ABSTRACT
William Blake retained his sense of balance by engraving together his Songs of Innocence and of Experience as ‘contrary states of the human soul,’ and his sense of perspective by treating winter as a season and life as an arc of Eternity. In Europe and America Blake sketches a panoramic view of the youth of England and their parents walking heavy and mustering for slaughter while their minds are choked by volumes of fog which pour down from ‘Infinite London’s awful spires’ and from the palace walls and ‘cast a dreadful cold Even on rational things beneath.’ Tom Paine’s work was circulated by shopkeepers chafing under corporation rule and weary, like Blake, of the ‘cheating waves of charterd streams’ of monopolised commerce. Blake may have written London before the last development, but before he completed his publication there was a flurry of alarm among freeborn Englishmen at the presence of German hirelings.
