Page:The prophetic books of William Blake, Milton.djvu/12

 recreation. No wonder at the expressions of unconcealed disappointment which we find in some of Blake's letters. He discovered immediately and to his cost that in the country there is no peace at all and that it is only in the midst of a great city that the artist can be truly alone with his own soul. "I do assure you," he wrote afterwards to Butts, "that, if I could have returned to London a month after my arrival here, I should have done so"; and in another letter, "I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and converse with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy and speak parables unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals."

But in spite of the truly "Herculean labours" which, he tells us, were imposed upon him at Felpham, Blake was at the same time fully conscious of a considerable debt of gratitude. He also speaks of his "three years slumber on the banks of Ocean." "O lovely Felpham," he affectionately exclaims, writing to Hayley, "parent of immortal friendship, to thee I am eternally indebted for my three years' rest from perturbation and the strength I now enjoy." The mere fact of the entire change of environment and the respite which he obtained from all the cares and worries which his life in London had accumulated, gave him a sense of rest and freedom, and he found in "the sweet air and the voices of winds, trees and birds, and the odours of the happy ground" an influence soothing and refreshing to the brain. The three years at Felpham were in this way years of retreat, during which he was enabled to devote hinself to bringing to an end the period of mental war; and the conflict was there fiercest because it had passed into the ultimate world of vision. It became possible for him to effect the clarification of his ideas both upon religion and art. "One thing of real consequence," he himself observes, in one of his letters, "I have accomplished by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough: namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art… which in the confusion of London I had very much obliterated from my mind." It was a time of personal introspection and analysis, and of the final purging away from his imagination of all that was not pure vision; and, with the passing of this period of trial and probation, came the return of all his