Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/18

 It is this summary compression of his theme which has in a large measure shifted to the shoulders of the reader the burden of time and patience more justly devolving upon the the writer. Besides this, the author's tendency, in the composition of the prophetic books, to finish sections, or more often whole pages, separately at a time, whenever the inspiration came upon him, is extremely apt to produce an inconsequence and discontinuity of thought (in many cases only imperfectly remedied in the process of construction), which is an additional source of obscurity. The defect of this system is conspicuously emphasized by the number of instances in Vala, Milton and Jerusalem where passages, often of some length, are found reduplicated. In Milton (p. 5*) we even find a section of some twenty or thirty lines which had already been engraved almost word for word as early as 1794 in the book of Urizen (chap. iv). It is remarkable also that both in the case of Milton and Jerusalem a different order is observed in the printing of the pages in one of the very few known copies of each. A considerable portion of the remainder of the material for the projected epic was, we may suppose, subsequently embodied in Jerusalem, which was also dated 1804 but was not published, in all probability, before about 1818.

A second reference to the undertaking, of which Milton was the outcome, occurs in a letter written rather more than two months later than that which has just been quoted. It is again to his friend Butts, and is dated 6th July, 1803, showing that the manuscript was already practically complete. "I hope," he characteristically remarks, "that all our three years' trouble ends in good luck at last, and shall be forgot by my affections, and only remembered by my understanding; to be a memento in time to come, and to speak to future generations by a sublime allegory, which is now perfectly completed into a grand poem…. This poem shall, by Divine assistance, be progressively printed and ornamented with prints, and given to the public." Although he speaks here of the poem being "now perfectly completed," the mention (on p. 17, l. 59) of Scholfield, with whom he did not come into conflict before the following month, and of South Molton Street (on p. 3*, l. 21), where he resided after his return to London, are alone sufficient to show that he was still prepared to make additions to it. The first of these names is also, it