Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/140

 126 2. While the Immortal in sleep became more and more mortal, and his ideas entered more and more into the strange form in which, to this hour, inheritance is passed on from father to son by the sulphurous fluid of transmittable life.

3. But the spiritual side of mortality is the mortal or temporary part of mind called Reason, Religion, Morality, cold, without imaginative fire, and clear, without mixture of blood; it settles at last in the soul, snowy cold, from the spent heats of passion. It settles after rolling. Its waves are billows of eternal death. Compare "Jerusalem," p. 39, 1. 8.

4. Then is the head a mere forgetfuluess of eternity, the heart a dumbness to love, the loins a necessary law of nature, and man's mind is locked away by the pre-occupation and kept as in fetters of ice from eternity, the free Imagination, while ever still Time beats, and those fetters are as ice of iron and brass,— cold experience, cold emotion.

5. Then is the mind enclosed in brain and skull, for so much of it as works is but a function of an organ.

6. And in the first age of this sort of life the expansive nerves of eternity become, in comparison, the bony chain of Time.

7. In the second age the senses that are of the blood disengage from these, as a darkened Eve from a darkened Adam.

8. In the third, by marriage of these obscure ones, the limited eyesight—for eyes are ever a symbol of marriage—becomes fixed in its narrowness and materialism.

9. In the fourth, by fruitfulness of this marriage, in pangs of child-bearing hope, the ears—symbolic gates of the World of Generation—are created.

10. In the fifth, the nostrils, symbol of outer world breathed into inner heart, are the next visionary forms.

11. And in the sixth, the tongue and throat, whose craving and whose receiving are more material and dark than that of ear or nostril, come to the growing obscurity.

12. Then eye, ear, nostril, throat—all the four gates of the cloudy region of sense being shrunk to the capacity that