Page:The letters of William Blake (1906).djvu/236

 170  has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him; I have had twenty. Thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils. These beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wifes feet are free from fetters. O lovely Felpham, parent of immortal friendship, to thee I am eternally indebted for my three years' rest

of the philosophy which militates against faith; it is the introducer of the tyranny of law and dogma (which, in his opinion, was the ruin of ancient Greek thought); its commonest, as well as its most deadly, manifestation is education; in art it is the academic rule.