The "poem" itself opens more intelligibly than most of the later books with a mythic story concerning one Palamabron and the horses of the plough; of Satan, who persuaded him to be allowed to drive the horses for one day, and of the dire confusion, strife, and tragedy resulting from Palamabron's consent. The story bears a distant analogy to the Phaethon myth, for Palamabron represents, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, the "imaginative impulse," while Satan is the dark angel who erects the barriers of reason limited by moral laws and senses around humanity. It was impossible for one to do the work of the other. The definite incidents with which "Milton" so hopefully opens are soon lost sight of, and the loosely-fitted framework, ill-adjusted and weak, contains a tangled woof of mysticism, from which the end of the thread is so difficult of extraction, that I for one must plead that the trouble of "winding a golden ball" seems hardly worth while, though it is no doubt possible and profitable to the student of mysticism. Milton's part in the book is perhaps the hardest to decipher. But we find him undertaking a journey from heaven, through earth and hell. "Milton" seems specially dear to Blake because he made Satan the supreme study of his greatest poem. Blake, as we know, had very original thoughts concerning Satan, and regarded him as the world's angel of light, a most respectable person indeed, for he is the enforcer of the moral law as evolved by divided generative humanity. Milton like Blake recognized this highly respectable aspect of Satan, whereas the world, says our poet in "The Everlasting Gospel," frequently mistakes Satan for Christ: The vision of Christ that thou dost see, Is my vision's greatest enemy, and it creates an abortive kind of hell-bat to take the _role_ of Satan,--a very confused state of affairs, which leads to no little deception and opacity in men's minds. The old themes of free-love for the sake of the spirit, and the denunciation of "Nature's cruel holiness," occupy much of the book, in which the mythic personages, Leutha, Rintrah, Ololon, and Enitharmon move up and down in dream-like procession. The ease with which these shadowy beings enter each other's personalities, divide, and separate again into manifold emanations and spectres, suggest the multitudinous globes into which a drop of quicksilver may be divided, uniting again on contact into several large ones, and finally forming the unit from which they were first divided. Fascinating as is the experiment with mercury, it becomes confusing and even tiresome when the appearing and vanishing parties are persons with names and presumably characters. One passage full of the old poetical loveliness of which Blake had been past master must be quoted. It shows that the beauty of nature at Felpham, with its distracting fascination, entered the soul of the poet, despite all theories and philosophizings.