Here are names, but no portraits. The King stands for the spirit of kingship in all ages and his nobles are those who uphold "this marble-built heaven," and "all this great starry harvest of six thousand years." They must resist to the death the crooked sickle stretched out over fertile France "till our purple and crimson is faded to russet, and the Kingdoms of earth bound in sheaves, and the ancient forests of chivalry hewn, and the joys of the combat burnt for fuel." (As Blake penned these fine words something of his early Elizabethan passion must have stirred in him.) The King, through whom the spirits of ancient Kings speak, peers through the darkness and clouds, and involuntarily sees the truth: "We are not numbered among the living." Life is with the prisoners who have burst their dens. Let Kings "shivering over their bleached bones hide in the dust! and plague and wrath and tempest shall cease." The Archbishop of Paris, symbol of traditional religion, arises and addresses the King. For him revolution can only mean atheism. "God so long worshipped departs as a lamp without oil.... The sound of prayer fails from lips of flesh, and the holy hymn from thickened tongues." Clergy as well as nobles vanish, mitre as well as crown. "The sound of the bell, and voice of the sabbath, and singing of the holy choir is turned into songs of the harlot in day, and cries of the virgin in night. They shall drop at the plough and faint at the harrow, unredeemed, unconfessed, unpardoned; the priest rot in his surplice by the lawless lover, the holy beside the accursed, the King, frowning in purple, beside the grey ploughman, and their worms embrace together." This, fine as it is, calls out a still finer speech from Orleans. "Can nobles be bound when the people are free, or God weep when His children are happy?" Then to the Archbishop he cries: "Go, thou cold recluse, into the fires of another's high flaming rich bosom, and return unconsumed, and write laws. If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories, learn to consider all men as thy equals, thy brethren, and not as thy foot or thy hand, unless thou first fearest to hurt them." Finally the voice of the people is heard rising from valley and hill. What though "the husbandman weeps at blights of the fife, and blastings of trumpets consume the souls of mild France, and the pale mother nourishes her child to deadly slaughter, yet when the will of the people is accomplished, then shall the soldier throw down his sword and musket and run and embrace the meek peasant ... the saw and the hammer, the chisel, the pencil, the pen, and the instruments of heavenly song sound in the wilds once forbidden ... and the happy earth sing in its course, the mild peaceable nations be opened to heaven, and men walk with their fathers in bliss."