Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/329

 Rh As the souls of men are attracted towards that "mild heaven" of dreams and shadows where only the reflected image of their own hopes and errors can abide, the imagination, most divine and human, most actual and absolute, of all things, recedes ever further and further among the clouds of smoke, vapours of "abstract philosophy," and is caught among the "starry wheels" of religion and law, whose restless and magnetic revolution attracts and absorbs her.

the deeps of "a dark and unknown night" in which "philosophy wars against imagination." Here also the main myth of the Europe is once more rehandled; to "create a female will," jealous, curious, cunning, full of tender tyranny and confusion, this is "to hide the most evident God in a hidden covert, even in the shadows of a woman and a secluded holy place, that we may pry after him as after a stolen treasure, hidden among the dead and mured up from the paths of life." Thus is it with the Titan Albion and all his race of mythologic men, when for them "Vala supplants Jerusalem," the husk replaces the fruit, the mutable form eclipses the immutable substance.

But into these darker parts of the book we will not go too deep. Time, patience, and insight on the part of writer and reader might perhaps clear up all details and lay bare much worth sight and study; but only at the expense of much labour and space. It is feasible, and would be worth doing; but not here. If the singular