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156
WILLIAM BLAKE

ments of myth broken off and flung before us after this fashion:

'But Rahab and Tirzah pervert
Their mild influences, therefore the Seven Eyes of God walk round
The Three Heavens of Ulro, where Tirzah and her Sisters
Weave the black Woof of Death upon Entuthon Benython
In the Vale of Surrey where Horeb terminates in Rephaim.'

In Jerusalem, which was to have been 'the grandest poem which the world contains,' there is less of the exquisite lyrical work which still decorates many corners of Milton, but it is Blake's most serious attempt to set his myth in order, and it contains much of his deepest wisdom, with astonishing flashes of beauty. In Milton there was still a certain approximation to verse, most of the lines had at least a beginning and an end, but in Jerusalem, although he tells us that 'every word and every letter is studied and put into its place,' I am by no means sure that Blake ever intended the lines, as he wrote them, to be taken as metrical lines, or read very differently from