with our friends across its bed, to exactly place a "memory belonging to it (which ought not to be called memory) with its right relation to the " obscure recollections of our corporeal understanding," Blake's remark will be seen not to require the reincarnation theory to make sense of it.

Of a similar kind was his opinion that Wordsworth had not written all his poems, nor Napoleon I fought all his battles. The first merely submitted to "dictate," the latter was killed and another spirit possessed his body. We all know cases now in which a man is personally killed by a bang on the head, while, on his "recovery," another person is found to be using his body. Sometimes later on the first person returns, whether by another bang or by a system of repeated awakenings from short sleeps, but to those who take it that one man means one person the medical accounts of such cases must make many physicians appear as mad as Blake seemed at his worst.

All this change of personality in the poetic beings or "states" was very annoying to readers of Blake who had no natural capacity for "meeting the Lord in the air" and no previous training in myth beyond such simple exercises as the classic tales have preserved for us, which have the immense advantage of lending themselves to almost unlimited misunderstanding without pulling us up short in our complacent career of misinterpretation. The theory usually adopted is that already mentioned as frankly uttered by Dr. Garnett, namely, that Blake did not know what he meant himself. But Dr. Garnett's day was over before it dawned, and now Messrs. Russell and Maclagan, working independently with no further guide than the incomplete and reticent interpretations of the Quaritch edition (which was in Dr. Garnett's hands also), made one discovery which they have written down and signed. "Blake is never vague." (See preface to their edition of Jerusalem, the first in ordinary type to be printed, and still, for the sake of its cheapness (5s.), its wide margins good to write notes on, and its sketch of an index, one that every reader who buys will be glad of.) A full index should be published. Theirs has the disadvantage of omitting many important words, and, what is worse, omitting important references to those words that it contains. There will be an encyclopædia and complete index to Blake published some day, but the disparaging tone of the scholarly average critic who does not know his Blake, but can write in such a tone as to make plain people think

that he knows all that is worth knowing, still clings like a wet blanket over the heads of the public, and publishers are very naturally afraid to print such a book, though the present writer has offered it. It ought to come out as the Proceedings" of a Blake Society.

The explanation of most of Blake's seeming errors about himself in the use of his own symbols is that he never quite threw off a habit of using nouns, and even proper names, as adjectives, or rather in places where adjectives would have seemed more comprehensible; and though this sounds a very wicked thing to do, it is not so if we who read have but the wit to understand; and those who contest this point, and set up a prejudice derived from the prose value of the nomenclature of grammar (a strong and valid plea in its place) as a reason for condemning Blake, might learn something if they would try and say what Blake said according to their own rules. They could do it, but the weary and verbose volume that would result would by its depressing and unpoetic quality so injure the fresh nerves of its best reader as to unfit him for seeing the visions and hearing the voices in his own interior faculties, without which all Blake's works will be to him as those nods or winks which the old proverb tells us are the same to a blind horse.

With regard to the tangle of is in is given above. The way to sort it from the text of Blake without any special exercise of faculties not usual to the run of mankind (the present writer has no such faculties whatsoever) may be found from contemplation of such sentences as that in Jerusalem, page 49, line 68

Luvah is named Satan because he has entered that State;

which has just been explained by

Satan is the State of Death, and not a Human Existence.

The whole passage is a master key to most of Blake's houses. Enitharmon (who loved Satan and nursed him as a son, as she had nursed Orc, Vala, Night V, line 70) herself sings a song of death to kill Los (after line 250 of Night I of Vala), who refused to be killed, though he had to smite her "to the earth." She also sang a song reviving him to life towards the end of Night II, but admitting the delight of the female in the death of the male.

It ceases to be paradoxical when we think of the facts of

life that underlie the poetry, on the living power of imagination that springs from the mental love aroused by our desire to be near the material beauty of nature, which is its one real result, notwithstanding that such beauty is illusion, its date a flash, and its material future eternal death.

So the good feminine or good material is essentially Nature's faculty of being the vessel that holds the male vital power, the emotion in which the "seed of contemplative thought" is carried, and the bad feminine is the carrier of the unformed reason and unformed memory or chaos that between them shall fight with imagination, trying to convince it of worthlessness and even of sin, and persuading it "to try self-murder on its soul"-Vala, Night I. These males and females are in fact influences.

Divide, ye bands, influence by influence,

says Urizen to his hosts in Vala, Night II.

Now that we have grown accustomed to understanding that throughout all mind, all life, feminine is one kind of influence, an emotional and beautiful kind, good when subservient to masculine, and that masculine is absolutely dead and satanic without it, and only tends to build nature by the power of reason in the space which otherwise is void and virginal, with no result (since nature is nothing), not even with the result of death, which is the state of nothing, we can with equanimity read such symbolic words as those, for example, about Canaan, which offer a typical set of Blakean difficulties:

The Heavenly Canaan..

is over Albion as the soul is to the body (Jerusalem, p. 71, first paragraph).

They took the falsehood [falsehood is prophetic]. They named it Canaan-gave a time-even six thousand years-called it Divine Analogy (Jerusalem, page 82, lines 17-20; page 84, line 28; page 85, first seven lines).

