KIDNAPPING BLAKE SIR,—Mr. Robson wishes to continue to quibble. The
reference to' the Northern Gate in The Book of Thel is continued in the line
The Eternal babes' terrific power lifted the northern bar. What did he lift if not the gate?
The reason why I did not mention the two 'Little Boy Lost' poems in my essay is because the subject of that essay was four other poems. I have written on the 'Little Boy' poems in their place, in the book from which my essay in The Divine Vision was an extract. They are not neo-Platonic and I have nowhere said that all Blake's symbolism is taken from the Neo- Platonists, important as this source is.
The neo-Platonic symbolism in Earth's Answer I have in my essay traced to its source in Taylor's Plotinus Concerning the Beautiful, 1789, several years before the Five Books. I know of no 'proof' more valid than the internal evidence I have given at length that Blake had read, at some stage, Taylor's presenta- tion of The Nature and Origin of Evil. Evidently Mr. Robson wants Blake to have not read Plotinus and Porphyry, and against such blind passion I have no argument.—Yours faithfully,
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