Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/173

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WILLIAM BLAKE
149

hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most sublime poetry. It is somewhat in the same manner defined by Plato. This poem shall, by divine assistance, be progressively printed and ornamented with prints, and given to the public.'

This I take to mean that before Blake's return to London in 1803 the letterpress of Jerusalem was, as he imagined, completely finished, but that the printing and illustration were not yet begun. The fact of this delay, and the fact that pages written after 1803 were inserted here and there, must not lead us to think, as many writers on Blake have thought, that there could be any allusion in Jerusalem to the attacks of the Examiner of 1808 and 1809, or that 'Hand,' one of the wicked sons of Albion, could possibly be, as Rossetti desperately conjectured, 'a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt.' The sons of Albion are referred to on quite a third of the pages of Jerusalem, from the earliest to the latest, and must have been part of the whole texture of the poem from the beginning. In a passage of the 'Public Address,' contained in the Rossetti MS.,