come at the last,
when the days of the Camel and the days of the Lion are over, and
inaugurate the beginning of the "Great Noon."

"And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold
And pitying the tender cries
And walking round the fold,
Saying, 'Wrath by his weakness
And by his health sickness
Are driven away
From our immortal day.'"

Using boldly and freely, and with far more genuine worship than
many orthodox believers, the figure and idea of Christ; it is not
exactly the Christ we know in traditional Catholic piety, to whom in
association with this image of the man-child, Blake's mind is
constantly turning.

With a noble blasphemy--dearer, one may hope, to God, than the
slavishness of many evangelical pietists--he treats the Christian
legend with the same sort of freedom that the old Greek poets used
in dealing with the gods of Nature.

The figure of Christ becomes under his hands, as we feel sometimes
it does under the hands of the great painters of the Renaissance, a
god among other gods; a power among other powers, but one
possessed of a secret drawn from the hidden depths of the universe,
which in the end is destined to prevail. So far does Blake stray from
the barriers of traditional reverence, that we find him boldly
associating this Christ of his--this man-child who is to redeem the
race--with a temper the very opposite of an ascetic one.

What makes his philosophy so interesting and original is the fact
that he entirely disentangles the phenomena of sexual love from any
notion or idea of sin or shame. The man-child whose pitiful heart
and whose tenderness toward the weak and unhappy are drawn from
the Christ-Story, takes almost the form of a Pagan Eros--the
full-grown, soft-limbed Eros of later Greek fancy--when the question of
restraint or renunciation or ascetic chastity is brought forward.

What Blake has really done, be it said with all reverence, and far
from profane ears--is to steal the Christ-child out of his cradle in the
church of his worshippers and carry him into the chambers of the
East, the chambers of the Sun, into the "Green fields and happy
groves" of primitive Arcadian innocence, where the feet of the
dancers are light upon the dew of the morning, and where the
children of passion and of pleasure sport and play, as they did in the
Golden Age.

In that wonderful picture of his representing the sons of God
"shouting together"