The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of these books, is thrown together, in something more approaching a whole, hut without apparent cohesion or consistency, in The Four Zoas, which probably dates from 1797 and which exists in seventy sheets of manuscript, of uncertain order, almost certainly in an unfinished state, perhaps never intended for publication, but rather as a storehouse of ideas. This manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order, and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in the third volume of their book on Blake, under the first, rejected, title of Vala.[3] They describe it as being in itself a sort of compound of all Blake's other books, except Milton and Jerusalem, which are enriched by scraps taken from Vala, but are not summarized in it. In the uncertain state in which we have it, it is impossible to take it as a wholly authentic text; but it is both full of incidental beauty and of considerable assistance in unravelling many of the mysteries in Milton and Jerusalem, the books written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find the final development of the myth, or as much of that final development as has come to us in the absence of the manuscripts destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those two books indeed seem to presuppose in their readers an acquaintance with many matters told or explained in this, from which passages are taken bodily, but with little apparent method. As it stands, Vala is much more of a poem than either Milton or Jerusalem; the cipher comes in at times, but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not wholly unlighted imagery. Blake still remembers that he is writing a poem, earthly beauty is still divine beauty to him, and the message is not yet so stringent as to forbid all lingering by the way.

In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical, and suggests the book of Proverbs, as thus:

'What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for
a song,
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought
with the price
Of all that a man hath—his wife, his house, his
children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none
comes to buy,
And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs
for bread in vain.'

Nature is still an image accepted as an adequate symbol, and we get reminiscences here and there of the simpler, early work of Thel, for instance, in such lines as:

'And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for its
flower and fruit,
Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear
expanse
To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible
array;
So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and bird
and beast,
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal
body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.'

There are descriptions of feasts, of flames, of last judgments, of the new Eden, which are full of color and splendor, passing without warning into the 'material sublime' of Fuseli, as in the picture of Urizen 'stonied upon his throne' in the eighth 'Night.' In the passages which we possess in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Blake gradually crystallizing, the transposition of every intelligible symbol into the secret cipher. Thus we find 'Mount Gilead' changed into 'Mount Snowdon,' 'Beth Peor' into 'Cosway Vale,' and a plain image such as this:

'The Mountain called out to the Mountain, Awake,
oh brother Mountain,'

Is translated backwards into:

'Ephraim called out to Tiriel, Awake, oh brother
Mountain.'

Images everywhere are seen freezing into types; they stop half-way, and have not yet abandoned the obscure poetry of the earlier Prophetic Books for the harder algebra of Milton and Jerusalem.