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What may man be? Who can tell? But what may woman be
To have power over man from cradle to corruptible grave?
He who was an Infant, and whose cradle was a manger,
Knoweth the Infant Sorrow, whence it came and where it goeth,
And who weave it a cradle of the grass that withereth away.
This world is all a cradle for the erred, wandering Phantom,
Rock'd by year, month, day, and hour. And every two moments
Between, dwells a daughter of Beulah, to feed the human vegetable.
Rock the cradle, ah me! of that eternal man!

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The magic influences of one of these mysterious daughters of Beulah' are thus described :

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She creates at her will a little moony night and silence,
With spaces of sweet gardens and a tent of elegant beauty
Closed in by sandy deserts, and a night of stars shining;
A little tender moon, and hovering angels on the wing.
And the male gives a time and revolution to her space
Till the time of love is passed in ever-varying delights:
For all things exist in the human imagination.

This last line contains what deserves to be called the cornerstone of Blake's philosophy. For his philosophy had corner-stone and foundation, and was not miraculously suspended in the air, as his readers might sometimes feel tempted to believe. Amid all contradictions, incoherences, wild assertions, this principle, that the conceptions of the mind are the realities of realities, that the human imagination is an eternal world, 'ever expanding in the bosom of God,'-shines steadily forth and to readers of a speculative turn, who will be at the pains to examine by its light these erratic writings, the chaos will resolve itself into substance, though not into form and order. It is needless to tell such thinkers that Bishop Berkeley was one on the list of Blake's favourite authors. But with his fervid, dauntless imagination, the artist seized hold of the metaphysician's theory of Idealism, and quickened it into a grand poetic reality.

There is another 'Song' in the Jerusalem, addressed To the Deists, beginning—

I saw a monk of Charlemaine,

which follows soon after the one already quoted To the Jews. As it is far less singular and characteristic than its predecessor, however, the concluding beautiful stanza is all that shall here detain us :— For a tear is an intellectual thing,

And a sigh is the sword of an angel king,
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

It were scarcely honest to call these extracts, specimens of the Jerusalem. They are exceptions, rather than specimens; and occur, for the most part, in the midst of such a chaos of words, names, and images, that, as the eye wanders, hopeless and dispirited, up and down the large closely-written pages, the mind cannot choose but busy itself with the question, how a man of Blake's high gifts ever came to produce such; nay, to consider this, as he really did, his greatest work. It must have been that, conscious of the deaf ear so resolutely turned towards him by the public, charmed he never so wisely,' he cared no longer to address it; but, casting away all idea of ordering and shaping his thoughts and imaginations in such wise that other minds could lay hold upon them, he followed the less laborious and more exciting pleasure of pouring his conceptions freely forth, all crude and inchoate, in words so vaguely and arbitrarily expressive of his meaning, that to himself alone could they suggest it.

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Of the pictorial part of the Jerusalem much might be said which would merely be applicable to all Blake's works alike. One point, perhaps, somewhat distinctive about it, is an extreme largeness and decorative character in the style of the drawings, which are mostly made up of a few massive forms, thrown together on a grand, equal scale. The beauty of the drawings varies much, according to the

colour in which they are printed. One copy, possessed by Mr. Monckton Milnes, is so incomparably superior, from this cause, to any other I have seen, that no one could know the work properly without having examined this copy. It is printed in a warm, reddish brown, the exact colour of a very fine photograph; and the broken blending of the deeper tones with the more tender shadows,-all sanded over with a sort of golden mist peculiar to Blake's mode of execution,-makes still more striking the resemblance to the then undiscovered

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of Nature herself. The extreme breadth of the forms throughout, when seen through the medium of this colour, shows sometimes, united with its grandeur, á suavity of line which is almost Venetian.

The subjects are vague and mystic as the poem itself. Female figures lie among waves full of reflected stars: a strange human image, with a swan's head and wings, floats on water in a kneeling attitude, and drinks: lovers embrace in an open water-lily: an eagleheaded creature sits and contemplates the sun: serpent-women are

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coiled with serpents: Assyrian-looking human-visaged bulls are seen yoked to the plough or the chariot: rocks swallow or vomit forth human forms, or appear to amalgamate with them: angels cross each other over wheels of flame and flames and hurrying figures writhe and wind among the lines. Even such slight things as these rough intersecting circles, each containing some hint of an angel; even these

are made the unmistakeable exponents of genius. Here and there some more familiar theme meets us,-the creation of Eve, or the Crucifixion; and then the thread is lost again. The whole spirit of the designs might seem well symbolized in one of the finest among them, where we see a triple-headed and triple-crowned figure embedded in rocks, from whose breast is bursting a string of youths,

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