Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine--
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.'

Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the sun,
the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the stars,
where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that were of
old, and the iron throne of Satan.

By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's paradoxical
wisdom, and as though there was no important truth hung from Dante's beam
of the balance, I but seek to interpret a little-understood philosophy
rather than one incorporate in the thought and habits of Christendom.
Every philosophy has half its truth from times and generations; and to us
one-half of the philosophy of Dante is less living than his poetry, while
the truth Blake preached and sang and painted is the root of the
cultivated life, of the fragile perfect blossom of the world born in ages
of leisure and peace, and never yet to last more than a little season; the
life those Phaeacians, who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in
nothing but in 'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,'
lived before Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who,
having eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages
when none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful emotion
because they are so little they are hardly of time and space at all.
'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote, 'opens into
eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow.' And again, 'Every
time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal' in its tenor and value
'to six thousand years, for in this period the poet's work is done, and
all the great events of time start forth, and are conceived: in such a
period, within a moment, a pulsation of the artery.' Dante, indeed,
taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and virtue are alike from love, and
that love is from God; but this love he would restrain by a complex
eternal law, a complex external Church. Blake upon the other hand cried
scorn upon the whole spectacle of external things, a vision t