Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/309

 ABOUT "VALA."

of the seventy pages of the MS. of "Vala" are reproduced here in facsimile, by the courteous permission of the Linnell brothers. They are enough to give some conception of the appearance of the MS., with its close and rapid writing, and hasty, slight, but poetic, sketches, designed for future illustrations.

It will be noticed that pages 1, 2 and 3 contain many erasures; that 4 and 5 are neatly written, evidently a fair copy, while later on we have what is clearly a first draft of the poem.

The title page, portions of which are almost too faint for reproduction, showed several changes of an important charac- ter. The work seems at first to have been intended to bear the name of

In the first lines, however, it is Los, and not the Man, who is made the hero of the tale. This was a much later idea. It seems to have arisen from the perception that the Spirit of