Life of William Blake (1880), Volume 1/Chapter 21

by Alexander Gilchrist, Anne Gilchrist

CHAPTER XXI.

THE JERUSALEM AND MILTON. 1804. [ÆT. 47.]

In two letters to Mr. Butts (p. 185-7) Blake had alluded to a 'long poem' descriptive of the 'spiritual acts of his three years' slumber on the banks of Ocean.' This was entitled Jerusalem; the Emanation of thie Giant Albion, 1804, Printed by W.Blake, South Molton Street; it is a large quarto volume of a hundred engraved pages, writing and design; only one side of each leaf being engraved. Most copies are printed with plain black and white, some with blue ink, some red; a few are tinted. For a tinted copy the price was twenty guineas.

The Jerusalem is prefaced by an 'Address' to the public, in a style to which the public is little accustomed:—

alt-text=a title "To the Public" on a hill-shaped outline, the words "Sheep." and Goats." appear on either side.

After my three years slumber on the banks of Ocean, I again display my giant forms to the public: my former giants and fairies having received the highest reward possible; the ... and ... of those with whom to be connected is to be ... I cannot doubt that this more consolidated and extended work will be ... as kindly received ... &c. ^{* *} * Reader, what you do not approve, &c. ... me for this energetic exertion of my talents.

Although the Jerusalem was conceived, and in great part written at Felpham, it was finished in London whilst the work of engraving for Hayley was still going on. At page 38 we find:—

From JERUSALEM.

In Felpham I saw and heard the visions of Albion;
I write in South Molton Street what I both see and hear.
In regions of humanity, in London's opening streets
I see the awful Parent Land in light.
Behold I see!
Verulam! Canterbury! venerable parent of men!
Generous immortal guardian! Golden clad; for cities
Are men, fathers of multitudes; and rivers and mountains
Are also men: everything is human! mighty! sublime!

The poem, since poem we are to call it, is mostly written in prose; occasionally in metrical prose; more rarely still it breaks forth into verse. Here is the author's own account of the matter:—

When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence, like that used by Milton, Shakspeare and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of the verse. But I soon found that, in the mouth of a true orator, such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I, therefore, have produced a variety in every line, both in cadence and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied, and put into its place. The terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other.

There is little resemblance to the 'prophetic books' of earlier date. We hear no longer of the wars, the labours, the sufferings, the laments of Orc, Rintrah, Urizen, or Enitharmon. Religious enthusiasm, always a strong element in Blake's mental constitution, always deeply tinging his imaginative creations, seems, during the time of the lonely sea-shore life, to have been kindled into over-mastering intensity. 'I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve, or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time; without premeditation, and even against my will; thus an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study,' he wrote in a letter already cited to Mr. Butts. Such a belief in plenary inspiration, such a deliberate abjuring of the guidance and control of intellect and will, could have but one result. 'Scattered upon the void in incoherent despair,' to borrow his own too appropriate words, are our thoughts whilst the eyes wander, hopeless and dispirited, up and down the large closely-written pages. The following lines instance in brief the devout and earnest spirit in which Blake wrote, the high aims he set before him, and afford also a glimpse of the most strange and unhappy result,—dark oracles, words presenting endless obstacles to all but him who uttered them:—

Trembling I sit, day and night. My friends are astonisht at me:
Yet they forgive my wand'rings. I rest not from my great task:
To open the eternal worlds! To open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards; into the worlds of thought: into eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
O Saviour! pour upon me thy spirit of meekness and love.
Annihilate selfhood in me! Be thou all my life!
Guide thou my hand, which trembles exceedingly, upon the Rock of Ages!
While I write of the building of Golgonooza and of the terrors of Entuthon:
Of Hand and Hyle, and Coban; of Kwantok, Peachey, Brereton, Slayd, and Hutton:
Of the terrible sons and daughters of Albion and their generations.
Scofield, Kox, Kotope and Bowen revolve most mightily upon
The furnace of Los, before the eastern gate bending their fury.
They war to destroy the furnaces; to desolate Golgonooza,
And to devour, the sleeping humanity of Albion in rage and hunger.

There is an ominous sentence in one of the letters to Mr. Butts, where, speaking of the Jerusalem, he says, 'the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (someof the persons excepted),' The italics are mine, and, alas! to what wisp-led flounderings of research might they not lure a reckless adventurer. The mixture of the unaccountable with the familiar in nomenclature which occurs towards the close of the preceding extract from the Jerusalem is puzzling enough in itself; but conjecture attains bewilderment when we realize that one of the names, 'Scofield' (spelt perhaps more properly Scholfield, but pronounced no doubt as above), was that of the soldier who had brought a charge of sedition against Blake at Felpham. Whether the other English names given were in some way connected with the trial would be worth any practicable inquiries. When we consider the mystical connection in which this name of Scofield is used, a way seems opened into a more perplexed region of morbid analogy existing in Blake's brain than perhaps any other key could unlock. It is a minute point, yet a significant and amazing one. Further research discovers further references to 'Scofield,' for instance,

'Go thou to Skofield:
Ask him if he is Bath or if he is Canterbury:
Tell him to be no more dubious: demand explicit words:
Tell him I will dash him into shivers where and at what time
I please. Tell him, Hand and Skofield, they are ministers of evil
To those I hate: for I can hate also as well as they.'

Again (not without Jack the Giant Killer to help):—

'Hark! hear the giants of Albion cry at night,—
We smell the blood of the English, we delight in their blood on our altars;
The living and the dead shall be ground in our crumbling mill.
For bread of the sons of Albion, of the giants Hand and Skofield:
Skofield and Cox are let loose upon the Saxons; they accumulate
A world in which man is, by his nature, the enemy of man.'

Again (and woe is the present editor!):—

"These are the names of Albion's twelve sons and of his twelve daughters:—'

(Then follows a long enumeration,—to each name certain countries attached):—

'Skofield had Ely, Rutland, Cambridge, Huntingdon,
Norfolk, Suffolk, Hertford, Essex, and his emanation is Guinivere.' (!!!)

The first of the three above quotations seems meant really as a warning to Scholfield to be exact in evidence as to his place of birth or other belongings, and as to the 'explicit words' used by Blake! Cox and Courthope are Sussex names: can these be the 'Kox' and 'Kotope' of the poem, and names in some way connected, like Schofield's, with the trial? Is the wild, wild tale of Schofield exhausted here? Alas no! At leaf 51 of the Jerusalem occurs the design which is reproduced opposite. In some, perhaps in all, copies of the Jerusalem, as a whole, the names inscribed above the figures are not given, but at least three examples of water-colour drawings, or highly-coloured reproductions of the plate exist, in which the names appear as in our plate. Who 'Vala' and 'Hyle' may personify I do not pretend to conjecture, though dim surmises hurtle in the mind, which, like De Quincey in the catastrophe of the Spanish Nun, I shall keep to myself. These two seem, pretty clearly, to be prostrate at the discomfiture of Schofield, who is finally retiring fettered into his native element. As a historical picture then, Blake felt it his duty to monumentalise this design with due inscription. Two of the three hand-coloured versions, referred to above, are registered as Nos. 50 and 51 of the Catalogue in Vol. II., and the third version appears as No. 108 in the Burlington Catalogue. I may note another point bearing on the personal grudges shadowed in the Jerusalem. In Blake's Public Address (see Vol. II.), he says, The manner in which my character has been blasted these thirty years, both as an artist and a man, may be seen, particularly in a Sunday paper called the Examiner, published in Beaufort's Buildings (we all know that editors of newspapers trouble their heads very little about art and science, and that they are always paid for what they put in upon these ungracious subjects); and the manner in which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen in a poem concerning my three years Herculean labours at Felpham, which I shall soon publish. Secret calumny and open professions of friendship are common enough all the world over, but have never been so good an occasion of poetic imagery.' Thus we are evidently to look (or sigh in vain) for some indication of Blake's wrath against the Examiner in the vast Jerusalem. It is true that the Examiner persecuted him, his publications and exhibition, and that Leigh Hunt

was prone to tell 'good stories' of him, as we shall see later; and in some MS. doggerel of Blake's we meet with the line,

'The Examiner whose very name is Hunt.'

But what form can the irate allegory be supposed to take in the Jerusalem? Is it conceivable that that mysterious entity or non-entity, 'Hand,' whose name occurs sometimes in the poem, and of whom an incribed spectrum is there given at full length, can be a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt? Alas, what is possible or impossible in such a connection?

Of the names strung together in the first extract in this chapter, many do not occur again throughout the book; and to some, the perplexed reader fails, to the last, to attach any idea. Their owners can hardly be spoken of as shadows, for a shadow has a certain definition of form. It may be surmised that the Jerusalem is to be regarded as an allegory in which the lapse of the human race from a higher spiritual state, and its struggles towards a return to such, are the main topics. 'Jerusalem' is once spoken of as Liberty; she is also apostrophized as 'mild shade of man,' and must, on the whole, be taken to symbolize a milennial state.

There is sometimes a quaint felicity in the choice of homely, familiar things as symbols, as in this description of Golgonooza, the 'spiritual fourfold London' (for so it is afterwards called in the Milton):—

Lo!
The stones are pity, and the bricks well-wrought affections,
Enamelled with love and kindness; and the tiles, engraven gold,
Labour of merciful hands; the beams and rafters are forgiveness;
The mortar and cement of the work, tears of honesty; the nails
And the screws and iron traces are well-wrought blandishments,
And well-contrived words, firm fixing, never forgotten,
Always comforting the remembrance: the floors humility;
The ceilings devotion the hearths thanksgiving.

Far more curious is the following song. It seems to indicate again that Jerusalem may have with Blake, in a wide acceptation, its not unusual significance of 'The True Church;' seeing that the portion of the poem in which this song occurs is addressed 'To the Jews,' and that the British nation, nevertheless, seems here as elsewhere in Blake's writings, to be 'the chosen people,' or as one may say, 'the Jews regenerate.' This song is given as an example of what Blake could do in his most exacting moods, if indeed he really expected any listener other than a 'spectre' or 'emanation' of his own to hearken to such strains; combining as they do, localities familiar only to penny-a-lining with conceptions 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane.' The early part of the song is included, indeed, not without hesitation, lest the reader should laugh at one whose creation was not for laughter; but it had better speak as a whole for itself, and for its author's wildest exigencies. The inmost cell of the poetic mind will not find the familiar names in such connexion altogether unwelcome; and after the stanza commencing,

'The Rhine was red with human blood,'

the verse opens out into reaches of utterance much nobler, and surely, here and there, not unsuggestive of prophecy.

To the Jews.

The fields from Islington to Marybone,
⁠To Primrose Hill and Saint John's Wood,
Were builded over with pillars of gold;
⁠And there Jerusalem's pillars stood.

Her little ones ran on the fields,
⁠The Lamb of God among them seen;
And fair Jerusalem, his Bride,
⁠Among the little meadows green.

Pancras and Kentish Town repose
⁠Among her golden pillars high,
Among her golden arches which
⁠Shine upon the starry sky.

The Jew's-Harp House and the Green Man,
⁠The Ponds where boys to bathe delight,
The fields of cows by Welling's farm,
⁠Shine in Jerusalem's pleasant sight.

She walks upon our meadows green
⁠The lamb of God walks by her side,
And every English child is seen,
⁠Children of Jesus and His Bride:

Forgiving trespasses and sins,
⁠Lest Babylon, with cruel Og,
With moral and self-righteous Law,
⁠Should crucify in Satan's synagogue.

What are those golden builders doing
⁠Near mournful, ever-weeping Paddington?
Standing above that mighty ruin
⁠Where Satan the first victory won?

Where Albion slept beneath the fatal tree,
⁠And the Druid's golden knife
Rioted in human gore,
⁠In offerings of human life?

They groaned aloud on London Stone,
⁠They groaned aloud on Tyburn's brook:
Albion gave his deadly groan.
⁠And all the Atlantic mountains shook.

Albion's spectre from his loins
⁠Tore forth in all the pomp of war,
Satan his name: in flames of fire,
⁠He stretched his Druid pillars far.

Jerusalem fell from Lambeth's vale
⁠Down through Poplar and old Bow,
Through Maiden, and across the sea.
⁠In war and howling, death and woe.

The Rhine was red with human blood,
⁠The Danube roll'd a purple tide.
On the Euphrates Satan stood
⁠And over Asia stretch'd his pride.

He wither'd up sweet Zion's hill
⁠From every nation of the earth,
He wither'd up Jerusalem's gates,
⁠And in a dark land gave her birth.

He wither'd up the human form
⁠By laws of sacrifice for sin,
Till it became a mortal worm,
⁠But, O! translucent all within!

The Divine Vision still was seen.
⁠Still was the human form divine;
Weeping, in weak and mortal clay,
⁠O Jesus! still the form was Thine!

