Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/301

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MILTON I.
287

Los and Enitharmon, give imaginative purpose to blood and nerves, to Time and Space.

Then (pp. 24, 25 and 26) Los is allowed in the myth to assume his full stature of gigantic proportions; war is his wine-press and printing press, and the whole mental world is the place of his vintage and harvest. He calls all the forces that live, to be one with him, delighting in prophecy and despising all other pleasure. They are discontented. Then his sons are seen as stars above the sea, and as little flies dancing in the field. Then some towns of England are used to hint the regions, south or north, and show how the instincts of man become ideas as souls put on body. And the inner expansiveness of the symbolic body is asserted, and the great central truth declared that Natui'e has no cause or causes in her (unless in the word Nature we include the idea Spirit, — an over-straining perhaps), but that Spiritual force alone has. This awakes and will re-awake ideas when Memory itself has gone to destruction with the brain in which it dwells, both being perishing and vegetable.

P. 27. And Los has Other sons than those that wear the look of stars, flies, or flowers. — These are the spiritual forces themselves. They form the corporeal, and they divide Time into its divisions and unite it again like a healed wound till six thousand years are seen to be less than a moment, notwithstanding the tent of its minutes, the golden entrance to its hours, the adamantine gates of each of its days and nights, the pure terrace of the months, the high towers of the years, the deep moats around the ages, the all other work of Fairy hands, that do the bidding of the Spirit of Prophesy.

P. 28. And the unity of art with the source of time, and of nerves with their meanings and of all with one another in the great polypus is told, — in brief, Nature is sketched in a few architectural strokes as a mental fact, — the Science of the Elohim."