Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/35

 He is my Spectre! in my obedience to loose him from my Hells,

To claim the Hells, my Furnaces, I go to Eternal Death.

And Milton said: I go to Eternal Death! Eternity shudder'd

For he took the outside course, among the graves of the dead,

A mournful shade. Eternity shudder'd at the image of eternal death.

Then on the verge of Beulah he beheld his own Shadow:

A mournful form double, hermaphroditic, male & female

In one wonderful body, and he enter'd into it

In direful pain for the dread shadow, twenty-seven fold

Reach'd to the depths of direst Hell, & thence to Albion's land:

Which is this earth of vegetation on which now I write.

The Seven Angels of the Presence wept over Milton's Shadow:

P. 14 AS when a man dreams, he reflects not that his body sleeps,

Else he would wake; so seem'd he entering his Shadow: but

With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence

Entering, they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body

Which now arose and walk'd with them in Eden, as an Eighth

Image Divine tho' darken'd, and tho' walking as one walks

In sleep: and the Seven comforted and supported him.

Like as a Polypus that vegetates beneath the deep,

They saw his Shadow vegetated underneath the Couch

Of death: for when he enter'd into his Shadow, Himself,

His real and immortal Self; was as appear'd to those

Who dwell in immortality, as One sleeping on a couch

Of gold: and those in immortality gave forth their Emanations

Like Females of sweet beauty, to guard round him & to feed

His lips with food of Eden in his cold and dim repose:

But to himself he seem'd a wanderer lost in dreary night.

Onwards his Shadow kept its course among the Spectres, call'd

Satan, but swift as lightning passing them, startled the shades

Of Hell beheld him in a trail of light as of a comet

That travels into Chaos: so Milton went guarded within.

The nature of infinity is this: That every thing has its

Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro' Eternity

Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind

His path, into a globe itself infolding, like a sun,

Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,

While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth, 11