Not until he had walked the road of mental excess was he to arrive at the palace of wisdom. Once there, he was to revise even his ideas on rebellion. Keeping these persons and things steadily in view, let us now follow in order and detail the works of Blake's most rebellious period. As was fitting, Blake sounded the note of rebellion in a poem on the French Revolution. At this stage--1790-91--the Revolution had not advanced far. The Reign of Terror and the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were still in the future. But the Bastille had fallen, and the noise of its fall set the nerves of the overstrung English liberals vibrating. The battle in prose was waged by Paine, Mackintosh, and Mary Wollstonecraft against Burke, and their names came at once into notoriety. Blake was as outspoken, and even more fearless, for he wore publicly the _bonnet rouge_ as the outward and visible sign of his faith, but fortunately for him, his natural medium of expression was poetry, and that of a kind hitherto unknown, and so, say what he would, no one paid him the smallest attention. What came doubtlessly as a surprise to himself was that his poem found a publisher; and the first Book, with the promise that the remaining Books of the Poem, which were finished, should be published in their order, was announced to the world by bookseller Johnson in 1791, at the modest price of one shilling. Blake has a strange allegorical method of dealing with the Revolution which can only irritate those who are not accustomed to his ways. Thus he speaks of the seven dark and sickly towers of the Bastille. To these he gives the descriptive names of Horror, Darkness, Bloody, Religion, Order, Destiny, the Tower of God, and he gives descriptions of the prisoners in the towers corresponding to their names. All these were imprisoned because in some form or other they had bidden for liberty. One was the author of "a writing prophetic"; another, a woman, "refused to be whore to the Minister and with a knife smote him"; another had raised a pulpit in the city of Paris and "taught wonders to darkened souls." The horror of their condition is described with great power, although with too congested an accumulation of baneful images. Thus: "In the tower named Darkness was a man pinioned down to the stone floor, his strong bones scarce covered with sinews; _the iron rings were forged smaller as the flesh decayed_." That is a Dantesque touch. But when one reads farther down of "an old man, whose white beard covered the stone floor like weeds on margin of the sea, shrivelled up by heat of day and cold of night; his den was short and narrow as a grave dug for a child, with spiders' webs wove and with slime of ancient horrors covered, for snakes and scorpions are his companions," then the piled-up details prevent a clear image, and detract from the value of what has gone before. In contrast to the wretched inhabitants of the Bastille, we are presented with the King and his nobles.