Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/46

 Rh some of which, like the prophetic books, are more than a little cryptic. The deities that reside in the empire of our hearts are in these ages at warfare. Our salvation looks almost hopeless, and our beloved country is groaning under the golden hoof and forgetting her inspiration. Her energy that should be her eternal delight is become a bond-slave to wealth and greed. The peasant no more ploughs, nor does the maiden spin; for both are willing to sell their energies into slavery, that the master who fattens and kills them may himself find hell. The eternal delight that is man's birthright is smelted into money that can buy nothing. The maiden has choice only to die in a naphtha-hell or to breed the pestilence that comes of forbidding energy its purposeful outcome. The upshot of the warfare in our cosmogony between the spirit and the matter, between purpose and the wilderness which gives it opportunity of conquest, between the fire of the Holy Ghost and the wet blanket of respectability, between imagination and reason, poetry and science, mastery and cringing humility; the upshot of the warfare looks to us now, who see not the end and yet are still something