ABSTRACT
To the Victorians Wordsworth was more than a poet; he was a religion, and the Lake District a national shrine. It is sacred texts from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that a younger generation chalks on the walls of William Blake's London, that 'Human awful wonder of God': for that generation is more concerned with humanity than with nature. Blake was the supreme poet of the industrial revolution; but that is not to say that he saw in it the dawn of his new age: on the contrary, he deplored and denounced the enslavement of 'the myriads of eternity' to the 'mills and ovens and cauldrons' made in the image of a mechanized nature: with sorrow he wrote of the Giant Albion, 'his machines are woven with his life'. With due respect to Blake the 'vision' of nature he so unforgettably describes is not his own but again Swedenborg's.
