Soon after his acquaintance with Blake began, his old friend Cowper died under tragic conditions, and a week later Hayley's only child (an illegitimate son) died also. The boy was a youth of promise, and had been a pupil of Flaxman. So he had gratified as well as filled the poor father's heart. Hayley's trouble called forth a letter from Blake, which I quoted when writing on the death of Robert, and it seems to have touched, perhaps comforted, Hayley, who even in his deep affliction assumed a pose not natural or spontaneous. Blake was recommended by Flaxman as an engraver and designer (if the latter should be required), and Hayley proposed that the Blakes should come and live at Felpham, near his own place of Eartham in Sussex, in order that his new _protege_ might engrave the illustrations to the life of Cowper which he was now about to write, under Hayley's own eye. The idea pleased Blake, while Mrs. Blake, he wrote, "is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels, whenever she hears it named." As a matter of fact, Hayley did not live at Eartham now, as the place was an expensive one to keep up, but had built himself a wonderful turretted marine "cottage," with a library and covered court for equestrian exercise at Felpham. [Illustration: PLATE FROM "EUROPE," PRINTED 1794 Coloured by hand] In the September of 1800, Blake being then forty-three years old, the husband and wife took up their abode in a pretty little cottage by the sea at Felpham, and began a new manner of life. If Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, had afforded Blake hints and types of spiritual life and light, how much larger a vista must have opened to him at Felpham. He used to wander musing along the seashore, and more than once saw the yellow sands peopled by a host of souls long since departed from this earth--Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton: "all," Blake said, "majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the common height of men." Many visions came to him at first. It is not wonderful that this should have been so, for there was nothing that did not teem with suggestions to his subjective mind, and when he received a new influx of spiritual light, as he seemed to have had at Felpham, then, indeed, were blossoms, stars and stones, nay, the very air he breathed, alive with a strange, sentient, crowding population, to whose spiritual utterances he listened, whose forms he strained his mental sight to realize. In a letter to Flaxman, beginning, "Dear Sculptor of Eternity," Blake writes in the first effervescence of delight: "Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen."