"My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explored too narrowly, might hurt my pecuniary circumstances, as my dependence is on engraving at present, and particularly the engravings I have in hand for Mr. H., and I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live. This has always pursued me.... This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. H. will bring me back again. For that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my mind.... But," he goes on to say, "if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears and natural desires, who can describe the dismal torments of such a state? I too well remember the threats I heard" (_i.e._, in vision). "If you, who are organized by Divine Providence for spiritual commission, refuse and bury your talents in the earth, even though you should want natural bread--sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity. Everyone in eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was crowned with glory and honour by his brethren and betrayed their cause to their enemies. You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend." Blake was the apostle and martyr of this devotion to the high spiritual mission of Art. He would make no compromise with the world. In a letter to Mr. Butts dated April 25th, 1803, he writes: "I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may 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, perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but doubts are always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends. Christ is very decided on this point: 'He who is not with me is against me;' there is no medium or middle state; and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life, while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy; but the man may be the friend of my spiritual life while he seems the enemy of my corporeal, though not _vice versa_." This enemy to Blake's spiritual life is certainly Hayley. He writes with unmistakable frankness of the Hermit of Eartham in a later letter: