though there are various details likely to give the reader pause: it is reproduced in our volume. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) is a magnificent work, and may be counted the very greatest monument of Blake's genius as a writer. It is in the highest degree startling, and demands careful thinking on the reader's part: if this is accorded, it can be understood and laid to heart. The chief subject-matter is the nature of good and evil (with reference to which a short passage has been extracted at our p. lxxxvi.), and their reciprocal necessity. Though permeated with poetic fire and energy, the work is undisguisedly in prose. The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) proclaims the vigorous and “ emancipated" views which Blake entertained on questions of sexual relation. This book, and those which remain to be mentioned, are not exactly prose, nor yet exactly poetry, so far as the form of the composition is concerned. They are written in a rhapsodical turmoil of thought and of imagery, which finds its most fitting expression in measures not meted out, rolling and semi-rhythmical, often moreover printed with gratuitous and troublesome disregard of metrical sequence, doing less than justice to the sound of the words. They surge on, overlapping the sense and the reader's faculty of analytical at、 tention, flecked here and there with resonances and recurrences. This way of writing conformed in some degree to the Ossian type, but of course with much more volume of sound, corresponding to its exaltation, if also its shadowiness and sometimes its inflation, of motive. Blake himself, in some prefatory words to the Jerusalem, has characterized the form of it as follows::

"When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence (like that used by Milton and Shakspeare, and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage of rhyming) to be a necessary and indispensable part of the verse. But I soon found that, in the mouth of a true orator, such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both in cadence and number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied, and put into its place. The terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts all are necessary to each other."

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America, Europe, Africa, and Asia (the Song of Los)-produced from 1793 to 1795-are entitled Prophecies;" not so much that they profess to foreshadow future events as that they present a stupendous panorama contemplated by a mystic in vision. The Book of Urizen, followed by The Book of Ahania (1794-95), derives more particularly from the theological side of Blake's mind -his conceptions regarding the Creator, as distinct from the Supreme Benevolence; Urizen himself being by far the greatest dramatic imagination which Blake has attained to or bequeathed to us, and in a certain way really potent and taking despotic possession of the mind. presents the "jealous God" of the Old Testament, as reinterpreted by the seer into a different range of religious ideas. Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804), differs considerably from the earlier Prophetic Books, both in subject and in manner, although referable to the same general

He re

fount of inspiration. It is no doubt adverted to in the following very impressive passage from the Descriptive Catalogue, and the battered and panting commentator cannot hope to put the matter much more clearly. "The Strong Man represents the human sublime; the Beautiful Man represents the human pathetic, which was, in the wars of Eden, divided into male and female; the Ugly Man represents the human reason. They were originally one man, who was fourfold: he was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos. The artist has written it under inspiration, and will, if God please, publish it: it is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain, and the world of Satan and of Adam. The Giant Albion was Patriarch of the Atlantic he is the Atlas of the Greeks, one of those the Greeks called Titans." And elsewhere: "Albion our ancestor, Patriarch of the Atlantic Continent, whose history preceded that of the Hebrews, and in whose sleep, or chaos, creation began. . . Imagination is surrounded by the Daughters of Inspiration, who, in the aggregate, are called Jerusalem." A few words of further characterization may be borrowed from Mr. Swinburne. "The enormous Jerusalem is simply a fervent apocalyptic discourse on the old subjects,-love without law and against law; virtue that stagnates into poisonous dead matter by moral isolation; sin that must exist for the sake of being forgiven, forgiveness that must always keep up with sin,-must even maintain sin, that it may have something to keep up with

...

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and to live for. Without forgiveness of sins, the one thing necessary, we lapse each man into separate self-righteousness, and a cruel worship of natural morality and religious law. For Nature (oddly enough, as it seems at first sight) is assumed by this mystical code to be the cruellest and narrowest of absolute moralists. Only by worship of imaginative impulse, the grace of the Lamb of God, which admits infinite indulgence in sin, and infinite forgiveness of sin-only by some such faith as this shall the world be renewed and redeemed." But Mr. Swinburne cautions the possible (I will not say the probable) reader against so much as essaying to understand some parts of the plan of the Jerusalem. • Neither let any attempt to plant a human foot upon the soil of the newly-divided shires and counties, parti. tioned though they be into the mystic likeness of the twelve tribes of Israel. Nor let any questioner of arithmetical mind apply his skill in numbers to the finding of flaws or products in the twelves, twenty-fours, and twenty-sevens, which make up the sum of their male and female Emanations." The poem named Milton (1804) reveals various arcan on the like moral and other subjects; among them (to quote again from Mr. Swinburne) “the incarnation, and descent into earth and hell, of Milton-who represents here the redemption by inspiration, working in pain and difficulty before the expiration of the six thousand years" (i.e., the period of mundane existence, according to Mosaic chronology). The only remaining and very brief Prophetic Book, The Ghost of Abel (published in 1822), takes a dramatic form, once more enforcing the doctrine of

The inscription which

the forgiveness of sins. precedes it may be given here,—both as a compendious example of the union of quaintness, profundity, and mysticism, which the Prophetic Books exhibit, and as reminding us of the long lapse of time during which the great-souled Blake wrote on, and found next to no listeners-from a date preceding the first volume of Cowper to a date only two years before the death of Byron.

"To Lord Byron in the Wilderness.—What dost thou here, Elijah?

Can a poet doubt the visions of Jehovah?

Nature has no outline, but Imagination has:

Nature has no time, but Imagination has:

Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves: Imagination is Eternity."

6.-EDITORIAL DETAILS.

The Prophetic Books, at which we have now given a hasty and half-shuddering glance, are excluded from the present edition of Blake's poems; exception being made in favour of Tiriel, and of The Book of Thel, as already mentioned. Our collection professes to give only the lyrical poems, and two or three others naturally associated with them; whereas the Prophetic Books are not exactly poems at all in point of form, and are certainly not lyrical poems. It would nevertheless be highly desirable that these books, now practically inaccessible, should be republished one day in ordinary book-shape; Blake will be but imperfectly known even to his enthusiasts until this is done. The series should include The French Revolution, and should be completed by