And Thine the human face; and Thine
⁠The human hands, and feet, and breath
Entering through the gates of birth
⁠And passing through the gates of death.

And, O! Thou Lamb of God! whom I
⁠Slew in my dark, self-righteous pride,
Art Thou return'd to Albion's land?
⁠And is Jerusalem Thy Bride?

Come to my arms, and never more
⁠Depart; but dwell for ever here;
Create my spirit to Thy love.
⁠Subdue my spectre to Thy fear.

Spectre of Albion! warlike fiend!
⁠In clouds of blood and ruin roll'd,
I here reclaim Thee as my own.
⁠My selfhood; Satan arm'd in gold.

Is this thy soft family love?
⁠Thy cruel patriarchal pride?
Planting thy family alone.
⁠Destroying all the world beside?

A man's worst enemies are those
⁠Of his own house and family;
And he who makes his law a curse
⁠By his own law shall surely die.

In my exchanges every land
⁠Shall walk, and mine in every land.
Mutual, shall build Jerusalem,
⁠Both heart in heart and hand in hand.

Many of Blake's favourite metaphysical and theological tenets are enlarged upon. As, for instance, the antagonism of Reason to Faith:—

And this is the manner of the sons of Albion in their strength:
They take two contraries, which are called qualities, with which
Every substance is clothed: they name them Good and Evil.
From these they make an abstract, which is a negation.
Not only of the substance from which it is derived,—
A murderer of its own body: but also a murderer
Of every divine member:—it is the Reasoning Power,
An abstract, objecting Power, that negatives everything.
This is the spectre of man,—the holy Reasoning Power;
And in its holiness is closed the abomination of desolation.

And again:—

Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion.

He who would do good to another, must do it in minute particulars:
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars,
And not in generalizing demonstrations of the Rational Power.
The Infinite alone resides in definite and determinate identity.

Here is another theme he loved to dwell on:—

All that has existed in the space of six thousand years
Permanent and not lost: not lost nor vanish'd; and every little act,
Word, work, and wish that have existed,—all remaining still
In those churches, ever consuming and ever building by the spectres
Of all the inhabitants of earth waiting to be created;
Shadowy to those who dwell not in them—mere possibilities;
But, to those who enter into them, they seem the only realities.
For everything exists; and not one sigh, nor smile, nor tear,
One hair, nor particle of dust—not one can pass away. *⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

All things acted on earth are seen in the bright sculptures of
Los's Hall. And every age renews its powers from these works:
With every pathetic story possible to happen from Hate or
Wayward Love. And every sorrow and distress is carved here;
Every affinity of parents, marriages and friendship's are here
In all their various combinations; wrought with wondrous art,
All that can happen to man in his pilgrimage of seventy years.

Interesting fragments, surely, if only as being so eminently characteristic of the man. A few more such—mere fragments—I will add before proceeding to speak of the decorative designs with which every page of the original is enriched:—

Wherefore hast thou shut me into the winter of human life
And closed up the sweet regions of youth and virgin innocence
Where we live forgetting error, not pondering on evil:
Among my lambs and brooks of water, among my warbling birds,
Where we delight in innocence before the face of the Lamb,
Going in and out before him in his love and sweet affection?
Vala replied weeping and trembling, hiding in her veil.

When winter rends the hungry family and the snow falls
Upon the ways of men, hiding the paths of man and beast,
Then mourns the wanderer: then he repents his wanderings and eyes
The distant forest; then the slave groans in the dungeon of stone,
The captive in the mill of the stranger sold for scanty hire:
They view their former life: they number moments over and over
Stringing them on their remembrance as on a thread of sorrow.

Imagination [is] the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable
universe is but a faint shadow: and in which we shall live, in our
eternal or imaginative bodies, when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more.

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

Without forgiveness of sin, Love itself is eternal Death.

O Albion! why didst thou a female will create?

Negations are not contraries. Contraries mutually exist.
But negations exist not; exceptions, objections, unbelief,
Exist not; nor shall they ever be organized for ever and ever.

From JERUSALEM.

If I were pure, never could I taste the sweets of the forgiveness of sins.
If I were holy, I never could behold the tears of love:
Of Him who loves me in the midst of His anger.

I heard His voice in my sleep, and His angel in my dream
Saying, Doth Jehovah forgive a debt, only on condition that it shall
Be paid? Doth He forgive pollution only on condition of purity?
That debt is not forgiven! that pollution is not forgiven!
Such is the forgiveness of the gods; the moral virtues of the
Heathen, whose tender mercies are cruelty. But Jehovah's salvation
Is without money and without price, in the continual forgiveness of sins.

