A

year, between the close of his purely literary
activity, and the shutting out of the light of
the spirit'as by a door and window shutters.'
The six silent years may well have been
silent, because the truth was coming upon
him, in Boehme's beautiful phrase, 'like a
bursting shower.' However this may be, his
illumination was before all else a deliverance
from Swedenborg. 'The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell' is certainly a reply to the latter's
'Heaven and Hell' then recently translated,
and probably very audible in the talk of his
Swedenborgian friend Flaxman, and of his
no less Swedenborgian brother James.
new heaven is begun,' he writes on one of the
first pages, and it is now thirty-three years
since its advent. The eternal hell revives, and
lo, Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb:
his writings are the linen clothes folded up.'
The creative imagination of William Blake-
the Christ in him-had arisen from the tomb
in the thirty-third year of his age, the year
at which Christ had arisen, and with it
had revived hell its activity and heaven its
passivity, and the garments of theologic faith
which had so long disguised it were thrown
away. The fierce invective of a later page about
Swedenborg having written no new truth, but
all the old falsehoods, combined as it is with a
glorification of the older mystics, Boehme and
Paracelsus, makes us recognize the wrath of a

man against something which had long warped and thwarted him. As years went on he returned again to some extent to the old admiration, though never to the old subjection, until Swedenborg became in Milton''strongest of men,' 'Samson shorn by the churches,' and in 'The Descriptive Catalogue' a 'visionary,' whose 'works' are well worth the study of painters and poets,' being the foundation of grand things.' But it must never be forgotten that whatever Blake borrowed from Swedenborg or Boehme, from mystic or kabalist, he turned to his own purposes, and transferred into a new system, growing like a flower from its own roots, supplementing in many ways, though not controverting in any main matters, the systems of his great predecessors, and that he stands among the mystics of Europe beside Jacob Boehme and the makers of the Kabala, as original as they are and as profound. He is one of those great artificers of God who uttered mysterious truths to a little clan. The others spoke to theologians and magicians, and he speaks to poets and artists. The others drew their symbols from theology and alchemy, and he from the flowers of spring and the leaves of summer; but the message is the same, and, the truth uttered is the truth God spake to the red clay at the beginning of the world.

The essentials of the teaching of 'The Prophetic Books' can be best explained by extracts

mainly from the 'prose writings,' for the language of the books themselves is exceedingly technical. 'God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes,' he wrote on the margin of a copy of Lavater's 'Aphorisms.' 'For let it be remembered that creation is God descending Our Lord according to the weakness of man. is the word of God, and everything on earth is the word of God, and in its essence is God.' That portion of creation, however, which we can touch and see with our bodily senses is 'infected' with the power of Satan, one of whose names is 'Opacity'; whereas that other portion which we can touch and see with the spiritual senses, and which we call 'imagination,' is truly the body of God,' and the only reality; but we must struggle to really mount towards that imaginative world, and not allow ourselves to be deceived by 'memory' disguising itself as imagination. We thus mount by poetry, music, and art, which seek for ever' to cast off all that is not inspiration,' and 'the rotten rags of memory,' and to become 'the divine members.' For this reason he says that Christ's apostles were all artists, and that 'Christianity is art,' that 'the whole business of man is the arts,' and that 'Israel delivered from Egypt is art delivered from nature and imitation'; and that we should all engage 'before the world in some mental pursuit.' We must take some portion of the kingdom of darkness, of the void in which we

live, and by 'circumcising away the indefinite' with a 'firm and determinate outline,' make of that portion a 'tent of God,' for we must always remember that God lives alone in minute particulars' in life made beautiful and graceful and vital by imaginative significance, and that all worthy things, all worthy deeds, all worthy thoughts, are works of art or of imagination. In so far as we do such works we drive the mortality, the infection, out of the things we touch and see, and make them exist for our spiritual senses'the enlarged and numerous senses;' and beholding beauty and truth we see no more 'accident and chance,' and the indefinite void 'and a last judgment' passes over us, and the world is consumed, for things are 'burnt up' 'when you cease to behold them.'

'Reason,' or argument from the memory and from the sensations of the body, binds us to Satan and opacity, and is the only enemy of God. Sin awakens imagination because it is from emotion, and is therefore dearer to God than reason, which is wholly dead. Sin, however, must be avoided, because we are prisoners, and should keep the rules of our prison house, for 'you cannot have liberty in this world without what you call moral virtue, and you cannot have moral virtue without the subjection of that half of the human race who hate what you call moral virtue.' But let us recognize that these laws are but the laws of prudence,' and do not let us

call them 'the laws of God,' for nothing is pleasing to God except the glad invention of beautiful and exalted things. He holds it better indeed for us to break all the commandments than to sink into a dead compliance. Better any form of imaginative evil—any lust or any hate-rather than an unimaginative virtue, for 'the human imagination alone' is 'the divine vision and fruition''in which man liveth eternally.' 'It is the human existence itself.' 'I care not whether a man is good or bad,' he makes Los, the 'eternal mind,' say in Jerusalem; 'all that I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go, put off holiness and put on intellect. By intellect he means imagination. He who recognizes imagination for his God need trouble no more about the law, for he will do naught to injure his brother, for we love all which enters truly into our imagination, and by imagination must all life become one, for a man liveth not but in his brother's face,' and by those. 'loves and tears of brothers, sisters, sons, fathers, and friends, which if man ceases to behold he ceases to exist.'

The great contest of imagination with reason is described throughout 'The Prophetic Books' under many symbols, but chiefly under the symbolic conflict of Los, the divine formative principle which comes midway between absolute existence and corporeal life, with Urizen, 'the God of this world' and maker of dead