Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/113

 Rh names, of an Eastern colour, Ijim and Mnetha. Tiriel appears again in The Book of Urizen as Urizen's first-born, Thiriel, 'like a man from a cloud born.' Har and Heva reappear in The Song of Los. The Book of Thel, engraved in 1789, the year of the Songs of Innocence, is in the same metre of fourteen syllables, but written with a faint and lovely monotony of cadence, strangely fluid and flexible in that age of strong cæsuras, as in:

The sentiment is akin to that of the Songs of Innocence, and hardly more than a shadow of the mythology remains. It sings or teaches the holiness and eternity of life in all things, the equality of life in the flower, the cloud, the worm, and the maternal clay of the grave; and it ends with the unanswered question of death to life: why? why? In 1790 Blake engraved in two forms, on six and ten infinitesimal plates, a tractate which he called, There is no Natural Religion. They contain, the one commenting on the other, a clear and