Till the time of love is passed in ever-varying delights:
For all things exist in the human imagination.
This seems an illustration of what we have said of the dependence of Blake’s poetry upon his pictorial imagination, for it is clearly nothing but a magnificent expansion of the midsummer night idyl of the glowworm shining for her mate, “with her little drop of moonlight,” as Beddoes beautifully says.
In artistic merit Jerusalem is fully equal to any of Blake’s works. There is less of the grotesque than in the others, and even more of the impressive. Much, however, depends upon the colouring, which varies greatly in different copies. Mr. Gilchrist warns us that it cannot be judged aright if we have not seen the “incomparable” copy in the possession of Lord Crewe. “It is printed in a warm reddish-brown, the exact colour of a very fine photograph; and the broken blending of the deeper lines 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 handling of Nature herself.” The general character of the design is excellently described by Gilchrist. “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 eagle-headed creature sits and contemplates the sun; serpent-women are 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 wreathe and wind among the lines.” It may indeed, like Blake’s other productions of the kind, be described as a gigantic arabesque, imbued with a passion and pathos not elsewhere attempted in this branch of art.
Design from “Milton.” By W. Blake.
The subject of Milton, from which one of our illustrations is selected, is, in Mr. Swinburne’s words, the incarnation and descent into earth and hell of Milton, who represents redemption by inspiration. Something similar, as we have seen, is the idea of Blake’s fine mystical book, Thel, and the pilgrimage through a lower sphere is also found in the oldest Assyrian poetry. The book, like Jerusalem, is dated 1804, but, like its companion, must have been composed at Felpham. Nothing save actual and present contact with country scenes could have inspired such a passage as this, the crown of all Blake’s unrhymed poetry:—
Thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring:
The lark sitting upon his earthly bed, just as the sun
Appears, listens silent: then springing from the wavy corn-field loud