Page:William Blake, a critical essay (Swinburne).djvu/320

these once understood, much that seemed the aimless unreflecting jargon of crude or accidental rhetoric assumes a distinct if unacceptable meaning. It is much otherwise with the external scheme or literal shell of the Jerusalem. Let no man attempt to define the post or expound the office of the "terrible sons and daughters." These, with all their flock of emanations and spectrous or vegetating shadows, let us leave to the discretion of Los; who has enough on his hands among them all. Neither let any attempt to plant a human foot upon the soil of the newly-divided shires and counties, partitioned though they be into the mystic likeness of the twelve tribes of Israel. Nor let any questioner of arithmetical mind apply his skill in numbers to the finding of flaws or products in the twelves, twenty-fours, and twenty-sevens which make up the sum of their male and female emanations. In earnest, the externals of this poem are too incredibly grotesque—the mythologic plan too incomparably tortuous—to be fit for any detailed coherence of remark. Nor indeed were they meant to endure it. Such things, and the expression of such things, as are here treated of, are not to be reasoned out; the matter one may say is above reasoning; the manner (taken apart from the matter) is below it: the spirit of the work is too strong and its form too faulty for any rule or line. It will upon the whole suffice if this be kept in mind; that to Blake, in a literal perhaps as well as a mystical sense, Albion was as it were the cradle and centre of all created existence; he even calls on the Jews to recognize it as the parent land of their history and their faith. Its incar-