Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/33

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INTRODUCTION.
9

Christianity,' he says, 'and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of Imagination: Imagination, 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.' To Nietzsche the sense of a divine haunting became too heavy a burden for his somewhat inhuman solitude, the solitude of Alpine regions, with their steadfast glitter, their thin, high, intoxicating air. 'Is this obtrusiveness of heaven,' he cries, 'this inevitable superhuman neighbour, not enough to drive one mad?' But Blake, when he says, 'I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly,' speaks out of natural joy, which is wholly humility, and it is only 'if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us,' it is only then that he dreads, as the one punishment, that 'every one in eternity will leave him.'