Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/199

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WILLIAM BLAKE
175

natural freedom, of body and soul; all his wrath went out against the forgers and the binders of these fetters. In his earlier poems he sings the instinctive joys of innocence; in his later, the wise joys of experience; and all the Prophetic Books are so many songs of mental liberty and invectives against every form of mental oppression. 'And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion.' One of the Prophetic Books, Ahania, can be condensed into a single sentence, one of its lines: 'Truth has bounds; Error has none.' Yet this must be understood to mean that error is the 'indefinite void' and truth a thing minutely organised; not that truth can endure bondage or limitation from without. He typifies Moral Law by Bahab, the harlot of the Bible, a being of hidden, hypocritic cruelty. Chastity is no more in itself than a lure of the harlot, typifying unwilling restraint, a negation, and no personal form of energy.

'No individual can keep the Laws, for they are death
To every energy of man, and forbid the springs of life.'

It is energy that is virtue, and, above all,