Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/92



The Blake MS. known as An Island in the Moon, is a thin foolscap folio volume of sixteen leaves, lacking two (or perhaps four) leaves through the loss of one (or two) sheets from the centre of the single quire of which it is composed.

The autograph is in Blake's early hand, and begins at the head of the first page (recto of first leaf):—

'In the Moon is a certain Island, near by a mighty continent, which small island seems to have some affinity 'to England, & what is more extraordinary the people are so much alike, & their language so much the same, that you would think you was among your friends, in this Island dwells three Philosophers, Suction the Epicurean, Quid the Cynic, and Sipsop the Pythagorean. I call them by the names of those sects; tho' the sects are not ever mention'd there, as being quite out of date, however the things still remain, and the vanities are the same, the three Philosophers sat together thinking of nothing. in comes Etruscan Column, the Antiquarian, & after an abundance of Enquiries to no purpose sat himself down & described something that nobody listen'd to. so they were employ'd when Mrs. Gimblet came in.'

It ends abruptly—or rather is left unfinished by the author—on line nineteen of the recto of the leaf following the lacuna in the text, now the seventeenth page, but which, when the book was complete, must have been page 21 or 25, The remaining pages are blank, with the exception of the verso of the last leaf, which is scribbled over with rough sketches and pen-trials, among them Blake's signature written backwards as if engraved on copper-plate. The soiled appearance of this last verso proves it to have been the original outer leaf of the MS., and since it is also, as