ance 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[1] 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[2] 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.
- ↑ The outcast monarch is the subject of one of Blake's "printed drawings ": a terrible picture of wild insanity, used paradoxically by Blake to symbolise the bestial existence of man under the domination of Reason.
- ↑ Cp. a line which is found engraved beneath some examples of Blake's print of "Glad Day ": "Albion rose from where he labour'd at the Mill with Slaves, | . . . " The mill is, in art, the mechanical 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" (Public Address, Gilchrist, 1880, vol. ii. p. 169); in philosophy, it is logic:—cp. Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle's Analytics."
