osition of his animosities and of their various
intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante emerges
from the earthly Paradise, is written 'Homer,' and in the next circle
'Swedenborg,' and on the margin these words: 'Everything in Dante's
Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of all, and its
goddess Nature, memory,' memory of sensations, 'not the Holy Ghost....
Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum. Homer is the
centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen.' The statement that round
Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence of his ideas, and of his
curiously literal understanding of his own symbols; for it is but another
form of the charge made against Milton many years before in _The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell_. 'In Milton the Father is destiny, the son a ratio of
the five senses,' Blake's definition of the reason which is the enemy of
the imagination, 'and the Holy Ghost vacuum.' Dante, like other medieval
mystics, symbolized the highest order of created beings by the fixed
stars, and God by the darkness beyond them, the _Primum Mobile_. Blake,
absorbed in his very different vision, in which God took always a human
shape, believed that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer
world was in itself idolatry, but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled
immensity was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His
essence--it being a creation of the ruining reason, 'generalizing' away
'the minute particulars of life.' Instead of seeking God in the deserts of
time and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called 'the abstract
void,' he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of time
and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the
ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and, above
all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and the
restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did he come
to Eden's 'breathing garden,' to use his beautiful phrase, and to the
unveiled face of God. No worthy symbol of God existed but the inner world,
the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many names,
'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body of God,'
'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most intimate
expression was art and poetry. He always sang of God under this symbol:

'For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God Our