Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/198

184 hard inaccessibilities, like cliffs of death, and beauty was despised, and a mental system adapted only to the temporary, a body of death, that is of memory, of the past, was formed round Imagination, the Lamb, so that Albion's impulses might be destroyed and his natural system of thought devoured, and mental contest might use up the growth of his harvest of ideas, as war takes away the labour of the husbandman.

P. 9, ll. 12 to 31. — So that the more foolish side of mind became the more formidable, so that Los had need to expose the secrets of the heart, and to make jewels or permanent beauties of its hidden sorrows, that those who did not value the truth of inspired love might defend the lie of bodily love, — the body, not the love, being itself a lie, — that enthusiasm and life might not cease.

P. 9, ll. 32 to 35. — So laboured prophecy to make the impulses of the spiritual Eden, — (spaces of Erin) compelling his own Reason (harsh spectre) to the work.

P. 10, ll. 1 to 26. — He also explained the nature of contraries and negations and the deadness of a mental power that objects and does not create. Therefore he enslaves his own spectre and therefore Los creates system, lest he himself should be enslaved to the system of another, — that is to say, vision compels reason to aid in systematizing mysticism lest the visionary faculty should be enslaved by dogma or science.

P. 10, ll. 22 to 28. — The spectre curses the children of Los, under figure of the sun, and moon, and divisions of the world (Los is Time as well as the prophetic spirit, and these are the appearances he gives as Time to his ideas).

P. 10, ll. 29 to 36. — But Los forbids his reason to object to the children of his imagination. He makes it invisible to them lest they should see it and become what they behold, for he loves and refuses to be ashamed of them.

P. 10, l. 37. — The spectre reviles his emotions, calls them his sins, and claims to love the chief of them all his Emanation, Enitharmon. He utters a lament of agony over his own