Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/19

 Rh developed personality for Nights VI., etc. He corresponds on the chart to the energy that enables Urizen to explore his world in the Sixth Night of " Vala." In the seventh chapter of " Urizen " — the first of the vegetative triad of chapters — the succession of moods or states made in the fourth chapter becomes restrictive and is symbolized as a chain of days and nights. In the eighth chapter the community of mental spaces summed up under the name Enitharmon grow restrictive also, and are symbolized as a net, and Urizen' s sons, the children of vegetative space, as those of Los are of ideal Time, are born ; and in the ninth chapter — Loins of the Loins — become wholly corporeal, or in other words, become the multitudes of unimaginative people, who make up the mass of the world's inhabitants. "Thel,"a fourfold book, begins not as the other books do for the most part with the chaos of fallen reason. In its first chapter " Thel " talks with the spiritual personality of beauty typified by the lily ; in its second — the Heart of the Heart — she talks with the cloud, the fleeting and formless emotions ; and in the third — the Loins of the Heart — with the worm, the vegetative instinct in its weakest and most innocent form. In the fourth chapter — the Head of the Loins — she explores for a moment the purely vegetative world of mortality and bodily completion typified by his own grave.

In " The Book of Los," also a fourfold book, Los begins his personality in the first chapter by separating it from the selfhoods or spectres about him. In the second he organizes the void or feminine into elements, a like action to the division of chaos into spaces, in the corresponding chapter — the fifth — of "The Book of Urizen." In the third— the vegetative stage — he sleeps in the world of Tharmas. In the fourth he begins his great contest with the now completed feminine' or external world by fixing the reason into the midst of passion, an action which is the other aspect of his chaining Orс in the corresponding chapter of "The Book of Urizen." This action is another instance of that symbolism which