And compare with

The body of Moses in the valley of Peor-the body of Divine Analogy.

Compare also for the expression six thousand years, and the connection between Locke, Nature, Rahab, Luvah, and Satan, Milton, page 44, lines 14 and 15. We can understand it along with further allusions, as when we are told how Jerusalem (is an) emanative vision of Canaan, page 82, line 21. meaning of this compare Jerusalem, page 54, lines 1-5. The

kings of Canaan: delusion and love, page 89, line 46. “I call to Canaan, etc.: they listen not," page 83, line 17. The central or heart daughters of Albion are Canaan (deceitfully so called), page 82, lines 24-30. "Flames of dusty fire" to Canaan, Jerusalem, page 80, line 50. Los drove the daughters of Albion from Albion; they became daughters of Canaan, page 74, line 38. (He did a similar thing for the kings of Asia.) Reasoning, doubt, despair, and death, go from Canaan to devour Jerusalem. The daughters of Albion shoot forth in (note the in) tender nerves, and are taught to dance before the kings of Canaan, who are, as we learn from Milton, page 16, line 36, the fires of youth, enthusiasm, "the all in all" of art in this world as a practical thing. They call Luvah king of Canaan, and take off his vesture (the woof of six hundred years) and darken his eyes, Jerusalem, page 66, lines 20 to 34. The Mundane Shell froze round Canaan, whose love is in man's blood (p. 64, line 1 and line 37). Canaan's daughters require human victims (imaginative ideas; jealousy separates it from man, Albion-lines 31, 41, and 42). Once Canaan was under the sky of liberty, Jerusalem. This is Canaan the man, not the place (line 18). Canaan is a portico, through which the sun and moon can pass, of the Temple of Human Intellect (page 58, line 33). It was in the central region, or his heart (page 29, line 31), and as one of the doubletried tends to destroy the offspring of liberty and mental love (page 5, line 14). Finally, there is Milton, extra-page 8, (from which we learn how) Urizen as Satan oft entered, vibrating and weeping, into the space called Canaan, there appearing an aged female form (six thousand years!) that shrinks the organs of life till they become finite and itself seems infinite. It will be seen that difficulty is not obscurity, and this will also enable the reader to recall again the poem called the Mental Traveller, and on going through Jerusalem once more to be less pestered by echoes in his mind of ordinary churchgoing allusions to Canaan which make it, to most of us, almost as annoyingly blessed a word as Mesopotamia.

Among the most irritating and perhaps at first the most puzzling sayings of Blake are those about the Mundane Shell. Built by Los in the power of "Urizen and by the bands of Influences,' above (within) which, see Milton, last half of page 16, Milton's Human Shadow travelled in lands some of which belong to a list given in Jerusalem, page 5, line 14. The Mundane Shell turns out to be itself in twenty-seven heavens that are folds of opaqueness (" another

covering of Earth is removed," Blake wrote triumphantly, after arriving at Felpham, in his letter). It has caverns, fortunately (Milton, page 18, line 42), and is blue (page 19, line 30), and its caves are between the stars (page 22, line 22), and-we must note this-it is continually built by Los round the Polypus, which is the dead sea of storgeous appetite, within which are the females, and which has, for its male portion, the satanic sons of Albion. Compare Jerusalem, page 69, lines 1 to 5, with Milton, page 34, lines 23 to 31. It has chaoses (places of memory without imagination), where the sons of Ololon, who turns out to be (page 34, line 41), so far as she was female, Milton's wives, daughters, Rahab, the twenty-seven heavens, and the Shell itself as a shadow, all that is contrary to the poetic genius (see page 43, line 29 and onwards).

In the clouds of Ololon (Pathos), the Lord (Imagination) surrounds the dry acts of Intellect (Mundane Shell), page 35,

line 39.

Line 13 of page 36 shows us the Polypus ("soft affections" under the name of Ololon, of course) within the Mundane Shell.

These things, moods, thoughts, and despairs in this Polypus-so called because they all grow to one another, and to touch one is to touch all are named, that they may be recognised wherever else mentioned in page 37, lines 19 to end; where its relation is seen to Los, the voids between the stars and much else that is related in Jerusalem, especially where Los's spectre, Satan, and Sons of Albion are explained. In page 40, line 43 to end, we hear of Milton, who unites with Los in the shadowy prophet who fell six thousand years ago-fell from his station, and who now labours while Urizen faints in terror to find that he is giving him life, among the caverns of the Mundane Shell, and (so large is the contest) on the banks of appetite (Armon).

In Milton we hear no more of this Shell, but in Jerusalem we hear of it from the earlier pages, which again is an indication that Milton was at first written before Jerusalem at Felpham, after Blake had read over Vala and thrust the word Albion into its earlier Nights, for in Jerusalem we are told, in that long and explanatory page 13 (lines 33, 35 to 54), of its twenty-seven heavens that, of course, are outside Golgonooza (the city of art and life), and of all that lies in the voids and chasms. It is again explained as separate from the Earth of Vegetation, page 16, line 25, and then not