that a sort of revelation of the relation between his symbols flashed on Blake. Of course Albion with America shut out by its War of Independence had, in fact, his western gate closed, and was the obvious symbol for Man in the condition called in Milton "delivered over to selfhood," page 12, line 24.

This "closed western gate" was also the symbol of decency, in the sense in which we consider decency to mean not the shutting out of allusion to vile meanness and black selfishness, but merely absence of frank language about the sexual passions. Such frankness, however, seemed to Blake to be "honesty," and his complaint that he might not always say what relation all his mythic personages held to the sexual as well as to other portions of the anatomy was part of the blame attaching to "Nature," by whom our "narrowed perceptions" have so perverted us, that "deep dissimulation is the only defence an honest man has left" (Jerusalem, page 49, line 23). Every gate is fourfold, and it will be noticed that those "whose western gates were open" were "weeping round Albion" (Jerusalem, page 45, line 34), in which incident much may be seen about those "intellectual things" tears, and of the meaning of the Western symbols (West-water; Tharmas-good tears of pity and brotherhood, bad tears of discouragement and groves of the "oak of weeping"). The whole passage begins practically at Jerusalem, page 42, line 77, that ends here a new part of the narrative opening page 45, line 37, while the Albion story re-appears and vanishes into explanation, emerging again, page after page, at irregular intervals. That the explanation of Blake's own symbols did not always occur to him at once, and that the visions were not a mere lot of deliberate allegories mechanically arranged in every case to fit his own analysis of human character is known, and is shown by the motto on the first page of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, "The eye sees more than the heart knows," which does not mean that Blake did not know his own meaning, as the Garnett school maintain, but that the meaning of his visions grew on him, as it will grow on the reader. Vala, Night III, line 105, has a word also about the "western gate."

In Milton, page 42, lines 2 and 3, we find him knowing only remotely" some of the acts and words of his own visions. This would account for his going backwards in the evolution of the nominality (if we may coin a word) of his myth making imagination and writing "Man," "Fallen

P

One," etc., in Vala at first, only correcting it to "Albion," when, by reconsideration, he had seen at Felpham that this was a better term, and that he had wisely used it when writing the Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793, four years before Vala was begun, and nine years before it (in conjunction with his earlier work) was reconsidered. It is just possible that the name was "found" by him on his early engraving when unpacking at Felpham, and was not added at this time. As a biographical point it must remain undecided. As a point of symbolic interpretation the date of the first use of the word in its later meaning is of no consequence whatever.

There is a note of surprise in Jerusalem, p. 27, in the prose part of the preface to chap. ii. Blake seems to have only just read what the "learned have explored," and to be pleased to find in it a fresh conviction of the truth of what he had already discovered by vision about Albion, even the visions being partly new and seen at Felpham. He had been too busy to read much during the first months at Felpham, and he may have borrowed books from Hayley during his feverish attack of illness in May 1802. It will be remembered that Blake's letter to Butts about the "re-collecting of scattered thoughts on art" is dated January of this year. A letter of November in the same year shows, by an argument quoted from Mr. Gilpin and by allusion to "all Sir Joshua Reynolds's discourses," that the process of re-collecting ideas was still going on.

Hayley was now arguing about Greek art, and thus driving Blake to gather together his own artistic ideas in opposition. To impress Blake, Hayley probably urged in support of his view that the classic standard of excellence was accepted by important persons in high positions, at court, in the army, or at the universities. If so, not only the "Sibylline leaves" but the preface to Milton must have been written now, for here, it is said, "We have hirelings in the camp, the court, and the university who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war," and the little fragments of poor verse about Sir Joshua in the MS. book which, from their position in the disorderly pages, were evidently written before the Public Address and other matter belonging to the years following the Felpham period, are found crammed in edgeways on blanks that were not intended to be covered when these 'epigrams" were written in the book. One of them refers to the discourse in which Reynolds desires that

the name of Michael Angelo should be his last utterance on Art. This epigram is called A Pitiful Case.

"The villain at the gallows tree"

When he is doomed to die,
To assuage his misery

In virtue's praise does cry.

So Reynolds when he came to die,
To assuage his bitter woe,
Thus aloud did howl and cry-

Michel Angelo! Michel Angelo!

There are also several allusions to "hiring" belonging to 1802-10. And there is the "hired villain," to whom we have not yet come, but who was long before 1820. Therefore, though one line is certainly to be found in the notes on the Discourses, that seems to imply that they were written when Blake was "aged sixty-three," that is in 1820, as Gilchrist maintains, we must remember that we have no reason to suppose that Blake parted with his Discourses, and we know that he was in the habit of retouching his own remarks from time to time to enforce their matter or to improve their symbolism, though not to correct their style. The lines are, of course,

When Nations grow old,

The arts grow cold,

And Science settles on every tree;

And the poor and the old

Can live upon gold,

For all are born poor.-Aged sixty-three.

