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Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of the orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the poet, and with something of the despised 'Monotonous Cadence.'

Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the title-page of Jerusalem, but, with the exception of the two plates called The Ghost of Abel, engraved in 1822, this vast and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains his last gospel. He thought it his most direct message. Throughout the Prophetic Books Blake has to be translated out of the unfamiliar language into which he has tried to translate spiritual realities,