None of these, that is, yet turned to evil, but still unfallen energies. At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds, Error none'), until he has organized the void and brought into it a light which makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the backbone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins, for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of furnaces, and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we are to hear so much in Jerusalem. He forges the sun, and chains cold intellect to vital heat, from whose torments:
'A twin
Was completed, a Human Illusion
In darkness and deep clouds involved.'
In The Book of Los almost all relationship to poetry has vanished; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely less so is The Book of Ahania (1795), written in the same short lines, hut in a manner occasionally more concrete and realizable. Like Urizen, it is almost all myth. It follows Fuzon, 'son of Urizen's silent burnings,' in his fiery revolt against:
'This cloudy God seated on waters,
Now seen, now obscured, king of Sorrows.'
From the stricken and divided Urizen is born Ahania ('so name his parted soul'), who is 'his invisible lust,' whom he loves, hides, and calls Sin.
'She fell down, a faint shadow wandering,
In chaos, and circling dark Urizen,
As the moon anguished circles the earth,
Hopeless, abhorred, a death shadow,
Unseen, unbodied, unknown,
The mother of Pestilence.'
But Urizen, recovering his strength, seizes the bright son of fire, his energy or passion, and nails him to the dark 'religious' 'Tree of Mystery,' from under whose shade comes the voice of Ahania, 'weeping upon the void,' lamenting her lost joys of love, and the days when:
'Swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness,
Bursting on winds my odours,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates,
In infant joy at my feet,
O Urizen, sported and sang.'
In The Four Zoas Ahania is called 'the feminine indolent bliss, the indulgent self of weariness.' 'One final glimpse,' says Mr. Swinburne, 'we may take of Ahania after her division—the love of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow, if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus made a worse thing than useless.' And her lament ends in this despair:
'But now alone over rocks, mountains,
Cast out from thy lovely bosom
Cruel jealousy, selfish fear,
Self-destroying; how can delight
Renew in these chains of darkness
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains,
Where bones from the birth are buried
Before they see the light.'