20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying, Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease.

CHORUS.

Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer in deadly black with hoarse note curse the sons of joy; Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free, lay the bound or build the roof; Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity that wishes but acts not;

For everything that lives is Holy.”

And so, as with fire and thunder—“thunder of thought, and flames of fierce desire”—is this Marriage of Heaven and Hell at length happily consummated; the prophet, as a fervent paranymph, standing by to invoke upon the wedded pair his most unclerical benediction. Those who are not bidden to the bridegroom’s supper may as well keep away, lest worse befall them, not having a wedding garment. For us there remains little to say, now that the torches are out, the nuts scattered, the songs silent, and the saffron faded from the veil. We will wish them a quiet life, and an heir who may combine the merits and capacities of either parent. It were pleasant enough, but too superfluous, to dwell upon the beauty of this nuptial hymn; to bid men remark what eloquence, what subtlety, what ardour of wisdom, what splendour of thought, is here; how far it outruns, not in daring alone but in sufficiency, all sayings of minor mystics who were not also poets; how much of lofty love and of noble faith underlies and animates these rapid and fervent words; what greatness of spirit and of speech there was in the man who, living as Blake lived, could write as Blake has written. Those who cannot see what is implied may remain unable to tolerate what is expressed; and those who can read aright need no index of ours.[51]

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The decorations of this great work, though less large and complete than those of the subsequent prophecies, are full of noble and subtle beauty. Over every page faint fibres and flickering threads of colour weave a net of intricate design. Skies cloven with flame and thunder, half-blasted trees round which huddled forms of women or men cower and cling, strange beasts and splendid flowers, alternate with the engraved text; and throughout all the sunbeams of heaven and fires of hell shed fiercer or softer light. In minute splendour and general effect the pages of Blake’s next work fall short of these; though in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion the separate designs are fuller and more composed. This poem, written in a sort of regular though quasi-lyrical blank verse, is more direct and lucid in purpose than most of these books; but the style is already laxer, veers more swiftly from point to point, stands weaker on its feet, and speaks with more of a hurried and hysterical tone. With “formidable moral questions,” as the biographer has observed, it does assuredly deal; and in a way somewhat formidable. This, we are told, “the exemplary man had good right to do.” Exemplary or not, he in common with all men had undoubtedly such a right; and was not slow to use it. Nowhere else has the prophet so fully and vehemently set forth his doctrine of indulgence; too Albigensian or antinomian this time to be given out again in more decorous form. Of pure mythology there is happily little; of pure allegory even less. “The eye sees more than the heart knows;” these words are given on the title-page by way of motto or key-note. Above this inscription a single design fills the page; in it the title is written with characters of pale fire upon cloud and rainbow; the figure of the typical woman, held fast to earth but by one foot, seems to soar and yearn upwards with straining limbs that flutter like shaken flame: appealing in vain to the mournful and merciless Creator, whose sad fierce face looks out beyond and over her, swathed and cradled in bloodlike fire and drifted rain. In the prologue we get a design expressive of plain and pure pleasure; a woman gathers a child from the heart of a blossom as it breaks, and the sky is full of the golden stains and widening roses of a sundawn. But elsewhere, from the frontispiece to the end, nothing meets us but emblems of restraint and error; figures rent by the beaks of eagles though lying but on mere cloud, chained to no solid rock by the fetters only of their own faiths or fancies; leafless trunks that rot where they fell; cold ripples of barren sea that break among caves of bondage. The perfect woman, Oothoon, is one with the spirit of the great western world; born for rebellion and freedom, but half a slave yet, and half a harlot. “Bromion,” the violent Titan, subject himself to ignorance and sorrow, has defiled her;[52] “Theotormon,” her lover, emblem of man held in bondage to creed or law, will not become one with her because of her shame; and she, who gathered in time of innocence the natural flower of delight, calls now for his eagles to rend her polluted flesh with cruel talons of remorse and ravenous beaks of shame: enjoys his infliction, accepts her agony, and reflects his severe smile in the mirrors of her purged spirit.[53] But he

“sits wearing the threshold hard
With secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desert shore
The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money.”

From her long melodious lamentation we give one continuous excerpt here. Sweet, and lucid as Thel, it is more subtle and more strong; the allusions to American servitude and English aspiration, which elsewhere distract and distort the sense and scheme of the poem, are here well cleared away.