[Gutenberg 60448] • William Blake

Excerpt: ...the blind cruelty of those who would educate us. This experience is so contrary that nothing could be more calculated to crush native innocence, joy, and spring. Pg 105 "O! father and mother, if buds are nipped And blossoms blown away, And if the tender plants are stripped Of their joy in the springing day, By sorrow and care's dismay, How shall the summer arise in joy, Or the summer fruits appear? Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy, Or bless the mellowing year, When the blasts of winter appear?" How indeed? The question is to parents, schoolmasters, professors, priests. The conditions for young lives are created by those who would strangle life. Yet when experience has been its most contrary, even nailing its victim to a cross, just there is deliverance. "Whate'er is born of mortal birth Must be consumed with the earth, To rise from generation free." It was Blake's supreme experience that he had been set free from generation. It was by a re-generation, and that had come to him through the death of Jesus. "The death of Jesus set me free." The same year 1794 saw Blake spinning fast the special mythological web with which he was to clothe or strangle his vision. He had separated from all his spiritual teachers; but Swedenborg lived on in him much more than he owned or even recognized, and Ossian and Milton still governed his imagination. Milton's huge figures were imitated in the mythological figures which were to stalk about his universe to the end; Ossian's fantastic Pg 106 names, which always fascinated him, provoked others still more fantastic. By means of these uncouth d