another instance of the culture given to these songs--a gift which has happily been bequeathed by Blake to his editor. This one was at first divided into five equal stanzas; the last two running thus:-- "'And pity no more would be If all were happy as we;' At his curse the sun went down, And the heavens gave a frown. "Down poured the heavy rain Over the new-reaped grain; And Misery's increase Is Mercy, Pity, Peace." Thus one might say is the curse confuted; for if, as the "grievous devil" will have it, the root of the sweetest goodness is in material evil, then may the other side answer that even by his own showing the flower or "increase" from that root is not evil, but good: a soft final point of comfort missed by the change which gives otherwise fresher colour to this poem. [33] But as above shewn the vision of the wise man or poet is wider than both; sees beyond the angel's blind innocent enjoyment to a deeper faith than his simple nature can grasp or include; sees also past the truth of the devil's sad ingenious "analytics" to the broader sense of things, seen by which, "Good and Evil are no more." [34] Query "Putting?" This whole poem is jotted down in a close rough handwriting, not often easy to follow with confidence. [35] In the line "A God or else a Pharisee," Blake with a pencil-scratch has turned "a God" to "a devil"; as if the words were admittedly or admissibly interchangeable! A prophet so wonderfully loose-tongued may well be the despair of his faithfullest commentators: but as it happens the pencil-scratch should here be of some help and significance to us: following this small clue, we may come to distinguish the God of his belief from this demon-god of the created "mundane shell"--the God of Pharisaic religion and moral law. [36] The creator by division, father of men and women, fashioner of evil and good; literally in the deepest sense "the God of this world," who "does not know the garment from the man;" cannot see beyond the two halves which he has made by violence of separation; would have the body perishable, yet the qualities of the bodily life permanent: thus inverting order and reversing fact. Parallel passages might be brought in by the dozen on all hands, after a little dipping into mystic books; but I want to make no more room here for all this than is matter of bare necessity. [37] We shall see this presently. I conceive however that Blake, to save time and contract the space of his preaching, uses the consecrated Hebrew name to design now the giver of the Mosaic law, now that other and opposite Divinity which after the "body of clay" had been "devoured" was the residue or disembodied victorious spirit of the human Saviour. Mysticism need not of necessity be either inaccurate or incoherent: neither need it give offence by its forms and expressions of faith: but a mystic is but human after all, and with the best intentions may slip somewhere, especially a mystic so little in _training_ as Blake, and so much of a poet or artist; who is not accustomed to any careful feeling of his way among words, except with an eye to the perfection of their bodily beauty. Indeed, as appears by Mr. Crabb Robinson's notes of his conversation, Blake affirmed that according to scripture itself the world was created by "the Elohim," not by Jehovah; whose covenant he elsewhere asserted was simply "forgiveness of sins." Thus even according to this heretical creed the God of the Jews would seem to be ranged on the same side with Christ against "the God of this world." [38] Compare this fragment of a paraphrase or "excursus" on a lay sermon by a modern pagan philosopher of more material tendencies; but given to such tragic indulgence in huge Titanic dithyrambs. "Nature averse to crime? I tell you, nature lives and breathes by it; hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, aches in all her nerves for the help of sin, yearns with all her heart for the furtherance of cruelty. Nature forbid that thing or this? Nay, the best or worst of you will never go so far as she would have you; no criminal will come up to the measure of her crimes, no destruction seem to her destructive enough. We, when we would do evil, can disorganise a little matter, shed a little blood, quench a little breath at the door, of a perishable body; this we can do, and can call it crime. Unnatural is it? Good friend, it is by criminal things and deeds unnatural that nature works and moves and has her being; what subsides through inert virtue, she quickens through active crime; out of death she kindles life; she uses the dust of man to strike her light upon; she feeds with fresh blood the innumerable insatiable mouths suckled at her milkless breast; she takes the pain of the whole world to sharpen the sense of vital pleasure in her limitless veins: she stabs and poisons, crushes and corrodes, yet cannot live and sin fast enough for the cruelty of her great desire. Behold, the ages of men are dead at her feet; the blood of the world is on her hands; and her desire is continually toward evil, that she may see the end of things which she hath made. Friends, if we would be one with nature, let us continually do evil with our might. But what evil is here for us to do, where the whole body of things is evil? The day's spider kills the day's fly, and calls it a crime? Nay, could we thwart nature, then might crime become possible and sin an actual thing. Could but a man do this; could he cross the courses of the stars, and put back the times of the sea; could he change the ways of the world and find out the house of life to destroy it; could he go into heaven to defile it and into hell to deliver it from subjection; could he draw down the sun to consume the earth, and bid the moon shed poison or fire upon the air; could he kill the fruit in the seed and corrode the child's mouth with the mother's milk; then had he sinned and done evil against nature. Nay, and not then: for nature would fain have it so, that she might create a world of new things; for she is weary of the ancient life: her eyes are sick of seeing and her ears are heavy with hearing; with the lust of creation she is burnt up, and rent in twain with travail until she bring forth change; she would fain create afresh, and cannot, except it be by destroying: in all her energies she is athirst for mortal food, and with all her forces she labours in desire of death. And what are the worst sins we can do--we who live for a day and die in a night? a few murders, a few"--we need not run over the not so wholly insignificant roll-call; but it is curious to observe how the mystical evangelist and the material humourist meet in the reading of mere nature and join hands in their interpretation of the laws ruling the outer body of life: a vision of ghastly glory, without pity or help possible. [39] Blake had first written "the creeping," then cancelled "the" and interlined the word "Antichrist": I have no doubt intending some such alteration as that in the text of "creeping" to "aping"; but as far as we can now know the day for rewriting his fair copy never came. [40] There are (says the mystic) two forms of "humility": detestable both, and condemnable. By one, the extrinsic form, a man cringes and submits, doubts himself and gives in to others; becomes in effect impotent, a sceptic and a coward; by the other or intrinsic form, he conceives too meanly of his own soul, and comes to believe himself less than God--of course, to a pure Pantheist, the one radical and ruinous error which throws up on all sides a crop of lies and misconceptions, rank and ready; as base a thing to believe as an act of bodily "humility" were base to do: consequently any mere external worship is by this law heathenish, heretical and idolatrous. This heathenish or idolatrous heresy of spiritual humility comes merely of too much reliance on the reasoning power; man is undivine as to his mere understanding, and by using that as an eye instead of an eyeglass "distorts" all which he does not obliterate. "Pride of reason" is a foolish thing for any clerical defender of the "faith" to impugn; such pride is essentially humility. To be proud of having an empty eye-socket implies that you would be ashamed of having eyesight; then you are proud on the wrong side, and humble there exactly where humility is a mere blundering suicide's cut at his own throat; if you are _not_ of your nature heavenly, how shall any alien celestial quality be sewn or stuck on to you? in whose cast clothes will you crawl into heaven by rational or religious cross-roads? "Imputed righteousness" will not much help your case; if you "impute" a wrong quality to any imaginable substance, does your imputation change the substance? What it had not before, it has not now; your tongue has not the power of turning truth to a lie or a lie to truth; the fact gives your assertion a straight blow in the face. The mystic who says that man is God has some logical cause for pride; but the sceptic has no more than the cleric--he who asserts that reason, which is finite, can be final, is essentially as "humble" as he who admits that he can be "saved" by accepting as a gift some "imputed" goodness which is not in any sense his. For reason--the "spectre" of the _Jerusalem_--is no matter for pride; if you make out that to be the best faculty about you, you give proof of the stupidest modesty and hatefullest humility. Look across the lower animal reason, and over the dim lying limit of tangible and changeable flesh; and be humble if you can or dare, then; for if what you apprehend of yourself beyond is not God, there is none--except in that sad sense of a daemon or natural force, strong only to create and to divide and to destroy and to govern by reason or religion the material scheme of things. _Extra hominem nulla salus._ "God is no more than man; _because_ man is no less than God:" there is Blake's Pantheistic Iliad in a nutshell. [41] An ugly specimen of ready-writing; meaning of course "with the sacrifice of bloody prey:" but doubtless even Blake would not have let this stand, though we cannot safely alter it: and the passage did upon the whole appear worth citing. [42] This is so like Blake's style of design that one can scarcely help fancying he must somewhere have translated it into colours perhaps more comprehensible than his words: have given somewhere in painter's types the likeness of that bodily appetite, serpentine food of the serpent, a lithe and strenuous body of clay, fair with luminous flakes of eruptive poison, foul with cold and coloured scales as the scales of a leper in grain; with green pallor of straining mouth and bloodlike expansion of fiery throat; teeth and claws convulsed with the painful lust of pain, eyelids cloven in sunder with a dull flame of desire, the visible venom of its breath shot sharp against the face and eyes of the divine human soul: he, disembodied yet incarnate in the eternal body, stripped of accidental and clothed with essential flesh, naked of attribute that he may be girdled with substance, wrestling silent with fair great limbs, but with calm hair and brows blanched as in fire, with light of lordship in the "sunclear joyful eyes" that already absorb and devour by sweet strength of radiance the relapsing reluctant bulk of body, that foulest ravenous birth begotten of accident or error upon time; eyes beautiful with the after-light of ancient tears, that shall not weep again for ever: "for the former things are passed away": and by that light of theirs shall all men see light. Behind these two, an intense and tremulous night stricken through with stars and fire; and overhead the dividing roof and underfoot the sundering floor-work of the grave; a waste place beyond, full of risen bones that gather flesh and springing roots that strike out or catch at light flying flames of life. Decidedly the design must exist somewhere; and presumably in "Golgonooza." We have the artist's prophetic authority for believing that his works written and painted before he came upon earth do in effect fill whole chambers in heaven, and are "the delight and study of archangels:" an apocalyptic fact not unnaturally unacceptable and inconceivable to the cleverest of Scotch stonemasons. [43] Compare Hugo's admirable poem in the _Chatiments_ (vii. 11. p. 319-321)--"Paroles d'un conservateur a propos d'un perturbateur:"--where, speaking through the mouth of "Elizab, a scribe," the chief poet of our time gives in his great swift manner a dramatic summary of the view taken by priests and elders of Christ. It is worth looking to trace out how nearly the same historical points of objection are selected and the same lines of inference struck into by the two poets; one aiming straight at present politics, one indirectly at mystic doctrine. "Cet homme etait de ceux qui n'ont rien de sacre, Il ne respectait rien de tout ce qu'on respecte. Pour leur inoculer sa doctrine suspecte, Il allait ramassant dans les plus