In the dark Ulro till the judgment. Also Milton knew and they knew

Himself was Human, though now wandering through death's vale In conflict with those three female forms which in blood and

jealousy

Surrounded him, dividing and uniting without end or number. Milton, pages 15 and 16.

The females whom Milton's living wives and daughters represented were female forms-forms of thought whose tendency is to the opposite of sympathy and forgiveness, and who fight for their mental lives, and are ready to destroy any mental life, or to bind any down that threatens their materialistic view of existence, which is their existence. Their names

Rahab and Tirzah, and Milcah and Mahlah, and Noah and Hoglah, Milton, page 16, line 11,

betray what kind of forms of thought they are. We have seen them in Jerusalem in page 68, at their symbolic work on Schofield (variously spelled), who was the limit of contraction recreated in Edom (or red earth), and therefore called Adam, who absorbed many of his brethren, to be himself bound down by Mahlah, Hoglah, and Milcah. Their names are biblical, and will be recognised as those of Zelophehad's daughters. He, as related in Numbers, chap. xxvi., verse 33, and chap. xxvii. at the beginning, had only these daughters and no sons. They obtained from Moses a special inheritance, as though they were heirs male, and not female, and from their time the Salic law, hitherto existing (though not under that name) among Israelites, was abolished.

Blake uses them symbolically as names suggestive of feminine or materialistic tyranny, as he uses those of the "Sons of Albion" for argumentative or negative tyranny. The next thing we hear of Milton was that

His body was the rock Sinai-that body
Which was on earth bound to corruption;

and the female influences were rocky also, and have further names which are heard of in Jerusalem.

All this is aimed at the belief in the hard apparent surfaces of Nature, that seems real, but is not, till some one is entrapped into lending his imagination to believe it.

The rock Sinai is heard of in the Book of Ahania in detail:

But Milton's Human Shadow continued journeying above
The rocky masses of the Mundane Shell."

Line 18.

And this is elaborately explained. Space forbids us to follow his journey minutely, but at last Blake cries out, after exhausting attempt to makes himself clear:

How can I, with my gross tongue that cleaveth to the dust, Tell of the fourfold man? Milton, page 10, line 15. He cannot, except by figures of speech. Our language was made for food and love, labour and war, on the plain, and in the state of mind that produced utterance. How can it in specific terms tell of psychic involutions? Arithmetic alone could as easily deal with the forms of thought for which the language called Algebra was invented. Blake's books are to those of other poets almost exactly what algebra is to arithmetic. His x, y, and z are biblical and historical names, and their action on each other contains truth that cannot be told except in mythic form. Those who insist that Blake shall be explained in non-mythic form are as reasonable as those who expect the mathematician to go without his letters and signs. More may be done than has yet been done, but Milton alone deserves a volume as long as this entire book to unravel it, though Blake tried hard, as such passages as the following show:

As when a man dreams he reflects not that his body sleeps, Else he would wake, so seemed he entering his own shadow, Milton, page 14, line 1, a passage to be read whenever the word sleep or dream occurs in Jerusalem. A little farther down, on line 10 and

following:

When he entered into his shadow, himself,

His real and immortal self was, as appeared to those

Who dwell in immortality, as one sleeping on a couch of gold.

But to himself he seemed a wanderer lost in dreary night.

The word self is used in several senses. It is a pity that Blake did not adopt a different way of writing for each,— roman, italic, black letter, and Greek.

Thus Milton stood forming bright Urizen, while his Mortal past
Sat frozen on the rock of Horeb, and his Redeemed portion
Thus formed the clay of Urizen, but within that portion

His real Human walked above in power and majesty

Though darkened, and the seven angels of the Presence attended him. Page 18, lines 10-14.

Or again :

As the ploughman or artificer or shepherd, While in the labours of his calling, sends his thoughts abroad To labour in the ocean or in the starry heavens, so Milton Laboured in chasms of the Mundane Shell, though here before My cottage, etc. Page 40, lines 4 etc. "Milton," being the name of a state about to be created, is a composite individual, and yet, "Milton" being a person, personal division is carefully explained.

The doctrine that there is a divided as well as a composite personality is seen even without more attempt to analyse it; as Blake's it was his second leading idea; his third, almost as puzzling at first, must be spoken of if we are to set up any real portrait of his mind.

This third idea was his view of morality. That he had been punished as a child for seeing visions, left him for life with the idea that generalised maxims not poetically illustrated in myths were what people called moral, and that it was therefore immoral to allow the mind to create mythic figures with their refusal to be translated, and their pictorial vividness-vision being clearer than sight itself, and their own passions of love and hate, lust and cruelty, that make them just like so many living savages.

All through Jerusalem, moral and matter-of-fact are seen to mean the same thing, while sin and sympathy are the same. Vision and forgiveness, we have already seen, are names for the Saviour seen in different attributes, male or female.

The result inevitably is that moral becomes a term of reprobation. The word "holy means (in sarcastic sense) unfruitful of imagination, sterile. Impurity and harlotry is a mixture of imagination with actual love or credulity,—of nature and mind. Chastity is (in a bodily sense) of no more importance compared to the mental virtues than body is compared to mind. It is actually evil when its mental effects are evil.

This is very much the view that Mr. Sinnett says was current in the Atlantic lands, now under the ocean, in times before that modern period known as ancient history. It survives, of course, in the modern clubman. Perhaps no one is ready to deny it unconditionally, except to uphold the ascetic Christianity of the Pauline dogma. Paul will be read of in Blake along with Constantine, Charlemagne, and Luther, as one who was not a whole-hearted upholder of Forgiveness as the only Christ.

At one period of Blake's life he certainly considered thought that is wrong a deadlier sin than certain acts that are not held to be right. The ethics of thought are still so far from being generally agreed on that the subject must be left here. There are words at the close of Broken Love that show him as not in the mood that wrote the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

CHAPTER XXX

SUMMING UP OF THE POSITION OF JERUSALEM' AND 'MILTON'

LATER than Jerusalem and Milton we can find no record of Blake's mind which has any completeness and force to be compared to that which they contain. They will remain the places where we must look for his portrait by his own hand in its most emphatic form. As it has been supposed for so long that Jerusalem was the poem that he wrote at Felpham, though passages in it are common to both Milton and Vala, and though we have no contemporary record, and though some pages of Milton, as engraved, seem to be later than anything in Jerusalem, the reasons for considering that Milton was the poem he wrote there, and "considered the grand reason" of his "being brought there," deserve to be brought together, even if some are repeated in doing so.

The first is that the poem was shortened from twelve books to two; the second, that he says, page 36 of Milton, that "Los" prepared his cottage at Felpham that he might write those visions, and one chief incident is given as occurring on his garden path. The third is that in Jerusalem, page 38, he says that he saw certain visions in Felpham that belong to the poem, but that he writes in South Molton Street, London. He says that he even heard some of what he writes in Lambeth, where he lived before he went to Felpham. The fourth is that he begins the poem with a list of symbolic characters, among whom is one (Scholfield) whose name he had only heard during the very last days that he was at Felpham. The fifth is that Milton is full of country descriptions and symbols-the lark, the shepherd, wildflowers-and that these are lost in Jerusalem. The sixth is that though a passage from one of his letters dated from Felpham recalls an expression from Jerusalem about the "fluctuating earth" on page 83, it is even more closely allied to the passage