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CHAPTER XXI.

SOUTH MOLTON STREET. 1804. [ET. 47.]

THE friendly haven of sweet Felpham was exchanged for the deeper seclusion of the brick-and-mortar desert, in the hope, as I hinted, of more perfect converse there with the Visions, undistracted by appeals from the beauty of the visible world, or by temptations from wellmeaning patrons; above all, undisturbed by daily contact with so essentially material and eighteenth century a mind as Hayley's, which must have had its benumbing influence on the visionary or imaginative faculty, though perhaps unrecognised. Blake did not return to a cottage at Lambeth, but to lodgings in South Molton Street, within a

There neither garden nor tree

mile of the spot where he was born. reminded him of what he had left behind. South Molton Street,

less shabby then than now, runs diagonally from Oxford Street into Brook Street. At No. 17 he took a first-floor, in which he remained for nearly seventeen years.

The first works issued from South Molton Street were the two engraved books, last mentioned, Jerusalem and Milton. The Jerusalem is prefaced by an Address' to the public, in a style to which the public is little accustomed:

Sheep.

To the Public.

Goats.

After my three years' slumber on the banks of Ocean, I again display my giant forms to the public: my former giants and fairies having received the highest reward possible; the . . . and . . of those with whom to

...

be connected is to be I cannot doubt that this more consolidated and extended work will be . . . as kindly received. . . &c. * * * Reader, what you do not approve, &c. .. me for this energetic exertion of

my talents.

Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion, 1804, Printed by W. Blake, South Molton Street, is a large quarto volume, of a hundred engraved pages, writing and design, only one side of each leaf being engraved. Most copies are printed in plain black and white, some with blue ink, some red; a few are tinted. For a tinted copy the price was twenty guineas.

The poem, since poem we are to call it, is mostly written in prose; occasionally in metrical prose; more rarely still it breaks forth into verse. Here is the author's own account of the matter:

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When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered a monotonous cadence, like that used by Milton, 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.

The Jerusalem bears little resemblance to the 'prophetic books' of earlier date. We hear no longer of the wars, the labours, the sufferings, the laments of Orc, Rintrah, Urizen, or Enitharmon; though some of these names are casually mentioned once or twice. What we do hear of, the reader shall gather for himself, from a few extracts. The following lines instance in brief, the devout and earnest spirit in which Blake wrote; the high aims he set before him; and afford also a glimpse of the most strange and unhappy result: dark oracles, words empty of meaning to all but him who uttered them :

Trembling I sit, day and night. My friends are astonisht at me :
Yet they forgive my wand'rings. I rest not from my great task:
To open the eternal worlds! To open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards; into the worlds of thought into eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
O Saviour! pour upon me thy spirit of meekness and love.
Annihilate selfhood in me! Be thou all my life!

Guide thou my hand, which trembles exceedingly, upon the Rock of Ages!

While I write of the building of Golgonooza and of the terrors of

Entuthon :

Of Hand and Hyle, and Coban; of Kwantok, Peachey, Brereton, Slayd, and Hutton :

Of the terrible sons and daughters of Albion and their generations.
Scofield, Kox, Kotope and Bowen revolve most mightily upon
The furnace of Los, before the eastern gate bending their fury.
They war to destroy the furnaces; to desolate Golgonooza,
And to devour the sleeping humanity of Albion in rage and hunger.

Of these names, many never occur again throughout the book; and to the remainder we, to the last, fail to attach any idea whatever. Their owners cannot even be spoken of as shadows, for a shadow has a certain definiteness of form. But these continue mere names. Perhaps abstract qualities, of some kind or other, may be the things signified; for the Jerusalem, so far as I can understand it, is an allegory in which the lapse of the human race from a higher spiritual state, and its struggles towards a return to such, are the main topics. Jerusalem' is once spoken of as 'Liberty;' she is also apostrophized as 'mild shade of man,' and must perhaps, on the whole, be taken to symbolize this ideal state.

There is sometimes a quaint felicity in the choice of homely, familiar things as symbols, which calls John Bunyan to mind; as in this description of Golgonooza, the 'spiritual, fourfold London' (for so it is afterwards called in the Milton):—

Lo!

The stones are pity, and the bricks well-wrought affections,

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