But now, having dared suggest to you something of Blake's radical idealism, I must, in fairness to those from whom we differ, let you see what grounds, besides the misinterpretations of his friends, there may be for suspecting Blake of madness. This very book of Jerusalem is indeed a strange medley of passionate poetry and catalogued bathos. We have pages and pages of stuff that were not worth reading, but for the shining gems hidden among the rubbish. Yet, as if to make amends for the waste of fine language, the illustrations to this book are more helpful in elucidating the text than in many of Blake's writings. Often it looks as if, although his drawings in general are every one descriptive of some idea peculiarly his own, they do not correspond with the text of the book in which they are found. Thus the extraordinary, but far from beautiful, picture in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell of the Birth of the Imagination, and the fleeing away of the people in dread of such a prodigy, is only quite intelligible when we read a description of the dire event in the Daughters of Albion. But in the Jerusalem the cuts belong much more nearly to the text,and many are almost self-explanatory.