mechants lieux Des bouviers, des pecheurs, des droles bilieux, D'immondes va-nu-pieds n'ayant ni sou ni maille: Il faisait son cenacle avec cette canaille. * * * * * L'honnete homme indigne rentrait dans sa maison Quand ce jongleur passait avec cette sequelle. * * * * * Il trainait a sa suite une espece de fille. Il allait perorant, ebranlant la famille, Et la religion et la societe. Il sapait la morale et la propriete. * * * * * Quant aux pretres, Il les dechirait; bref, il blasphemait. Cela Dans la rue. Il contait toutes ces horreurs-la Aux premiers gueux venus, sans cape et sans semelles. Il fallait en finir, les lois etaient formelles, On l'a crucifie." [44] In a briefer and less important fragment of verse Blake as earnestly inculcates this faith of his: that all mere virtues and vices were known before Christ; of right and wrong Plato and Cicero, men uninspired, were competent to speak as well as he; but until his advent "the moral virtues in their pride" held rule over the world, and among them as they rode clothed with war and sacrifice, driving souls to hell before them, shone "upon the rivers and the streams" the face of the Accuser, holy God of this Pharisaic world. Then arose Christ and said to man "Thy sins are all forgiven thee;" and the "moral virtues," in terror lest their reign of war and accusation should now draw to an end, cried out "Crucify him," and formed with their own hands the cross and the nails and the spear: and the Accuser spoke to them saying:-- "Am I not Lucifer the great And ye my daughters, in great state, The fruit of my mysterious tree Of Good and Evil and Misery?" If, the preacher adds, moral virtue was Christianity, Christ's pretensions were madness, "and Caiaphas and Pilate men praiseworthy;" and the lion's den a fitter emblem of heaven than the sheepfold. "The moral Christian is the cause of the unbeliever;" and Antichrist is incarnate in those who close heaven against sinners "With iron bars in virtuous state And Rhadamanthus at the gate." But men have so long allowed the heathen virtues, whose element is war and whose essence retaliation, to "take Jesus' and Jehovah's name" that the Accuser, Antichrist and Lucifer though he be, is now worshipped by those holy names over all the world: and the era called Christian is the era of his reign. For the rest, this new relic has no special merit, although it may be allowed some share of interest as a supplement or illustration to the larger poem or sermon. [45] The words "female" and "reflex" are synonymous in all Blake's writings. What is feminine in its material symbol is derivative in its spiritual significance; "there is no such thing in eternity as a female will;" for in eternity substances lose their shadows, and essence puts off accident. The "frowning babe" of the last stanzas is of course the same or such another as the one whose birth is first spoken of; not the latter female growth born in the earthly house of art, but genius itself, whose likeness is terrible and unlovely at first sight to the run of men, filling them with affright and scandal, with wonder and the repellent sense that a new and strange thing is brought into the world. [46] It seems not impossible that this series may have been intended, in its complete form, to bear the title of _Ideas of Good and Evil_, which we find loosely attached to the general MS. When the designer broke it up into different sets, this name would naturally have been abandoned. [47] Of Blake's prose other samples are extant besides the notes on art published in the second volume of the _Life and Selections_. These strays are for the most part, as far as I have seen, mere waifs of weed and barren drift. One fragment, not without some grace and thoughtfulness curiously used up and thrown away, is an allegory of "the Gods which came from Fear," of Shame born of the "poisonous seed" of pride, and such things; written much in the manner of those early Ossianic studies which dilate and deform the volume of _Poetical Sketches_: perhaps composed (though properly never composed at all) about the same time. Another, a sort of satire on critics and "philosophers," seems to emulate the style of Sterne in his intervals of lax and dull writing; in execution it is some depths below the baby stories of little Malkin, whose ghost might well have blushed rejection of the authorship. The fragment on _Laocoon_ is a mere cento of stray notes on art which reaffirm in a chaotic and spluttering manner Blake's theories that the only real prayer is study of art, the only real praise, its practice; that excellence of art, not moral virtue, is the aim and the essence of Christianity; and much more of the same sort. These notes, crammed into every blank space and corner of the engraved page, burst out as it were and boil over, disconnected but irrepressible, in a feverish watery style. All really good or even passable prose of Blake's seems to be given in the volume of _Selections_. [48] It should not be overlooked that this part of his work was left unfinished, all but untouched, by the author of the _Life_. Without as long a study and as deep a sympathy as his, it would seem to any follower, however able and zealous, the most toilsome as well as the most sterile part of the task in hand. The fault therefore lies with chance or fate alone. Less than I have said above could not here be said; and more need not be. I was bound at starting to register my protest against the contempt and condemnation which these books have incurred, thinking them as I do not unworthy the trouble of commentary; but no word was designed to depreciate the careful and admirable labour which has completed a monument cut short with the life of the sculptor, joined now in death to the dead whom he honoured. [49] Something like this may be found in a passage of Werner translated by Mr. Carlyle, but mixed with much of meaner matter, and debased by a feebleness and a certain spiritual petulance proper to a man so much inferior. The German mystic, though ingenious and laborious, is also tepid, pretentious, insecure; half terrified at his own timid audacities, half choked by the fumes of his own alembic. He labours within a limit, not fixed indeed, but never expansive; narrowing always at one point as it widens at another: his work is weak in the head and the spine; he ventures with half a heart and strikes with half a hand; throughout his myth of Phosphorus he goes halting and hinting; not ungracefully, nay with a real sense of beauty, but never like a man braced up for the work requisite; he labours under a dull devotion and a cloudy capacity. Above all, he can neither speak nor do well, being no artist or prophet; and so makes but a poor preacher or essayist. The light he shows is thick and weak; Blake's light, be it meteor or star, rises with the heat and radiance of fire or the morning. [50] A word in passing may here be spared to the singular MS. of _Tiriel_. This little poem or mythical episode is evidently a growth of the crude Ossianic period; in style it is somewhat weak and inadequate to any grave or subtle expression of thought: a few noticeable lines intervene, but the general execution is heavy, faint, and rough even for a sketch. Here however (if I am not incorrect in referring it to a date earlier than the earliest of the prophetic books) we may see the dull dawn of a day full of fiery presage, of the light and vapour of tempestuous revelation. The name of Tiriel king of the West, father of a rebellious race of children who perish by his curse, hardly reappears once as "Thiriel" the cloud-born son of Urizen; Har and Heva, the gentler father and mother of the great eastern family, who in the _Song of Los_ are seen flying before the windy flames of a broad-blown sunset, chased over Asia with fire and sword by the divine tyrant and his tributary kings, are here seen forsaken of their sons in extreme and childish age, but tended by "Mutha" their mother; "they are holy and forgiving, filled with loving mercy, forgetting the offences of their most rebellious children." Into the story or subject-matter we need not go far; but it is worth notice that the series of twelve designs classified in the catalogue, section B., No. 156, pp. 253-4 of vol. 2, must evidently (as is there half suggested) be a set of illustrations to this _Tiriel_. In one of these any reader will recognize the serpentine hair which at her father's imprecation rose and hissed around the brows of "Hela" (_Tiriel_, ch. 6); but these designs have as evidently fallen out of order; thus the one lettered (_k_) appears to illustrate the very first lines of the poem; and others seem equally misarranged. In this faint allegory of the blind discrowned king with his two brothers, the mad invulnerable giant of the woods and the fettered dotard dwelling in caves, some fresh incomplete symbol is discernible of tyranny and error, of strength made insane or perverse and weakness made cruel or imbecile by oppression of the spirit or the flesh; the "eloquent" outcast oppressor might then be the uninspired intellect, against whose errors and tyrannies its own children revolt, and perish by the curse of their perishing father and mother, blind reason and powerless faith: but from such shallow and sandy soil the conjectural Muse of commentary can reap little worth her pains to garner, and at every sweep of her sickle must risk being blinded by the sand blown into her eyes. Some stray verses might be gathered up, perhaps worth a place in the gleaner's loose sheaf; such as these: "And aged Tiriel stood and said: Where does the thunder sleep? Where doth he hide his terrible head? and his swift and fiery daughters, Where do they shroud their fiery wings and the terrors of their hair?" Anything better worth citation than such crude sonorous snatches of lyric style I have not found here, except in chap. vii., where the dying Tiriel lays his final curse on Har--"weak mistaken father of a lawless race," whose "laws and Tiriel's wisdom end together in a curse." Here, in words afterwards variously repeated and enlarged, he appeals against the laws of mere animal life, the narrowed senses and material bondage of men upon earth; against unnatural training and abstinence through which "milk is cut off from the weeping mouth with difficulty and pain," when first "the little lids are lifted and the little nostrils opened;" against "hypocrisy, the idiot's wisdom and the wise man's folly," by which men are "compelled to pray repugnant and to handle the immortal spirit" till like Tiriel they become as subtle serpents in a paradise which they consume fruit by fruit and flower by flower till at its fall they themselves are left desolate. Thus too he inveighs against faith in matter and "respect of persons" under their perishable and finite forms: "Can wisdom be put in a silver rod or love in a golden bowl? is the son of a king warmed without wool? or does he cry with a voice of thunder? does he look upon the sun and laugh, or stretch his little hands into the depths of the sea?" Much of this has been half erased, probably with a view to remoulding the whole: for here alone does anything in tone or thought recall the nobler mysticism of Blake's later writings. [51] Before we dismiss the matter from view, it may be permissible to cast up in a rough and rapid way the sum of Blake's teaching in these books, if only because this was also the doctrine or moral of his entire life and life's work. I will therefore, as leave has been given, append a note extracted from a manuscript now before me, which attempts to embody and enforce, if only by dint of pure and simple exposition, the pantheistic evangel here set forth in so strange a fashion. Thus at least I read the passage; if misinterpreted, my correspondent has to thank his own laxity of expression. "These poems or essays at prophecy" (he says) "seem to me to represent in an obscure and forcible manner the real naked question to which all theologies and all philosophies must in the end be pared down. Strained and filtered clear of extraneous matter, pruned of foreign fruit and artificial foliage, this radical question lies between Theism and Pantheism. When the battles of the creeds have been all fought out, this battle will remain to fight. I do not see much likelihood on either hand of success or defeat. Faith and reason, evidence and report, are alike inadequate to decide the day. This prophet or that prophet, this God or that God, is not here under debate. Histories, religions, all things born of rumour or circumstance, accident or change, are out of court; are, for the moment, of necessity set aside. Gentile or Jew, Christian or Pagan, Eastern or Western, can but be equal to us--for the moment. No single figure, no single book, stands out for special judgment or special belief. On the right hand, let us say (employing the old figure of speech), is the Theist--the 'man of God,' if you may take his own word for