Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/146

 132 The ox is natural strength, the dog is natural craving. So Urizen wept, and called it Pity, and his tears flowed down on the winds; and the air being the region of the heart, tears became to him the Eve within his ribs, as the drop of blood to Los.

6. And his tears fructified the region of air in their way, for they were breathed in by his nostrils that lead to error, the world when everything that enters becomes a self-hood. And the cold shadow so born followed him wherever he went over the three-fold infinite number, or thrice ten abodes, or cities, of his numerous divided offspring.

7. And the shadow took shape as a web of tears, a female thing, not complete, yet recognizable in embryo.

8. And he twisted this net into a system as dogma and theology twist vision and mysticism.

9. And then the female was born, and perceived as the Net of Religion.

1. Then the mental sub-divisions of Urizen contracted into organisms of bodily narrowness as he himself had contracted, and as men's intellects do under Religion when Religion is a net, not an inspiration.

2. And these mentally shrunken creatures that should have been infinite, though seven feet high, were dwarfs compared to that giant stature into which they should have grown.

3. For six days earth was made by the shrinkage of these intellectual powers, usually called creation, and on the seventh day they were completely bounded from all visionary life, and they rested in that hope which a literature, more modern than Blake's, has called Agnosticism. This is the story of the creation of the delusion called Nature, not of Creation in the full sense of the term. For Creation produced the means by which that delusion was able to delude, and also our escape by death from its power.