Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/413

 engrave and issue, as the contrary to 'For Children,' The Gates of Paradise — a book which is known to us only from its title-page — ' For Children, the Gates of Hell.' (See W. M. Rossetti's 'Annotated Lists of Blake's Paintings, Drawings, and Engravings,' Gil. i. 250.)

The Gates of Paradise also appeared with the new t/nda ted tite-pa.ge : For the Sexes The | Gates  of | Para- dise I ^prologue of ten lines. This is in reality a second and considerably changed edition, printed several years later ; though Blake has left unaltered the original imprints, dated 1793, ^^ ^^^ ^oot of the frontispiece and sixteen plates of emblems. The lines on the new title-page beginning ' Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice/ and some part of the legends, are additions. The three supplementary plates containing the ' Keys of the Gates ' and ' To the Accuser ' appear also for the first time.

Gilchrist (i. 102) regards the Keys, 'themselves a little obscure,' merely as versified explanations of the artist's original motives. This, however, is an error into which the poet's biographer could not have fallen had he made any serious attempt to trace the gradual evolution of Blake's symbolic system. These lines, as my footnotes to the Keys amply demonstrate, belong to the same period as Miltofi and Jerusalem, reading into what were at first simple allegorical pictures for children the later developed elaborate symbolism in which Blake clothed his full-fledged mystical gospel. Thus we find ' Water,' represented in the earlier issue by the figure of a survivor of the Deluge, interpreted ' for the sexes,' as ' Doubt self-jealous, watry folly,' while the ' dark hermaphrodite ' (or humanity divided against itself) — a favourite figure in Jerusalem — is somewhat violently offered as the interpretation of the picture illustrating ' Fire.' The original plates have been worked over and elaborated in this second issue, the figure of ' Fire ' being now represented as blind in order that it may agree with the descriptive text.