of the vision are already there, perfectly translating ecstasy into familiar speech; they have but to look and to speak. But to Blake, as to Swedenborg, no tradition is sufficiently a matter of literal belief to be at hand with its forms; new forms have to be made, and something of the crudity of Swedenborg comes over him in his rejection of the compromise of mortal imagery.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell may be called or not called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense; with The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the series perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine prose of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has given place to a metre vaguer than the metre of The Book of Thel, and to a substance from which the savour has not yet gone of the Songs of Innocence, in such lines as:
'The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke, and the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river.'
It is Blake's book of love, and it defends the honesty of the natural passions with unslackening ardour. There is no mythology
