Page:William Blake (IA williamblake00ches).pdf/174

 could exist. In short, Blake really insisted that man as the image of God had a right to impose form upon nature. He would have laughed to scorn the notion of the modern evolutionist—that Nature is to be permitted to impose formlessness upon man. For him the lines in a landscape were boundaries which he drew like frontiers, by his authority as the plenipotentiary ambassador of heaven. When he drew his line round Leviathan he was drawing the divine net around him; he tamed his bulls and lions even by creating them. And when he made in some picture a line between sea and land that does not exist in Nature, he was saying by supernatural right, "Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed."

I select the symbol of the sea partly because Blake was himself fond of such elemental images, and partly because it is an image especially appropriate to Blake's great conception of the outline in the eternal imagination. Nearly all phrases about the sea are specially and spiritually false. People talk of the sea