Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/245

Rh never dies, but renews by its seed. Just so the imaginative image returns by the seed of contemplative thought. The writings of the prophets illustrate these conceptions of the visionary fancy by their various sublime and divine images as seen in the worlds of vision.

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of every thing which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.

All things are comprehended in these eternal forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the true vine of eternity... who appeared to me as coming to judgment among His saints, and throwing off the temporal, that the eternal might be established. Around him were seen the images of existences according to a certain order, suited to my imaginative eye, as follows:—

Jesus seated between the two pillars, Joachin and Boaz, with the word divine of revelation on His knee, and on each side the four-and-twenty elders sitting in judgment; the heavens opening around Him by unfolding the clouds around His throne. The old heavens and the old earth are passing away, and the new heavens and the new earth descending: a sea of fire issues from before the throne. Adam and Eve appear first before the judgment-seat, in humiliation; Abel surrounded by innocents; and Cain, with the flint in his hand with which he slew his brother, falling with the head downwards. From the cloud on which Eve stands, Satan is seen falling head-long, wound round by the tail of the serpent, whose bulk, nailed to the cross round which he wreathes, is falling into the abyss. Sin is also represented as a female bound in one of the serpent's folds, surrounded by her fiends. Death is chained to the cross, and Time falls together with Death, dragged down by a demon crowned with laurel. Another