Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/145

Rh temporal desire, and the cold negative of analytic and moral reason.

10. And she became the mother of many prophetic or imaginative forms of living thought.

1. Urizen explored his dens, in all the three regions, or head, heart, loins, these being seen in his earthy northern place of abode as mountain, moor and wilderness. He took a globe of imagination to see by, and as he went forms of life from his forsaken mountains — for he had left his original southern hills for the northern — struggled so far after him, and annoyed him as dreams annoy reasonable men.

2. They were dread terrors, delighting in blood, not friendly shapes as when in the south. They loomed brokenly in his night, and terrified him.

3. The worst were the most complete, for some were self-hoods as organized as he. Tiriel, Utha, Grodna, and Fuzon, rulers of the sub-division of the northern world, of the air, water, earth, fire of the earth, came to his sight. His daughters too — that is, his instinctive, not his mental subdivisions — arose from lower animals and herbs, growing by accretion of the lesser divisions, not by division of greater.

4. But no divisions of moral intellect can have the completeness of the whole, no truth can tell all truth, no law enact every restriction, no mortal consent to perfect mortal pi'udence. So he cursed the sons and daughters of his mind for not being purely mechanical products of experience.

5. For he saw that mind lived by breaking down experience. The ox moaning in the slaughter-house, showed him the strength desti'oyed to feed strength; and the dog shut from the wintry door, showed desire barred out lest it should satisfy itself at the expense of desire. The door opened to the ox, led it to death; that shut on the dog closed it from life.

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