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The maxim, however unwelcome to a century that valued the ‘golden mean’ and sought to dissuade people from extremes of any kind, was one to which he firmly adhered. Even in these early lyrics Blake could proceed by evoking contrary states of mind: two consecutive poems, for example, each entitled ‘Song’, give opposing versions of a village love. ey’d maid Closes her eyes in sleep beneath night’s shade: Whene’er I enter, more than mortal fire Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire. The second song, by contrast, describes the torments of jealousy.

The fruits of his thought can be found, before the Songs, in the little collections of aphorisms already touched on: ‘THERE is NO Natural Religion’ and ‘ALL RELIGIONS are ONE’, in which he launched his first open attacks on contemporary intellectual attitudes. For many eighteenth-century philosophers, following in the wake of Bacon, Locke and Newton, the human body seemed to be a highly appropriate instrument for dealing with nature. If the five senses were finely attuned to all that it had to offer, the task of the intellectual was simply to investigate the relationships between man and nature until they were brought into harmony.

They can easily be passed over if treated in the single, long-page tabulation that serves to render them in most of the published versions, but in the originals each aphorism is given an entire small page, with its own illustration, resulting in an increased impressiveness of effect. The third set of these designs, entitled ‘ALL RELIGIONS are ONE’, maintains that the human faculty which can deal with the lack inherent in all rationally bound discourse, responding instead to the infinity inherent in all things, is the Poetic Genius; it also shows itself (as in the Old and New Testaments, for instance) in prophecy.