Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/122

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98
WILLIAM BLAKE

Gates, Hancock and Green,' side by side with Orc and the Angel of Albion; it preaches every form of bodily and spiritual liberty in the terms of contemporary events, Boston's Angel, London's Guardian, and the like, in the midst of cataclysms of all nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world for a time is given into the power of Orc, unrestrained desire, which is to bring freedom through revolution and the destroying of the bonds of good and evil. He is called 'Antichrist, Hater of Dignities, lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law.' He is the Satan of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and he also proclaims:

'For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil'd.'

As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses, stamping the stony law to dust '; so, here, he hears the voice of Orc proclaiming:

'The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts through the wild wilderness: