fits and stored up for such as can like it. Thus the poem opens, with not less fervour and splendour of sound than usual.
"Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet's Song!
Record the journey of immortal Milton thro' your realms
Of terror and mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions
Of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose
His burning thirst and freezing hunger! Come into my hand,
By your mild power descending down the Nerves of my right arm
From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry
The Eternal Great Humanity Divine planted his Paradise
And in it caused the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms
In likeness of himself."
(Observe here the answer by anticipation to the old foolish charge of madness and belief in mere material visions; a charge indeed refuted and confuted at every turn we take. Thus, and no otherwise, did Blake believe in his dead visitors and models: as spectres formed into new and significant shape by God, after his own likeness; not called up as by some witch of Endor and reclothed with the rags and rottenness of their dead old bodies; creatures existing within the brain and imagination of the workman, not as they were once externally and by accident, but as they will be for ever by the essence and substance of their nature. For the "vegetated shadow" or "human vegetable" no mystic ever had deeper or subtler contempt than Blake; nor was ever a man less likely to care about raising or laying it after death.)
"Tell also of the False Tongue! vegetated
Beneath your land of shadows; of its sacrifices, and
Its offerings: even till Jesus, the image of the Invisible God,
Became its prey; a curse, an offering, and an atonement
For Death Eternal, in the heavens of Albion, and before the gates
Of Jerusalem his Emanation, in the heavens beneath Beulah."
