The disturbance caused by this untoward incident, the repeated failures of literary attempts, the completion of Cowper’s Life, which had been the main object of his coming, joined, doubtless, to a surfeit of Hayley, induced a return to London.  He feared, too, that his imaginative faculty was failing.  “The visions were angry with me at Felpham,” he used afterwards to say.  We regret to see, also, that he seems not always to have been in the kindest of moods towards his patron.  Indeed, it was a weakness of his to fall out occasionally with his best friends; but when a man is waited upon by angels and ministers of grace, it is not surprising that he should sometimes be impatient with mere mortals.  Nor is it difficult to imagine that the bland and trivial Hayley, perpetually kind, patronizing, and obvious, should, without any definite provocation, become presently insufferable to such a man as Blake.

Returned to London, he resumed the production of his oracular works,—­“prophetic books,” he called them.  These he illustrated with his own peculiar and beautiful designs, “all sanded over with a sort of golden mist.”  Among much that is incoherent and incomprehensible may be found passages of great force, tenderness, and beauty.  The concluding verses of the Preface to “Milton” we quote, as shadowing forth his great moral purpose, and as revealing also the luminous heart of the cloud that so often turns to us only its gray and obscure exterior:—­

  “And did those feet in ancient time
    Walk upon England’s mountain green? 
  And was the holy Lamb of God
    On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

  “And did the countenance Divine
    Shine forth upon our clouded hills? 
  And was Jerusalem builded here
    Among these dark, Satanic hills?

  “Bring me my bow of burning gold! 
    Bring me my arrows of desire! 
  Bring me my spear!  O clouds, unfold! 
    Bring me my chariot of fire!

  “I will not cease from mental fight,
    Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
  Till we have built Jerusalem
    In England’s green and pleasant land.”

The same lofty aim is elsewhere expressed in the line,—­

  “I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord!”

Our rapidly diminishing space warns us to be brief, and we can only glance at a few of the remaining incidents of this outwardly calm, yet inwardly eventful life.  In an evil hour—­though to it we owe the “Illustrations to Blair’s Grave”—­he fell into the hands of Cromek, the shrewd Yorkshire publisher, and was tenderly entreated, as a dove in the talons of a kite.  The famous letter of Cromek to Blake is one of the finest examples on record of long-headed worldliness bearing down upon wrong-headed genius.  Though clutching the palm in this case, and in some others, it is satisfactory to know that Cromek’s clever turns led to no other end than poverty; and nothing worse than poverty had Blake, with all his simplicity, to encounter.  But Blake, in his poverty, had meat to eat which the wily publisher knew not of.