Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/69

 Rh the contrary, his vision-seeing was the might of imagination, the seizing hold of his heart by tongues of fire, the carrying of his acquiescent yet mightily winged soul deep into the abyss, out beyond the heights, and always to the unfolding of the human mystery. How much he suffered over these visions none can tell, and only one ever knew. This was his Kate. Their courtship was this. "Oh, Mr. Blake, I pity you!" said the illiterate tender Catherine Boucher when he told of his first and only love-disappointment. "You pity me?" replied the young man; "then I love you!"

That was the sowing of the seed. The blossoming of the flower must have brought joy to the angels; for night after night, for hours at a time, the man would sit absorbed in his visions of mystic births, battles and destroyings all leaping in furnaces of flame, all peopling the empire of the human soul. Within the palaces and dungeons of this eternal soul he would hear Los, the human God of Purpose, towering above the forces of destruction, hammering away at his red-hot self-hood, the terrific sparks rushing forth to blind the cringing fears; the frozen Urizen hurling