Page:The letters of William Blake (1906).djvu/38

 xxxii is, as it was for Blake, inseparable from its reality, will be reminded in this lovely invention of the striking words in The Obscure Night of the Soul, where St. John of the Cross tells of how the Ladder of Contemplation ascends to the Sun, which is God.

It was not destined that this new-found happiness should remain for long unclouded. The "brotherly affection" with which he was at first received by his benevolent patron, soon unmasked itself as the charity of an elder brother, or in other words a tyranny of a peculiarly exasperating kind; and even the mild and ever-patient Blake could not long endure the "genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation" which he encountered continually by reason of the visionary quality of his inventions. How many of us have suffered from those who "do unkind things in kindness: with power armed to say the most irritating things in the midst of tears and love!" as Blake afterwards wrote in his Milton, a poem which is almost wholly devoted to describing, under a close disguise, the events, or the "herculean labours," as he calls them, of his life at Felpham; and how many of us have cried out with him: "O God, protect me from my friends, that they have not power over me: Thou hast given me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies." At last he could