Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/44

would father the puny abortion upon our prophet, is hateful to Blake. Art is for the ennobling of life, for the manifestation to man of the worth of life and the glory of the heavens. Art without purpose is art with a worm in its soul, and a worm that breeds pestilence. "Truth has bounds, error none," Blake declares in the book of Urizen. And we dare not forget this awful doom of forgetting the purpose of our energy. Yet if truth has bounds, if energy must have reason for its outward circumference, we need have no fear of reason's despotism; for our horizon is hedged in only by the limitations of our energies. Reason is minister to the imagination, and must never become its master.

For all are men in eternity, rivers, mountains, cities, villages.
All are human, and when you enter into their bosom, you walk
In Heavens and Earths; as in your bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, and all you behold: though it appears without, it is within,
In your imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but a shadow.

Jerusalem, iii. p. 71.