⁠The vegetative universe opens like a flower from the earth's centre,
In which is eternity. It expands in stars to the mundane shell.
And there it meets Eternity again, both within and without.

What may man be? Who can tell? But what may women be
To have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave?
He who was an Infant, and whose cradle was a manger,
Knoweth the Infant Sorrow, whence it came and where it goeth.
And who weave it a cradle of the grass that withereth away.
This world is all a cradle for the erred, wandering Phantom,
Rock'd by year, month, day, and hour. And every two moments
Between, dwells a daughter of Beulah, to feed the human vegetable.

Rock the cradle, ah me! of that eternal man!

The magic influences of one of the 'daughters of Beulah' are thus described:—

⁠She creates at her will a little moony night and silence,
With spaces of sweet gardens and a tent of elegant beauty
Closed in by sandy deserts, and a night of stars shining;
A little tender moon, and hovering angels on the wing.
And the male gives a time and revolution to her space
Till the time of love is passed in ever-varying delights:
For all things exist in the human imagination.

This last line contains what deserves to be called the corner-stone of Blake's philosophy. For his philosophy had corner-stone and foundation, and was not miraculously suspended in the air, as his readers might sometimes feel tempted to believe. Amid all contradictions, incoherences, wild assertions, this principle,—that the conceptions of the mind are the realities of realities, that the human imagination is an eternal world, 'ever expanding in the bosom of God,'—shines steadily forth: and to readers of a speculative turn, who will be at the pains to examine by its light these erratic writings, the chaos will resolve itself into substance, though not into form and order. It is needless to tell such thinkers that Bishop Berkeley was one on the list of Blake's favourite authors. But, with his fervid, dauntless imagination, the artist seized hold of the metaphysician's theory of Idealism, and strove to quicken it into a grand, poetic Cosmos.

There is another 'Song' in the Jerusalem, addressed To the Deists, beginning—

I saw a monk of Charlemaine,

which follows soon after the one already quoted To the Jews. As it is far less singular and characteristic than its predecessor, however, the concluding beautiful stanza is all that shall here detain us:—

For a tear is an intellectual thing,
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

Of the pictorial part of the Jerusalem much might be said which would merely be applicable to all Blake's works alike. One point, perhaps, somewhat distinctive about it, is an extreme largeness and decorative character in the style of the drawings, which are mostly made up of a few massive forms, thrown together on a grand, equal scale. The beauty of the drawings varies much, according to the colour in which they are printed. One copy, possessed by Lord Houghton, is so incomparably superior, from this cause, to any other I have seen, that no one could know the work

From JERUSALEM

properly without having examined this copy. It is printed in a warm, reddish brown, the exact colour of a very fine photograph; and the broken blending of the deeper tones with the more tender shadows,—all sanded over with a sort of golden mist peculiar to Blake's mode of execution,—makes still more striking the resemblance to the then undiscovered 'handling' of Nature herself. The extreme breadth of the forms throughout, when seen through the medium of this colour, shows sometimes, united with its grandeur, a sauvity of line which is almost Venetian.

The subjects are vague and mystic as the poem itself. Female figures lie among waves full of reflected stars: a strange human image, with a swan's head and wings, floats on water in a kneeling attitude, and drinks: lovers embrace in an open water-lily: an eagle-headed creature sits and

contemplates the sun: serpent-women are coiled with serpents: Assyrian-looking, human-visaged bulls are seen yoked to the plough or the chariot: rocks swallow or vomit forth human forms, or appear to amalgamate with them: angels cross each other over wheels of flame: and flames and hurrying figures wreathe and wind among the lines. Even

such slight things as these rough intersecting circles, each containing some hint of an angel; even these are made the unmistakable exponents of genius. Here and there some more familiar theme meets us,—the creation of Eve, or the Crucifixion; and then the thread is lost again. The whole spirit of the designs might seem well symbolized in one of the finest among them, where we see a triple-headed and

triple-crowned figure embedded in rocks, from whose breast is bursting a string of youths, each in turn born from the others breast in one sinuous throe of mingled life, while the life of suns and planets dies and is born, and rushes together around them.

Milton: a Poem in Two Books. The Author and Printer, W. Blake, 1804, is a small quarto of forty-five engraved pages, coloured by hand in the usual manner. In the frontispiece of the Jerusalem, a man enters at a dark door carrying a planet. Would we might follow him through those dim passages, and see them by his light! Nor would his company be less serviceable among the mazes of the Milton. As this latter work has no perceptible affinity with its title, so the designs it contains seem unconnected with the text. This principle of independence is carried even into Blake's own portrait of his cottage at Felpham, p. 245, which bears no accurate resemblance to the real place. In beauty, the drawings do not rank with Blake's most notable works; the copy at the Museum (as seen by the water-mark of its paper—1808) is not one of the earliest, and others might, probably, be found surpassing it in point of colour. Two of the designs chiefly arrest attention; each of which shows us a figure falling as if struck by Heaven; one bearing the inscription Robert, and the other William. They embody the sweet remembrance which Blake preserved of his lost brother, throughout the dying life of every day. Of the two figures, Robert, the already dead, is wrapped in the deeper shadow; but, in other respects, they are almost the same.

THE CRUCIFIXION.—From JERUSALEM.

The poem is very like the Jerusalem in style: it would seem, in fact, to be a sort of continuation; an idea that is borne out by the verses with which its singular Preface concludes:—

And did those feet in ancient time
   Walk upon England's mountain 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 ii. 29.

The Milton, as I have hinted, equals its predecessor in obscurity; few are the readers who will ever penetrate beyond the first page or two. There is also the same religious fervour, the same high, devout aim:

I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord!

exclaims Blake in one place; and the reader is, with impassioned earnestness, besought to give heed unto him in the following line, which recurs incessantly:—

Mark well my words; they are of your eternal salvation!

About Milton we hear very little, but his name is mentioned in the opening invocation:—

⁠Daughters of Beulah! muses who inspire the poet's song!
Record the journey of immortal Milton through your realms
Of terror and mild moony lustre!

And afterwards we are told:—

First Milton saw Albion upon the rock of ages,
Deadly pale outstretch'd and snowy cold, storm-cover'd:
A giant form of perfect beauty outstretch'd on the rock
In solemn death: the Sea of Time and Space thunder'd aloud
Against the rock which was inwrapp'd with the weeds of death
Hovering over the cold bosom. In its vortex Milton bent down
To the bosom of death. What was underneath soon seem'd above,
A cloudy heaven mingled with stormy seas in loudest ruin.
But as a wintry globe descends precipitant, through Beulah, bursting
With thunders loud and terrible, so Milton's shadow fell
Precipitant, loud thund'ring, into the sea of Time and Space.

Two other familiar names find pregnant mention.

God sent his two servants Whitfield and Wesley; were they prophets?
Or were they idiots and madmen? 'Shew us miracles?'
Can you have greater miracles than these? Men who devote
Their life's whole comfort to entire scorn, injury, and death?

But the chief parts are played, as before, by shadowy or symbolic personages; of some of whose names, however, a definite interpretation here occurs which will be welcome:—

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 brow 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.

'The latter part of the first book of Milton,' says Mr. Swinburne,—to whose guidance the reader, desirous of testing his poetic mettle by plunging resolutely through the dark mazes of these labyrinthine, spectre-haunted books, is commended,—'is a vision of nature, a prophecy of the gathering of the harvest of Time, and treading 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'er wearied;
Drowned in the wine is many a youth and maiden; those around
Lay them on skins of tigers, 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 kinds of insects, of roots and seed 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 whiepresses.
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-sweet of the cluster, the last sigh
Of the mild youth who listens to the luring songs of Luvah.

With the following sweet reminiscence of life at Felpham, which occurs in the Second Book of Milton, and with the quaint and pretty lines à propos of which Blake introduces the idealized view of his cottage, given at the end of this chapter, let these gleanings from the 'Prophetic Books' conclude.

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, vibrates 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 begin 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.
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 jasmine, 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.

*When Los joined with me he took me in his fiery whirlwind;
My vegetated portion was hurried from Lambeth's shades;
He set me down in Felpham's vale, and prepared a beautiful
Cottage for me, that, in three years, I might write all these visions;
To display Nature's cruel holiness; the deceits of Natural Religion.
Walking in my cottage garden, sudden I beheld
The virgin Ololon, and address'd her as a daughter of Beulah:—
'Virgin of Providence! fear not to enter into my cottage!'