Page:The letters of William Blake (1906).djvu/39

 Rh conceal the truth no more. "He is as much averse," he complains of Hayley in a letter to Butts, "to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible," and "approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems." This attitude on the part of his patron soon convinced him that he was in serious danger from an enemy of his soul, who was urging him in the name of worldly wisdom to forsake his allegiance to Imagination, that he might devote himself to the imitation of nature. So after three dark years he was forced to return to London. The experience had not, however, been an altogether fruitless one. "One thing," he writes, "of real consequence I have accomplished by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough, namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art, and resumed my primitive and original ways of execution in both painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much obliterated from my mind." And again, "My heart is full of futurity; I perceive that the sore travail which has been given me these three years leads to glory and honour; I rejoice and tremble." The clarification of ideas, and the return to those principles of technique which were latent in his youthful pieces, and which preceded the attempt at eclecticism, when it was his intention to