Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/302

Also the rising and setting moon he views surrounding
His cornfields and his valleys of five hundred acres square;
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
To the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade;
Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth
A vortex not yet passed by the traveller thro' Eternity."

One curious piece of symbolism may be extracted from the myth, as the one reference to anything actual:—

"Then Milton knew that the Three Heavens of Beulah were beheld
By him on earth in his bright pilgrimage of sixty years
In those three Females whom his Wives, and those three whom his Daughters
Had represented and contained, that they might be resumed
By giving up of Selfhood."

But of Milton's flight, of the cruelties of Ulro, of his journey above the Mundane Shell, which "is a vast concave earth, an immense hardened shadow of all things upon our vegetated earth, enlarged into dimension and deformed into indefinite space," we will take no more account here; nor of the strife with Urizen, "one giving life, the other giving death, to his adversary;" hardly even of the temptation by the sons and daughters of Kahab and Tirzah, when

⁠The twofold Form Hermaphroditic, and the Double-sexed,
The Female-male and the Male-female, self-dividing stood
Before him in their beauty and in cruelties of holiness."

(Compare the beautiful song "To Tirzah," in the Songs of Experience.) This Tirzah, daughter of Rahab the holy, is "Natural Religion" (Theism as opposed to Pantheism), which would fain have the spiritual Jerusalem offered in sacrifice to it.