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WILLIAM BLAKE
199
would grow hoarse and the outrider saddle-sick long before the great man's advent; and for these offices we have no further taste or ability. Those who will may now, with what furtherance they have here, follow us through some brief revision of each book in its order.[1]
- ↑ A word in passing may here be spared to the singular MS. of Tiriel. This little poem or mythical episode is evidently a growth of the crude Ossianic period; in style it is somewhat weak and inadequate to any grave or subtle expression of thought: a few noticeable lines intervene, but the general execution is heavy, faint, and rough even for a sketch. Here however (if I am not incorrect in referring it to a date earlier than the earliest of the prophetic books) we may see the dull dawn of a day full of fiery presage, of the light and vapour of tempestuous revelation. The name of Tiriel king of the West, father of a rebellious race of children who perish by his curse, hardly reappears once as "Thiriel" the cloud-born son of Urizen; Har and Heva, the gentler father and mother of the great eastern family, who in the Song of Los are seen flying before the windy flames of a broad-blown sunset, chased over Asia with fire and sword by the divine tyrant and his tributary kings, are here seen forsaken of their sons in extreme and childish age, but tended by "Mutha" their mother; "they are holy and forgiving, filled with loving mercy, forgetting the offences of their most rebellious children." Into the story or subject-matter we need not go far; but it is worth notice that the series of twelve designs classified in the catalogue, section B., No. 156, pp. 253-4 of vol. 2, must evidently (as is there half suggested) be a set of illustrations to this Tiriel. In one of these any reader will recognize the serpentine hair which at her father's imprecation rose and hissed around the brows of "Hela" (Tiriel, ch. 6); but these designs have as evidently fallen out of order; thus the one lettered (k) appears to illustrate the very first lines of the poem; and others seem equally misarranged. In this faint allegory of the blind discrowned king with his two brothers, the mad invulnerable giant of the woods and the fettered dotard dwelling in caves, some fresh incomplete symbol is discernible of tyranny and error, of strength made insane or perverse and weakness made cruel or imbecile by oppression of the spirit or the flesh; the "eloquent" outcast oppressor might then be the uninspired intellect, against whose errors and tyrannies its own children revolt, and perish by the curse of their perishing father and mother, blind reason and powerless faith: but from such shallow and sandy soil the conjectural Muse of commentary can reap little worth her pains to garner, and at every sweep of her sickle must risk being blinded by the sand blown into her eyes. Some stray verses might be gathered up, perhaps worth a place in the gleaner's loose sheaf; such as these:
And aged Tiriel stood and said: Where does the thunder sleep?
Where doth he hide his terrible head? and his swift and fiery daughters,
Where do they shroud their fiery wings and the terrors of their hair?"Anything better worth citation than such crude sonorous snatches of lyric style I