it; the believer in a separate or divisible deity, capable or conceivably capable of existence apart from ours who conceive of it; a conscious and absolute Creator. On the left hand is the Pantheist; to whom such a creed is mainly incredible and wholly insufficient His creed is or should be much like that of your prophet here;" (I must observe in passing that my correspondent seems so unable to conceive of a comment apart from the text, an exponent who is not an evangelist,--so inclined to confuse the various functions of critic and of disciple, and assume that you must mean to preach or teach whatever doctrine you may have to explain--in a word, so obtuse or perverse on this point that he might be taken for a professional man-of-letters or sworn juryman of the press; but I will hope better things of him, though anonymous;) "and that creed, as I take it, is simply enough expressible in Blake's own words, or deducible from them; that 'all deities reside in the human breast'; that except humanity there is no divine thing or person. Clearly therefore, in the eyes of a Theist, he lies open to the charge of atheism or antitheism. The real difference is perhaps this; God appears to a Theist as the root, to a Pantheist as the flower of things. It does not follow logically or actually that to this latter all things are alike. For us (he might say), for us, within the boundaries of time and space, evil and good do really exist, and live no empirical life--for a certain time, and within a certain range. 'There is no God unless man can become God.' That is no saying for an Atheist. 'There is no man unless the child can become a man'; is that equivalent to a denial of manhood? But if a man is to be born into the world, the mother must abstain from the drugs that produce abortion, the child from strong meats and drinks, the man from poisons. So it is in the spiritual world; tyranny and treachery, indolence and dulness, cannot but impede and impair the immutable law of nature and necessary growth. These and their like must be and must pass away; the eternal body of things must change. As the fanatic abstains through fear of God or of hell, the free-thinker abstains from what he sees or thinks to be evil (_i. e._, adverse or alien to his nature at its best) through respect for what he is and reverence for what he may be. Pantheism therefore is no immoral creed, and cannot be, if only because it is based upon faith in nature and rooted in respect for it. By faith in sight it attains to sight through faith. It follows that pure Theism is more immediately the contrary of this belief, more unacceptable and more delusive in the eyes of its followers, than any scheme of doctrine or code of revelation. These, as we see by your Blake" (again), "the Pantheist may seize and recast in the mould of his own faith. But Theism, but the naked distinct figure of God, whether or not he assume the nature of man, so long as this is mere assumption and not the essence of his being--the clothes and not the body, the body and not the soul--this is to him incredible, the source of all evil and error. Grant such a God his chance of existence, what reason has the Theist to suppose or what right to assume his wisdom or his goodness? why this and not that? whence his acceptance and whence his rejection of anything that is? 'Shall the clay demand of the potter, why hast thou made me thus?' Shall it not? and why? Of whom else should a man ask? and if sure of his God, what better should he do? Theism is not expansive, but exclusive: and the creeds begotten or misbegotten on this lean body of belief are 'Satanic' in the eyes of a Pantheist, as his faith is in the eyes of their followers." There is much more, but it were superfluous to mix a narcotic over strong: and in pursuit of his flying "faith" my friend's ideal "Pantheist" is apt to become heretical. [52] That is, woman has become subject to oppression of customs; suffers violence at the hands of marriage laws and other such condemnable things. "Emancipation" and the cognate creeds of which later days have heard so much never had a more violent and vehement preacher. Not love, not the plucking of the flower, but error, fear, submission to custom and law, is that which "defiles" a woman in the sight of our prophet. [53] Even thus told, the myth is plain enough; a word or two of briefer translation may serve also to light up future allusions. "I plucked Leutha's flower," says Oothoon in the prelude of this poem, "and I was not ashamed;" the flower that brings forth a child, which nature permits and desires her to gather; Leutha is the spirit emblematic of physical pleasure, of sensual impulse and indulgence, from whom comes the "loose Bible" of Mahomet (_Song of Los_). But crossing the seas eastward to find her lover, the strong enslaved spirit of Europe, she, type of womanhood and freedom, is caught and chained as he by the force of conventional error and tyrannous habit, which makes her seem impure in his eyes; so they sit bound back to back, afraid to love; the eagles that tear her flesh are emblems of her lover's scorn; vainly, a virgin at heart, she appeals to all the fair and fearless face of nature against her rival, the prurient modesty of custom, a virgin in face, a harlot at heart; against unnatural laws of restraint upon youths and maidens, whose inevitable outcome is in the licentious alternative not less unnatural; he will not answer but with vain and vague lamentation, will not turn himself and love her for all her crying: the mystery of things and thoughts, the tyranny of times and laws, is heavy upon them to the end. All forms of life but these are free to be fair and happy: only from east to west the prison-houses are full of the wailing of women. [54] Night, or the darkness of worlds yet undivided and chaotic, is always typified by Blake as a "forest" dark with involved and implicated leaf or branch. Compare "The Tiger." [55] Along this page a serpent of imperious build rears the strong and sinuous length of his dusky glittering body, and spits forth keen undulating fire. [56] It is possible that Blake intended here some grotesque emblematic reference to the riots witnessed by himself, in which Lord Mansfield's house and MSS. were destroyed by fire. At all events, here alone is there any visible allusion to a matter of recent history. [57] That is, being unable to reconcile qualities, to pass beyond the legal and logical grounds of good and evil into the secret places where they are not. The whole argument hinges on this difference between Pantheism, which can, and Theism, which cannot, and is therefore no surer or saner than a mere religion based on Church or Bible, nor less incompetent to include, to expound, to redeem the world. [58] Compare, for the doctrine as to delusion and jealousy being _feminine_ principles (destructive by their weakness, not by their strength), this strange expostulation with God, recalling the tone of earlier prophets:-- "Why art thou silent and invisible, Father of Jealousy? Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds From every searching eye? Why darkness and obscurity In all thy words and laws, That none dare eat the fruit but from The wily serpent's jaws? Or is it because Jealousy[A] Gives feminine applause?" [A](This word, half rubbed off in the MS., may be "secrecy"; and the point would remain the same.) [59] Leutha, the spirit or guardian goddess of natural pleasure and physical beauty, is sacrificed as a ransom to redeem the spirit or guardian god of prohibitive law or judicial faith; to him she is sacrificed that through her he may be saved. Thus, in the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, the maiden who "plucks Leutha's flower," who trusts and indulges Nature, has her "virgin mantle torn in twain by the terrible thunders" of religious and moral law: woman was sacrificed and man "fast bound in misery" during the eighteen centuries--through which the mother goddess lay asleep, to weep over her children at her waking; as in the Prophecy of _Europe_ Time the father and Space the mother of men are afflicted and spellbound until the sleep of faith be slept out. There again the emblematic name of Leutha recurs in passing. [60] That is of course the reprobate according to theology, such as the heretical prophet himself: the class of men upon which is laid the burden of the sins of the elect, as Satan's upon Rintrah in the myth. [61] This line appears to have been too much for the writer in the _Life_, who here breaks his quotation short off by the head, annihilating with a quite ingenious violence at once grammar, sense, and sound. It is but a small nut to have broken his critical tooth upon; the evident meaning being simply this: that within the centre of everything living by animal or vegetative life there is by way of kernel something imperishable; the fleshly or material life of form contains the infinite spiritual life, lurking under leaf or latent under limb: man and flower and beast have each the separate secret of a soul or divisible indestructible spirit (compare even the _Songs of Innocence_); but while the earthly and fleshly form remains there stand as wardens of the ways the two material giants, Strength and Force, binding the soul in the body with chains of flesh and sex, the spirit in the petals with bonds of vegetable form, fashioned fastenings of chalice and anther, sprinklings of dusty gold on leaf or pistil; always, without hammer or rivet of Vulcanic forging, able to hold fast Prometheus in blind bondage to the flesh and form of things; so that except by inspiration there can be no chance of seeing what does exist and work in man or beast or flower; only by vision or by death shall one be brought safe past the watch guarded by the sentinels of material form and bodily life, the crude tributary "Afrites" (as in the Aeschylean myth) of the governing power which fashions and fetters life in men and things. And thus this, the singing of birds and dancing of flowers, the springing of colour and kindling of music at each day's dawn, is a symbol--"a vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon"--of the dwellers in that milder and moonlight-coloured world of reflex mortal spirits over the imperishable influences of a higher spiritual world, which descending upon earth must be clothed with material mystery and become subject to sensuous form and likeness in the body of the shadow of death. This glorious passage, almost to be matched for wealth of sound, for growth and gradation of floral and musical splendour, for mastery of imperial colour, even against the great interlude or symphony of flowers in _Maud_, was not cast at random into the poem, but has also a "soul" or meaning in it--though the ways of seeing and understanding are somewhat too closely guarded by "Og and Anak." Reading it as an excerpt indeed one need hardly wish to see beyond the form or material figure. That "innumerable dance" of tree and flower and herb is not unfit for comparison with the old [Greek: anerithmon gelasma] of the waves of the sea. [62] One may fear that some such symbolic stuff as this is really at the root of the admirable poem christened by its editor with the name of _Broken Love_: which I gravely suspect was meant for insertion in some fresh instalment of prophetic rhapsody by way of complement or sequel to _Jerusalem_. The whole tone of it, and especially that of some rejected stanzas, is exactly in the elemental manner of the scenes (where scene is none) between Albion, Jerusalem, and Vala the Spectre of Jerusalem (books 1st and 2nd):-- "Thou hast parted from my side-- Once thou wast a virgin bride: Never shalt thou a true love find-- My Spectre follows thee behind. "When my love did first begin, Thou didst call that love a sin; Secret trembling, night and day, Driving all my loves away." These two stanzas (recalling so many other passages where Blake has enforced his doctrines as to the fatal tendency of the fears and jealousies, the abstinence and doubt, produced by theoretic virtue and hatched by artificial chastity) stood originally as third and fourth in the poem. They are cancelled in Blake's own MS.; but in that MS. the poem ends as follows, in a way (I fear) conclusive as to the justice of my suggestion; I mark them conjecturally, as I suppose the dialogue to stand, by way of helping the reader to some glimpse of the point here and there. "When wilt thou return and view My loves and them to life renew? When wilt thou return and live? When wilt thou pity as I forgive?" "Never, never, I return; Still for victory I burn. Living, thee alone I'll have; And when dead I'll be thy grave. "Through the heaven and earth and hell Thou shalt never, never quell: I will fly and thou pursue; Night and morn the flight renew." (This I take to be the jealous lust of power and exclusive love speaking through the incarnate "female will." See _Jerusalem_ again.) "And I, to end thy cruel