To this passage succeeds another of like beauty, a Flora's Feast of colour and scent.
Thou perceivest the flowers put forth their precious odours: And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweet, Forgetting that within that centre Eternity expands Its ever-during doors, that Og and Anak fiercely guard. First ere the morning breaks, joy opens in the flowery bosoms, Joy even to tears, which the Sun rising dries: first the wild thyme And meadowsweet downy and soft, waving among the reeds, Light springing in the air, lead the sweet dance: they wake The honeysuckle sleeping on the oak: the flaunting beauty Revels along the wind: the white-thorn, lovely may Opens her many lovely eyes: listening, the rose still sleeps, None dare to wake her: soon she bursts her crimson-curtained bed And comes forth in the majesty of beauty; every flower, The pink, the jessamine, the wall-flower, the carnation, The jonquil, the mild lily opes her heavens: every tree And herb and flower soon fill the ear with an innumerable dance, Yet all in order sweet and lovely. Men are sick with love.
Oh! how gladly the ear and heart rest on passages such as these, after toiling through the arid wilds of non-poetical occultism!
As usual the illustrations are turned to with keen delight. The iridescent pages recall the charms of the "Songs of Innocence and Experience." Take it all in all the colour in this last prophetic book combines a clarity and brilliance of tone inferior to no other of Blake's. All is careful, clear and precise, and there are no passages of heavy colouring or impasto work.
Forms, elemental, electric, indicative of unknown forces and conditions of consciousness start from the pages. As in "Jerusalem," every page of writing is adorned, but the colour adds the necessary charm to the forceful designs. Plate 15 represents a muscular male--Michael Angelesque in its modelling--leaping upon a rock and seizing by the shoulders a languid old man. The young man is Milton, starting on his journey "to annihilate the selfhood of deceit and false forgiveness." The old man is Albion seated on the Rock of Ages, his legs immersed in the sea of Time and Space, his nerveless arms supported on the tables of the Law. Above them both, on a semi-circular plane of light, the Eternals are seen, passing in procession in a kind of ecstatic choric dance. Three play on instruments of music, while two others toss balls of light in joyous abandon. The rhythmic character of these dancers, their robes fetched out like clouds upon the wind, and the colour translucent and vivid as that of a border of April flowers, makes one think of the fair works with which Luca della Robbia has set the dark old streets of Florence, of which, as some one has poetically said, they would seem to be the "wall-flowers."