Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/50

36 he "teaches in song" — as the overworked phrase has it — what he "learned in suffering."

From his mental fire a form of beauty springs that becomes another man's delight. He, like Tiriel, is driven out, having exhausted his masculine — that is to say, mental — potency. It was a part of Blake's belief in the reality of mental creations that they could eject their creator from his own world.

It is now the business of the mind who lias done its own work to enjoy another's, as another enjoys his. ("In seed-time, learn; in harvest, teach; in winter, enjoy" — "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," first proverb.)

His mental guests, no longer thought of by him, become scattered. His mind alone concentrated them. His cottage vanishes. (Was this written at Felpham ? Compare the expression about the Flat Earth becoming a ball, and the phrase in Mr. Butt's letter, September, 1801.)

What has happened is this. The man has entered a state of mortality, and vegetation drawn down to it by physical love, when mental had fatigued him as the shadowy and other females drew down Zoas and spectres into generation.

Presently a new mental birth takes place. A babe is born. It must be given up to the old laws of the Mundane Shell. Golgonooza is built on rocks ("Jerusalem," p. 53, l. 17), and if the idea is to enter into consummate bliss, it must enter into a mortal. (Truth must be a man.) (" Jerusalem," p. 69, l. 31, and p. 86, l. 42.)

Thus the thoughts and the thinker melt into one another, the labours of art and the experience of love being the gates through which the mental passes to the personal, and the personal to the mental.