in it, beyond a name or two, easily explicable. Oothoon, the virgin joy, oppressed by laws and cruelties of restraint and jealousy, vindicates her right to the freedom of innocence and to the instincts of infancy.
'And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their eternal joy.
Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy:
Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy!'
It is the gospel of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and, as that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant rhetoric, but with vehement conviction, proclaims liberty for the body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and imagery are partly biblical, and have little suggestion of the manner of the later Prophetic Books.
America, written in the same year, in the same measure as the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is the most vehement, wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a prophecy of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against England both literally and symbolically, with names of 'Washington, Franklin, Paine and Warren,
