At this time, in 1780, Blake threw off one of his very own magnificent designs known as _Morning, or Glad Day_. It is the real Blake with only one foot on earth, his head in a flood of light, and the symbols of his grub state--caterpillar and moth--at his feet. The rays of the light are darting north and south and east and west. Blake had weary years before him to work out his salvation to Glad Day. This design makes it certain that he already had had his glimpse of the end, and we shall find that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.
London was not without its excitements. Lord George Gordon headed the No-Popery Riots in 1780, and through the unruly violence of the mob, London was in a panic for a week. Lord George was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower, where he was visited by the ubiquitous John Wesley, who found him well instructed in the Bible and not disposed to complain.
It is impossible to trace accurately what books Blake read at this time. It is evident that he observed Wesley and Whitefield and admired much that he saw in them. But his own religious genius was far removed from theirs, and sought nourishment elsewhere. It is probable that he read Boehme, Paracelsus, Fludd, Madame Guyon, and St Theresa in his spare hours.
But there were other imperious needs surging up in him. The creative passion of love was driving him hither and thither. With his tendency to view all things in the light of eternity, he was passionately in love with the eternal feminine, into which any pair of bright eyes would serve as windows. The particular pair of eyes that captivated him belonged to "a lively little girl" called Polly Wood, with whom he kept company for a while. Polly's conversation was probably no more suitable as a permanent entertainment to Blake than that of a modern flapper. Fortunately, she understood little affairs of the heart much better than he did, not taking them more seriously than they deserved; and when she saw symptoms of tremendously earnest love-making threatening to engulf her, she quickly shook him off with a sharp stroke, "Are you a fool?" and left him feeling very lacerated and sorry for himself.
Blake had not long to wait for another manifestation of the eternal feminine. Recovering from an illness at Kew, where he was staying at the house of a market-gardener named Boucher, he told his grief to the gardener's daughter Catherine, who declared that she pitied him from the heart. There was the authentic voice of the eternal feminine. "Do you pity me?" he gasped. "Yes! I do most sincerely" the voice continued. "Then I love you!" and his fate was sealed. William Blake and Catherine Boucher were married quietly at St Mary's Church, Battersea, on August 18th, 1782, and the happy pair, leaving their parental nests, made their first little home together in lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields.