Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/171

 Rh was begun in that year. Yet it is not certain that the engraved text of Jerusalem, at any rate, was formally published till after 1809. Pages were certainly inserted between those two dates. On p. 38 Blake says:

That the main part was writen in Felpham is evident from more than one letter to Butts. In a letter dated April 25, 1803, Blake says: 'But none can know the spiritual acts of my three years' slumber on the banks of ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or unless he should read my long poem descriptive of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lost; the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines