Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/11

 able to transfigure its empty routine with the joy and exuberance of his own intellectual freedom. But the process of the mill is the annihilation of the spirit. It is the logic which abhors and contemns everything it cannot explain. It is, in art, the method pursued by those who believe that genius can be acquired by taking pains, who "turn that which is soul and life into a mill or machine."

When, in the autumn of the year 1800, Blake withdrew from London into the country, he seemed to see the dawn of another life, in which he was to emerge at last from the confusion and unrest of his past existence into a state of freedom and spiritual felicity. He believed that the generosity of his new patron would for ever redeem him from that servile necessity of soul-destroying drudgery which had hitherto been imposed upon him by the fear of starvation, and that he would be able to pursue the arts of imagination, unfettered and uninterrupted. The atmosphere of Felpham appeared to his liberated perceptions to be a "more spiritual" one than that of London. "Heaven," he wrote, on arriving, to Flaxman, "opens here on all sides her golden gates; … voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen." He dreamed of becoming the prophet of a new era of visionary creation when men should again "converse in heaven and walk with angels," upon earth. But he was quickly to be disillusioned. It was soon clear that his patron was not at all disposed to bestow, with his benevolence, a free hand. Besides this, he was wholly out of sympathy with the visionary character of Blake's inventions, both in poetry and painting, and irritated him beyond measure by the "genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation," with which he was content to receive them. "He is as much averse," Blake bitterly complained 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." Miniature painting, engraving of a despicable sort and the decoration of Hayley's library with a frieze of poets' heads were by no means the most grievous of the tasks set; and the worst of them was far more tolerable than the habit of reading Klopstock aloud with which his patron sought to improve the brief hours of