that they also could mean nothing to the emotions or to the memory (Bowlahoola, Golgonooza), the whole unhuman mythology, abstractions of frigid fire. In Jerusalem Blake interrupts himself to say:
'I call them by their English names; English, the rough basement.
Los built the stubborn structure of the Language, acting against
Albion's melancholy, who must else have been a Dumb despair.'
In the Prophetic Books we see Blake labouring upon a 'rough basement' of 'stubborn' English; is it, after all this 'consolidated and extended work,' this 'energetic exertion of his talent,' a building set up in vain, the attempt to express what must else have been, and must now for ever remain, 'a dumb despair'?
I think we must take the Prophetic Books not quite as Blake would have had us take them. He was not a systematic thinker, and he was not content to be a lyric poet. Nor indeed did he ever profess to offer us a system, built on logic and propped by reasoning, but a myth, which is a poetical creation. He said in Jerusalem:
