Blake was destined to stay three years at Felpham, and he always regarded this period as marking a most important crisis in his life. Since the publication of his _Poetical Sketches_ in 1783 he was conscious of being under a cloud. His visions that had been so bright and inspired him to songs of such divine simplicity had not vanished, but they had lost their crystalline clearness. His cloudy vision appeared in uncertain art. It is true that his allegiance to the linear schools never wavered, and Michael Angelo remained the supreme master in his eyes, but for a time he was fascinated by the luscious ornament and colour of the Venetian school, and with his passion for uniting contraries believed that he might marry Florence and Venice. The same uncertainty appeared in his spiritual life. We have followed him through various stages of rebellion, and seen how his faith in rebellion received a rude shock from the Reign of Terror. Since then he was learning more and more to explore the riches of the past, but he had not gone far enough to place his rebellion and to see it and that of his rebel contemporaries in its proper historical perspective. He was disturbed also by a restless ambition of worldly success. Many men whose gifts were much inferior to his own were famous and rich. Sir Joshua did all that a spiritually blind man could do, and was reckoned with the giants. Romney, whose art Blake much preferred to Reynolds's (he was decidedly of the Romney faction), on account of its greater simplicity and more scrupulous regard to outline, was sufficiently famous and remunerated; but Blake, whose gifts were rarer than any, had scant recognition and scant money, and he still hoped that with an influential patron he might take his place in contemporary fame, and incidentally make enough money to relieve him of all anxiety for the future. For he was being ground by poverty. His wants were simple enough--food, clothing, materials of work--but when the supply falls even a little below the want, then the grinding process begins and carries on its inexorable work until the spirit breaks. But now friend Flaxman had introduced him to poet Hayley, who was not only famous for his literary work, but also for a remarkable and untiring zeal in the service of those he reckoned his friends. Blake's hopes rose high, and his spirits overflowed. He wrote an enthusiastic letter to Flaxman attributing to him all his present happiness, and enclosing lines in which he recalls his successive friends "in the heavens"--Milton, Ezra, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Paracelsus, Boehme--and concludes by affirming that he has seen such visions of the American War and the French Revolution that he "could not subsist on the earth, but by conjunction with Flaxman, who knows to forgive nervous fear." Flaxman had studied Swedenborg, and could perfectly understand such language.