Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/187

 Rh the emanation of Intuition, and personifies spiritual beauty. The drama is the division, death, and resurrection, in an eternal circle, of the powers of man and of the powers in whose midst he fights and struggles. Of this incommensurable action we are told only in broken hints, as of a chorus crying outside doors where deeds are being done in darkness. Images pass before us, make their gesture, and are gone; the words spoken are ambiguous, and seem to have an under meaning which it is essential for us to apprehend. We see motions of building and of destruction, higher than the topmost towers of the world, and deeper than the abyss of the sea; souls pass through furnaces, and are remade by Time's hammer on the anvil of space; there are obscure crucifixions, and Last Judgments return and are re-enacted.

To Blake, the Prophetic Books were to be the new religious books of a religion which was not indeed new, for it was the 'Everlasting Gospel' of Jesus, but, because it had been seen anew by Swedenborg and by Wesley and by 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press of Love,' among whom