Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/280

266 P. 5, ll. 18 to 31. After again warning the reader to attend to his words — for they deal with the salvation of his soul from opaque reasons — Blake tells how the secondary or elementary powers through which the arts, whether of life or literature, work, rebel against this rule of the generalizing reason of the opaque and become egotisms ("madder") and strive for their own life against the power of Satan. The imaginative impulse, hearing their complaints, grows angry. He calls on the eternal mind to judge what has occurred.

P. 5, ll. 32 to 41. Impulse calls mind into action by its destructive vehemence, but the opaque rules and laws make it appear as if imaginative impulse was itself the means of breaking them, and mind is made believe that imaginative impulse is their enemy.

P. 5, ll. 42 to 47. Mind bids Impulse work at the Arts free from the rules of the opaque, or bids the powers of the opaque do their own work by themselves. Again Blake bids the reader mark his words.

P. 6, ll. 1 to 10. Satan excuses himself with inner speech for rules, and corporeal reasonings are always mild or without that chafing of the spirit with limitation which is wrath. Here is this insidious quality. When he returns to his mills, that is when he, leaving the work of impulse, returns to his own work of mechanical drudgery and mechanical arguments, he finds all in disorder. He had persuaded Palamabron to do his work as the easier task, as Hayley had set Blake to the drudgery of miniature paintings, and the like, and impulses had set all in confusion. Two days — of a thousand years a-piece — equivalent to the first two days of creation, and corresponding to the eyes of God, Lucifer, and Moloch, have now been described. Impulse has sought the "mills" as light fell in the beginning, and on the second, corresponding to Moloch, the flame-filled idol, the power of "mills" and "harrow," are alike enraged. The next three days, needed to carry us to birth, are passed over without special mention, and we are about to reach a sixth