mocks, Annihilate thee on the rocks, And another form create To be subservient to my fate. "Till I turn from female love And root up the infernal grove, I shall never worthy be To step into eternity." (This stanza ought probably to be omitted; but I retain it as being carefully numbered for insertion by Blake: though he by some evident slip of mind or pen has put it before the preceding one.) "Let us agree to give up love And root up the infernal grove, Then shall we return and see The worlds of happy eternity. "And throughout all eternity I forgive you, you forgive me; As our dear Redeemer said, This the wine and this the bread." That is perfect _Jerusalem_ both for style and matter. The struggle of either side for supremacy--the flight and pursuit--the vehemence and perversion--the menace and the persuasion--the separate Spectre or incarnation of sex "annihilated on the rocks" of rough law or stony circumstance and necessity--the final vision of an eternity where the jealous divided loves and personal affections "born of shame and pride" shall be destroyed or absorbed in resignation of individual office and quality--all this belongs but too clearly to the huge prophetic roll. Few however will be desirous, and none will be wise, to resign for these gigantic shadows of formless and baseless fancy the splendid exposition given by the editor (p. 76 of vol. ii). Seen by that new external illumination, though it be none of the author's kindling, his poem stands on firmer feet and is clothed with a nearer light. [63] In the mythologic scheme, also, Los god of time and Albion father of the races of men are rival powers; and the "Spectre" or satellite deity reproaches his lord with resignation of the world and all its ways and generations (which should have been subject only to the Time-Spirit) to the guidance of the nations sprung from the patriarch Albion (called in Biblical records after Jewish names, here spoken of by their English or other titles, more or less burlesque and barbaric) who have taken upon themselves to subdue even Time himself to this work and divide his spoils. So closely is the bare mythical construction enwound with the symbolic or doctrinal passages which are meant to give it such vitality and such coherence as they may. [64] Who adore nature as she appears to the Deist, who select this and reject that, assume and presume according to moral law and custom, instead of accepting the Pantheistic revelation which consecrates all things and absorbs all contraries. 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This day, neatly printed, price 1s. 6d.; by post 1s. 8d. Mental Exertion: its Influence on Health. By Dr. BRIGHAM. Edited, with additional Notes, by Dr. ARTHUR LEARED, Physician to the Great Northern Hospital. This is a highly important little book, showing how far we may educate the mind without injuring the body. The recent untimely deaths of Admiral Fitzroy and Mr. Prescott, whose minds gave way under excessive mental exertion, fully illustrate the importance of the subject. EVERY HOUSEKEEPER SHOULD POSSESS A COPY. Now ready, in cloth, price 2s. 6d.; by post 2s. 8d. The Housekeeper's Assistant; a Collection of the most valuable Recipes, carefully written down for future use, by Mrs. B---- during her forty years' active service. As much as two guineas has been paid for a copy of this invaluable little work. How to See Scotland; or, a Fortnight in the Highlands for L6. A plain and practical guide.--Price 1s. Now ready, 8vo., price 1s. List of British Plants. Compiled and Arranged by Alex More, F.L.S. This comparative _List of British Plants_ was drawn up for the use of the country botanist, to show the differences in opinion which exist between different authors as to the number of species which ought to be reckoned within the compass of the _flora_ of Great Britain. Now ready, price 2s. 6d.; by post 2s. 10d. Dictionary of the Oldest Words in the English Language, from the Semi-Saxon Period of A.D. 1250 to 1300; consisting of an Alphabetical Inventory of Every Word found in the Printed English Literature of the 13th Century, by the late HERBERT COLERIDGE, Secretary to the Philological Society. 8vo., neat half morocco. An invaluable work to historical students and those interested in linguistic pursuits. The School and College Slang of England; or, Glossaries of the Words and Phrases peculiar to the Six great Educational Establishments of the country.--Preparing. This day, in Crown 8vo., handsomely printed, price 7s. 6d. 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Illustrated by Holbein and Albert Durer. With Wood Engravings of the "Life of Christ," rich woodcut border on every page of Fruit and Flowers; also the Dance of Death, a singularly curious series after Holbein, with Scriptural Quotations and Proverbs in the Margin. Square 8vo., cloth neat, exquisitely printed on tinted paper, price 8s. 6d.; in dark morocco, very plain and neat, with block in the Elizabethan style impressed on the sides, gilt edges, 16s. 6d. Apply direct for this exquisite volume. AN APPROPRIATE BOOK TO ILLUMINATE. The attention of those who practise the beautiful art of Illuminating is requested to the following sumptuous volume:-- The Presentation Book of Common Prayer. Illustrated with Elegant Ornamental Borders in red and black, from "Books of Hours" and Illuminated Missals, by GEOFFREY TORY. One of the most tasteful and beautiful books ever printed. May now be seen at all booksellers. Although the price is only a few shillings (7s. 6d. in plain cloth; 8s. 6d. antique do.; 14s. 6d. morocco extra), this edition is so prized by artists that, at the South Kensington and other important Art Schools, copies are kept for the use of students. Now ready, in 8vo., on tinted paper, nearly 350 pages, very neat, price 5s. Family History of the English Counties: Descriptive Account of Twenty Thousand most Curious and Rare Books, Old Tracts, Ancient Manuscripts, Engravings, and Privately-printed Family Papers, relating to the History of almost every Landed Estate and Old English Family in the Country; interspersed with nearly Two Thousand Original Anecdotes, Topographical and Antiquarian Notes. By JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN. By far the largest collection of English and Welsh Topography and Family History ever formed. Each article has a small price affixed for the convenience of those who may desire to possess any book or tract that interests them. AN INTERESTING