[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF "URIZEN." PUBLISHED 1794] In fire and strife and anguish he creates the world, "like a black globe, viewed by the Sons of Eternity, standing on the shore of the Infinite Ocean, like a human heart struggling and beating, the vast world of Urizen appears." But after this effort he is laid in "stony sleep unorganized rent from eternity." Los, who is Time, was then wrenched out of Urizen, and suffers fierce pain in the act of separation and division. Then, while Time works with hammers at his forge, fires belching around, he sees, nay! appears to assist at, the further changes of Urizen. For the "formless god" is gradually taking form, and inclosing himself in a human body. He assumes bones, heart, brain, eyes, ears, nostrils, stomach, throat, tongue, arms, legs, and feet. And now "his eternal life like a dream was obliterated." An age of intense agony and stress was allotted to the evolution and development of each created portion of the body. Meanwhile Los "forged chains new and new, numbering with links, hours, days and years." When Los had finished his unwilling task, and saw Urizen all bound with the chains of time, the senses, and the enclosing boundaries of his own selfhood, "Pity began." This is another painful division and shrinkage,-- In tears and cries imbodied A female form trembling and pale, Waves before his deathy face. Her name is Pity or Enitharmon. She is also Space, and her union with Los or Time naturally follows. The Eternals are so terrified at what Urizen has done, that they enclose the new creation in a tent to hide it from their sight, and call the tent Science. From the union of Space and Time springs a child, Orc, hereafter the deliverer, whom the father and mother chain with the chain of jealousy below the deathful shadow of Urizen. Urizen then explores his new kingdom, and, looking on his teeming world, he sickened, for he saw "that no flesh nor spirit could keep his iron laws (of prohibition and restraint) one moment." So he made a great Web or Net, and flung it over all, and this was called the Net of Religion. And of his now finished Creation it is written, Six days they shrunk up from existence And on the seventh day they rested. And they blessed the seventh day in sick hope, And forgot their eternal life. The evolution or changes of Urizen form the subjects of a great number of the plates. Blake has wrought here through the pictorial medium as Dante wrought the "Inferno" in his own art. The same high imagination, the same passionate and unshrinking realization of it, the same terrible force are integral parts of the minds of both artists, and inspire both works, different in kind as they are and separated by centuries of thought and feeling. No wonder that Linnell desired Blake in his old age to make drawings from the "Inferno," "thinking him the very man and only to illustrate Dante."