Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/133

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BOOK OF LOS.
119

spring from the mount of rocky brain and the marsh of vegetative heart, the completed form, the human illusion, the body form in which we see among clouds (in a glass darkly) the spiritual and real human form, was completed.

Note.

In the numberings of the stanzas of this book, the main meaning of the 3, 6, 7, 9, 10 are as in "Urizen," creation, preparation, manifestation, separation or birth-completeness.

But the whole is seen from another side. "Los" is, as it were, the second book of "Urizen," and perhaps was intended to have been so called, when in the previous year he called its predecessor the cc First book of Urizen." It, however, is better entitled "Book of Los." Where the same subject is touched in both books, it will not always be found that the allusion is invariably from a fifth stanza to a fifth, or from a fourth to a fourth. But that does not in any way destroy the value of what may be called the numerical cypher as used within the limits of each. The sequence of the main story gathers meaning from the numerical hint, no less faithfully in the books taken separately, and each for its own department of the vast myth.