ABSTRACT
Delayed gratification is the point of the text, which relates that even though John Milton entered the Blake poet several plates earlier in the form of "a falling star". A main purpose of Milton, like William Blake's painting of the Last Judgment examined in the preceding chapter, is to give readers some idea of what the process Charles Howard Hinton describes might be like. Behind Milton plate 47 stands a century-long investigation into the nature of vision. The chapter explores more deeply the physiology of Blakean touch in relation to eighteenth-century theories of vision and matter. The vast and bulky sun disc of Milton plate 47 can be considered as a touch-rich reprise of the breakthrough vortex of Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion frontispiece. Milton plate 47 adopts Thomas Flaxman's perspectivism while re-imagining his remote, anonymous deity in tactual and anthropomorphic terms.