We must regret that Blake did not at this period write a concise history of the human race. It would have been something like this in matter, as we see by Jerusalem, page 27:

"Notwithstanding what is true about Brutus being the ancestor of Britain (hence the name), and about the British being descendants of the Trojans, as I sang in my youth, and about their having brought here wisdom, art, and science from Asia, when Asia, given over to war and egotism, no longer deserved such possessions, a descent from good to evil of an even earlier date had taken place here, for we find Druids performing human sacrifice in a manner that shows them to have been literal misreaders of a highly ancient and poetic religious decree. The voice that uttered that decree must have been that of a man whose mind was so diffusible in its higher parts that it rode far

out beyond his visible outline, and did not serve as the darkened minds of men do now (though acting along just such a subtle atmosphere in doing so), only to move their arms and legs. His mind reached to the stars, which also means that it reached the remotest truths that were in his limbs, as we call the exteriors of mind, and he embraced in his intuitions all the reasonings and ideas that have since got cut loose from him, and have shrunk up right and left into separations, as we men shrink from one another into mortal egotisms when we forget brotherhood. This atmosphere is now ours in so limited a degree that we cannot generally even see through a brick wall to behold another brick wall, nor allow our imaginations to be visible when our eyes are full of daylight. There was a special part of this ancestral mind most suited to going forth that usually went out on its diffused atmosphere. It exists and can be seen now. It grew to be called Jerusalem,' after a city built and destroyed by man in Syria, this deed being permitted in order to be a symbol of man's emanation when literature could not properly describe this because a shyness and modesty had put clothing on man and woman, dulness on their visions, and egotism on their hearts, and matter-offactness on their poetry. But all things began in 'Albion."

Many facts that are now familiar to us all about "thought transference," "pre-natal memory," and about the effects on which much of magic is based, and that are produced by unmated love in the spiritual region, where it acts in an unnatural manner, being diverted from its proper function in the reproduction of species,-these Blake attempted singlehanded to understand and control. He saw in them regions of eternity, while in the peculiarly distracting and belittling effect on all prophetic powers wrought by competition, jealousy, argument, and egotism he saw regions of death. There is reason to fear that, just as he was not suspicious enough of rebellion in his apprentice days, so he was not suspicious enough of imagination at a later period, and that the deadly part of mental life is often much more imaginative and contains much more brotherhood than he was willing to believe. But unless Blake's meaning along this central line of idea is properly judged by us, we are only trifling when we pretend that we have a right to deny that he was a madman. It is true that more than this is required if we are to justify our assertion that Blake was sane in the face of all the apparent incoherence of his writings, and the real coherence of the

myth of the Four Zoas must be read in its scattered morsels— a thing that Gilchrist, the Rossettis, and even Mr. Swinburne omitted to do, and that Dr. Garnett could not understand when it had been done for him. Mr. William Michael Rossetti, while unfortunate enough not to understand Blake's myth, was man enough to say that he did not think him sane, for which some respect must always be paid to him, notwithstanding the unjustifiable concealments of his editorial treatment of Broken Love and the Everlasting Gospel, and the mistake that he made about the "hired villain" epigram, to which we shall soon

come.

In the sketch here given of Blake's historical idea there is no reference to the Atonement, but that has been treated and explained by him fully, chiefly in the last pages of Jerusalem and in Milton. For those who wish to find the "real" Blake in his views about this in particular, the following references may be of use. They are given here, however, with the warning that the sentences in which the words referred to occur are not only insufficient, but absolutely misleading to those who do not weigh others that seem to have nothing to do with them, particularly those that dwell on the symbolic difference between the horizontal (length and breadth, east and west) and the perpendicular (height and depth, north and south) which have to be traced all through the poems, for every line in every page must be read either in relation to the horizontal or to the perpendicular symbol, and that relation is not always one of immovable position, but is frequently one of transference.

Redeem, Redeemed, or Redemption are words found in Milton-page 5, line 3; page 6, line 25; page 9, lines 19, 22, 23; page 11, lines 30, 32; page 18, line 11; page 20, line 44; page 22, line 52; page 23, line 27; page 25, line 36; and page 37, lines 11 and 12.

Redemption, a word unfortunately absent from the Russell and Maclagan sketched index in their edition of Jerusalem, occurs in that poem on page 36, line 41; page 48, line 63; page 59, line 9; page 92, line 20.

That the first 36 pages do not contain the word shows them to have been written in a separate meditative mood. In Vala we find it in Night VIII, lines 194, 354, first above that declaration against separatism

Now we know that life eternal

Depends alone upon the Universal hand, and not in us

Is aught but death in individual weakness, sorrow, and pain.