Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/287

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MILTON I.
273

Mind — Palamabron — but was repelled by his purely mental emanation, the formation of the internal emotions, as Leutha herself is of the external sensations.

P. 10. ll. 1 to 15. She asks why it is that the spectral life issues from her to seize the children of the mind. To prevent this, sexual love enters into the brain of pleasant life or into the lower mind and fills it with that apparent love for the higher mind which made it attempt the work of the imagination and so cause the confusion already described. Instead of imagination, hater of corporeal mind and sexual lore, — she makes them have a feminine or passive love for this love. Thus Hayley was fascinated by the mind of Blake, through the least corporeal part of his own mind — its desire for sensations. Leutha having thus entered the imaginative world, through Satan driving the horses of Palamabron. Leutha, now the emanation of Satan, tries to do the work of Elynitria, the emanation of Palamabron, that is to say, to give rest (in emotional life) to the horses, or unfeeling thoughts. They are, however, maddened by the corporeal fascination, bodily beauty, ll. 16 to 30. Satan filled with a power, reflected from the internal life, controlled the harrow and tried to stay its maddened course by the observations of generalized reasons — banks of sand — and all the classifications of external things. " Chaos and Ancient Night," the life of mere memory, came from under the harrow, and the lower mind filled with egotistic pride drives the harrow of personal emotion among "the stars of Jehovah," the once creative centre of the intellect. It was then that Leutha made the serpent of corporeal life — the deceiving bodily activity that crawls upon its belly, and through length and breadth, not from Nadir to Zenith, or Zenith to Nadir, ll. 31 to 40. The gnomes, the forces of the energetic life of thought, answered the creation of the deceitful serpent by an egotism of the imagination which attacks the corporeal. They refused to labour more in the harrow now that Satan drives it, and to fascinate them into obedience, Leutha says that

VOL. II. 18