In vain: he is hurried afar into an unknown Night.
He bleeds in torrents of blood, as he rolls thro' heaven above,
He chokes up the paths of the sky: the Moon is leprous as snow:
Trembling and descending down, seeking to rest on high Mona:
Scattering her leprous snow in flakes of disease over Albion.
The Stars flee remote: the heaven is iron, the earth is sulphur,
And all the mountains and hills shrink up like a withering gourd.'
Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of the orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the poet, and with something of the despised 'Monotonous Cadence.'
Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the title-page of Jerusalem, but, with the exception of the two plates called The Ghost of Abel, engraved in 1822, this vast and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains his last gospel. He thought it his most direct message. Throughout the Prophetic Books Blake has to be translated out of the unfamiliar language into which he has tried to translate spiritual realities,