VOLUME TO ANTIQUARIES. Now ready, 4to., half morocco, handsomely printed, price 7s. 6d. Army Lists of the Roundheads and Cavaliers in the Civil War. These most curious Lists show on which side the gentlemen of England were to be found during the great conflict between the King and the Parliament. Only a very few copies have been most carefully reprinted on paper that will gladden the heart of the lover of choice books. Folio, exquisitely printed on toned paper, with numerous Etchings, &c., price 28s. Millais Family, the Lineage and Pedigree of, recording its History from 1331 to 1865, by J. B. PAYNE, with Illustrations from Designs by the Author. Of this beautiful volume only sixty copies have been privately printed for presents to the several members of the family. The work is magnificently bound in blue and gold. These are believed to be the only etchings of an heraldic character ever designed and engraved by the distinguished artist of the name. _Apply direct for this work._ Now ready, 12mo., very choicely printed, price 6s. 6d. London Directory for 1677, the Earliest Known List of the London Merchants. See Review in the _Times_, Jan. 22. This curious little volume has been reprinted verbatim from one of the only two copies known to be in existence. It contains an Introduction pointing out some of the principal persons mentioned in the list. For historical and genealogical purposes the little book is of the greatest value. Herein will be found the originators of many of the great firms and co-partnerships which have prospered through two pregnant centuries, and which exist some of them in nearly the same names at this day. Its most distinctive feature is the early severance which it marks of "goldsmiths that keep running cashes," precursors of the modern bankers, from the mass of the merchants of London. Now ready, price 5s.; by post, on roller, 5s. 4d. Magna Charta. An Exact Facsimile of the Original Document preserved in the British Museum, very carefully drawn, and printed on fine plate paper, nearly 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, with the Arms and Seals of the Barons elaborately emblazoned in gold and colours. A.D. 1215. Copied by express permission, and the only correct drawing of the Great Charter ever taken. Handsomely framed and glazed, in carved oak of an antique pattern, 22s. 6d. It is uniform with the "Roll of Battle Abbey." A full translation, with Notes, has just been prepared, price 6d. NEW BOOK BY PROFESSOR RENAN'S ASSOCIATE. Exquisitely printed, 12mo., cloth, very neat, price 3s. 6d. Apollonius of Tyana: the Pagan or False Christ of the Third Century. An Essay. By ALBERT REVILLE, Pastor of the Walloon Church at Rotterdam. Authorized translation. A most curious account of an attempt to revive Paganism in the third century by means of a false Christ. Strange to say, the principal events in the life of Apollonius are almost identical with the Gospel narrative. Apollonius was born in a mysterious way about the same time as Christ. After a period of preparation came a Passion, then a Resurrection, and an Ascension. In many other respects the parallel is equally extraordinary. In the press, 4to. Part I. The Celtic Tumuli of Dorsetshire: an Account of Personal and other Researches on the Sepulchral Mounds of the Durotiges; forming the First Part of a Description of the Primeval Antiquities of the County. In small 4to. handsomely printed, 1s. 6d. Esholt in Airedale, Yorkshire: the Cistercian Priory of St. Leonard, Account of, with View of Esholt Hall. ANECDOTES OF THE "LONG PARLIAMENT" OF 1645. 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A most curious document, and of the greatest interest, as the descendants of nearly all these Norman Conquerors are at this moment living amongst us. No names are believed to be in this "Battel Roll," which are not fully entitled to the distinction. Handsomely framed and glazed, in carved oak of an antique pattern, price 22s. 6d. Warrant to Execute Charles I. An Exact Facsimile of this Important Document in the House of Lords, with the Fifty-nine Signatures of the Regicides, and Corresponding Seals, admirably executed on paper made to imitate the Original Document, 22 in. by 14 in. Price 2s.; by post, 2s. 4d. Handsomely framed and glazed, in carved oak of an antique pattern, 14s. 6d. Now ready. Warrant to Execute Mary Queen of Scots. The Exact Facsimile of this Important Document, including the Signature Queen Elizabeth and Facsimile of the Great Seal, on tinted paper, made to imitate the original MS. Safe on roller, 2s.; by post, 2s. 4d. Handsomely framed and glazed, in carved oak of an antique pattern, 14s. 6d. In 1 vol., 4to., on tinted paper, with 19 large and most curious Plates in facsimile, coloured by hand, including an ancient View of the City of Waterford. Illuminated Charter-Roll of Waterford, Temp. Richard II. Price to Subscribers, 20s.; Non-subscribers, 30s. Of the very limited impression proposed, more than 150 copies have already been subscribed for. Amongst the Corporation Muniments of the City of Waterford is preserved an ancient Illuminated Roll, of great interest and beauty, comprising all the early Charters and Grants to the City of Waterford, from the time of Henry II. to Richard II. Full-length Portraits of each King adorn the margin, varying from eight to nine inches in length--some in armour and some in robes of state. In addition are Portraits of an Archbishop in full canonicals, of a Chancellor, and of many of the chief Burgesses of the City of Waterford, as well as singularly-curious Portraits of the Mayors of Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, and Cork, figured for the most part in the quaint bipartite costume of the Second Richard's reign, peculiarities of that of Edward III. Altogether this ancient work of art is unique of its kind in Ireland, and deserves to be rescued from oblivion. _John Camden Hotten, 74 & 75, Piccadilly, London._ * * * * * Transcriber's note: The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. The following misprints have been corrected: "has" corrected to "hast" (page 153) "Thetoormon" corrected to "Theotormon" (page 234) "woamn" corrected to "woman" (footnote 19) "rongh" corrected to "rough" (footnote 20) Other than the corrections listed above, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM BLAKE: A CRITICAL ESSAY *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. 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