Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/101

 Rh and that one to whom love was pity more than it was desire would have given no nearer cause for jealousy than some unmortal Oothoon.

It was in 1794 that Blake engraved the Songs of Experience. Four of the Prophetic Books had preceded it, but here Blake returns to the clear and simple form of the Songs of Innocence, deepening it with meaning and heightening it with ardour. Along with this fierier art the symbolic contents of what, in the Songs of Innocence, had been hardly more than a child's strayings in earthly or divine Edens, becomes angelic, and speaks with more deliberately hid or doubled meanings. Even 'The Tiger,' by which Lamb was to know that here was 'one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' is not only a sublime song about a flame-like beast, but contains some hint that 'the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' In this book, and in the poems which shortly followed it, in that MS. book whose contents have sometimes been labelled, after a rejected title of Blake's, Ideas of Good and Evil, we see Blake more wholly and more evenly