'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah's night,
And twofold Always May God us keep
From Single vision, & Newton's sleep!
I also enclose you some ballads by Mr. Hayley, with prints to them by your humble servant.[1] I should have sent them before now, but could not get anything done for you to please myself; for I
which are "addressed to the intellectual powers," while they are "altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding:" that is to say, where the appeal is directly to Imagination and not through the senses. This state, generally called Eden by Blake, is the one to which he held that all art should aspire. But, not unnaturally, the critics "trembled exceedingly . . . | . . . and wept, | crying with one voice: Give us a habitation & a place | In which we may be hidden. . . . | For if we, who are but for a time & who pass away in winter, | Behold these wonders of Eternity we shall consume | (Milton, p. 30, ll. 21-27); accordingly, a second state or threefold vision was "given in mercy to those who sleep" (Vala, book 1. l. 199), that is to say, those who have spiritual aspirations indeed, but who are continually deceived by the apparent solidity of the external world and endowing it with a material existence. It is the state in which imaginative creation is usually found, where the purity of the inspiration is obscured and contaminated by numberless delusions of a corporeal nature. It is the atmosphere through which those who are not strong enough to bear the naked Light become recipients of the divine proceeding. Its name is Beulah, The third state, called in Jerusalem, Generation, "the image of regeneration," is the normal, uncreative state, in which those who have any imagination at all commonly reside. The last, named Ulro, is "a self-devouring monstrous Human Death " (Milton, p. 34, l. 26), and embraces those whose bosoms are "opake against the Divine Vision" (Milton, p. 7, l. 30), either through the soul-destroying influences of Science and Reason, or, worst of all, through "the cruel and hypocritic holiness" of Puritanism.
- ↑ A Series of Ballads (about animals); Chichester: Printed by J. Seagrave for W. Blake, Felpham, 1802; 4to, issued in four parts, in blue paper covers, with 14 engravings (including head and tail-pieces) by Blake from his own designs.
