By Satans Watch-fiends tho' they search numbering every grain Of sand on Earth every night, they never find this Gate. It is the Gate of Los. Withoutside is the Mill, intricate, dreadful And fill'd with cruel tortures; but no mortal man can find the Mill 5Of Satan, in his mortal pilgrimage of seventy years
For Human beauty knows it not: nor can Mercy find it! But In the Fourth region of Humanity, Urthona namd[,] Mortality begins to roll the billows of Eternal Death Before the Gate of Los. Urthona here is named Los. 10And here begins the System of Moral Virtue, named Rahab. Albion fled thro' the Gate of Los, and he stood in the Gate.
Los was the friend of Albion who most lov'd him. In Cambridgeshire His eternal station, he is the twenty-eighth, & is four-fold. Seeing Albion had turn'd his back against the Divine Vision, 15Los said to Albion, Whither fleest thou? Albion reply'd.
I die! I go to Eternal Death! the shades of death Hover within me & beneath, and spreading themselves outside Like rocky clouds, build me a gloomy monument of woe: Will none accompany me in my death? or be a Ransom for me 20In that dark Valley? I have girded round my cloke, and on my feet Bound these black shoes of death, & on my hands, death's iron gloves: God hath forsaken me, & my friends are become a burden A weariness to me, & the human footstep is a terror to me.
Los answerd, troubled: and his soul was rent in twain: 25Must the Wise die for an Atonement? does Mercy endure Atonement? No! It is Moral Severity, & destroys Mercy in its Victim. So speaking, not yet infected with the Error & Illusion,
