Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/75

 THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL.

, — the wrath that is of the reprobate, or man's amorous fury, rages in the burdened air, — the region of the heart. Hungry clouds, or blood that has its own needs and cravings also, swag on the deep, or region of the loins, and all external nature.

Once, before it was revealed that everything that lived was holy, the just man kept his course through this life, the veil of death, by treading in meekness the perilous path of virtue. But now Freedom shows beauty like roses, and sweetness like that given by the honey of bees, in the road where morality had only revealed a desert or a heath.

Then in every cliff and tomb, in every high and hard law and every dead formula, symbolism showed an unsuspected beauty, and the body of man became prolific of spiritual progeny as his dry law, and matter-of-fact religion of sublime poetry.

Then, it being seen how small a matter is the letter and how great the spirit, and the right of free-love being claimed with free imagination, the villain left the path of conventional dogma and pretended also to be a perceiver of the freedom of truth.

This tends to drive the just man into an asceticism which is by no means otherwise forced upon him.

Now, the tempter puts on soft hypocrisy, and honest anger accompanies the just man into the desert, — the region of conduct, not of imagination.

This is because in man's heart a lion, a conscious hunger