Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/13

 youthful enthusiasm. "I am drunk," he wrote to Hayley from London, "with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years. I thank God that I courageously pursued my course through darkness"; and again, six weeks later, "I have indeed fought through a hill of terrors and horrors (which none could know but myself) in a divided existence; now, no longer divided nor at war with myself, I shall travel on in the strength of the Lord God, as poor Pilgrim says."

The events of this final struggle at Felpham, together with its triumphant issue, are recorded by Blake in the book of Milton. The poet had from his earliest days made a strong appeal to his imagination. In the lines (enclosed with a letter to Flaxman dated 12th September, 1800) where he gives a brief summary of the various influences which had entered into his life, he places Milton first in the list of his spiritual instructors: "Now my lot in the heavens is this, Milton lov'd me in childhood and shew'd me his face." In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake criticizes, it is true, Paradise Lost, because in it the restrainer of reason, (Urizen-Jehovah) who is by Milton called Messiah, is made to cast out desire or energy (Satan), which "is the only life"; for, as he contemptuously observes, "those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained," and, as he further explains, in A Vision of the Last Judgment, "Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their eternal glory…. Those who are cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's by … cruelty of all kinds." But at the same time he points out that Milton was none the less "a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it"; for, in spite of himself, Satan became the hero of his poem and he found himself writing "in fetters when he wrote of Angels and of God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell."