Now by the light of these extracts let any student examine the great figure at p. 13, where “he beheld his own Shadow—and entered into it.” Clothed in the colours of pain, crowned with the rays of suffering, it stands between world and world in a great anguish of transformation and change: Passion included by Incarnation. Erect on a globe of opaque shadow, backed by a sphere of aching light that opens flower-wise into beams of shifting colour and bitter radiance as of fire, it appeals with a doubtful tortured face and straining limbs to the flat black wall and roof of heaven. All over the head is a darkness not of transitory cloud or night that will some time melt into day; recalling that great verse: “Neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night.”
“As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps,
Else he would wake; so seemed he entering his Shadow; but
With him the Spirits of the Seven Angels of the Presence
Entering, they gave him still perceptions of his Sleeping Body
Which now arose and walked with them in Eden, as an Eighth
Image, Divine tho’ darkened, and tho’ walking as one walks
In Sleep; and the Seven comforted and supported him.”
The whole passage is full of a deep and dim beauty which grows clearer and takes form of feature to those only who bring with them eyes to see and patience to desire it. Take next this piece of cosmography, worth comparing with Dante’s vision of the worlds:—
“The nature of infinity is this; That everything has its
Own vortex: and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity
Has passed that vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind
His path into a globe itself enfolding, like a sun
Or like a moon or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onward in his wondrous journey thro’ the earth,
Or like a human form, a friend with whom he lived benevolent:
As the eye of man views both the east and west encompassing
Its vortex, and the north and south, with all their starry host;
Also the rising and setting moon he views surrounding
His cornfields and his valleys of five hundred acres square;
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
To the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade;
Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth
A vortex not yet passed by the traveller thro’ Eternity.”
One curious piece of symbolism may be extracted from the myth, as the one reference to anything actual:—
“Then Milton knew that the Three Heavens of Beulah were beheld
By him on earth in his bright pilgrimage of sixty years
In those three Females whom his Wives, and those three whom his Daughters
Had represented and contained, that they might be resumed
By giving up of Selfhood.”
But of Milton’s flight, of the cruelties of Ulro, of his journey above the Mundane Shell, which “is a vast concave earth, an immense hardened shadow of all things upon our vegetated earth, enlarged into dimension and deformed into indefinite space,” we will take no more account here; nor of the strife with Urizen, “one giving life, the other giving death, to his adversary;” hardly even of the temptation by the sons and daughters of Rahab and Tirzah, when
“The twofold Form Hermaphroditic, and the Double-sexed,
The Female-male and the Male-female, self-dividing stood
Before him in their beauty and in cruelties of holiness.”
(Compare the beautiful song “To Tirzah,” in the Songs of Experience.) This Tirzah, daughter of Rahab the holy, is “Natural Religion” (Theism as opposed to Pantheism), which would fain have the spiritual Jerusalem offered in sacrifice to it.
“Let her be offered up to holiness: Tirzah numbers her:
She numbers with her fingers every fibre ere it grow:
Where is the Lamb of God? where is the promise of his coming?
Her shadowy sisters form the bones, even the bones of Horeb
Around the marrow; and the orbed scull around the brain;
She ties the knot of nervous fibres into a white brain;
She ties the knot of bloody veins into a red-hot heart;
She ties the knot of milky seed into two lovely heavens,
Two yet but one; each in the other sweet reflected; these
Are our Three Heavens beneath the shades of Beulah, land of rest.”