Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/10

 with the religious and political upheaval of his day. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America, as well as the lost poem entitled The French Revolution, are almost exclusively devoted to this subject. He was never tired of inveighing against the disastrous tyranny of those laws and moralities which had been framed by abstract philosophy and false religion for the suppression of the "interior vision," and urging the people to shake off, before it is too late, "the heavy iron chain" which is "descending link by link" to enslave them. The dominion of this malignant spectre was daily increasing, and even Blake himself, who was in so little the child of his own age, was not able to escape entirely from its pernicious influence. For every man is born with the instincts of his time, which are ineradicable from his natural state, and if these instincts are altogether corrupt and worldly, it is only in the power of a supreme imaginative intelligence to eliminate their tendency. It was a time when the emanative portion of the universal manhood had fallen into a deep sleep, and before it could be awakened and resume its place in the fourfold harmony of human existence, it was necessary that the "selfish" spectre should be compelled to resign the power which it had usurped. This earth-born antagonist, hitherto victorious in the strength of the prevailing rationalism and materialism from which it had issued, if it was to be overcome, must, Antaeus-like, be uprooted from all terrestialterrestrial [sic] contact and grappled with in the pure region of imagination. It was many years before Blake learnt this sovereign secret and many "times" of almost overwhelming despair "passed over him" before the conflict was at an end. In the same letter, which has been already quoted, he likens his state during these anxious years to that which transformed King Nebuchadnezzar into a beast of the field: using the wild insanity of the outcast monarch as a symbol of the bestial existence of man under the domination of Reason. "I was a slave," he writes, "bound in a mill among beasts and devils. These beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife's feet are free from fetters." He had begun by attempting to face the world on its own ground. He believed that by entering the servitude of the mill he would be