LETTER REFERRING TO BLAKE
philosophical opinions. They are a strange compound of Christianity & Spinozaism & Platonism. I must confine myself to what he said ahout your brother's works & I fear this may lead me far enough to fatigue you in following me. After what I have said Mr. W[ordsworth] will not be flattered by knowing that Blake deems him the only poet of the age. Nor much alarmed by hearing that like Muley Moloch Blake thinks that he is often in his works an Atheist. Now according to Blake Atheism consists in worship[p]ing the natural world, which same natural world properly speaking is nothing real, but a mere illusion produced by Satan. Milton was for a great part of his life an Atheist, & therefore has fatal errors in his Paradise Lost which he has often begged Blake to confute. Dante (tho' now with God) lived & died an Atheist He was the slave of the world & time But Dante & Wordsw. in spight of their Atheism were inspired by the Holy Ghost, & Wordsworth's poems, (a large proportion at least) are the work of divine inspiration. Unhappily he is left by God to his own illusions, & then the Atheism is apparent. I had the pleasure of reading to B. in my best style (& you know I am vain on that point & think I read W's poems peculiarly well) the Ode on Immortality. I never witnessed greater delight in any listener & in general B. loves the poems. What appears to have disturbed his mind, on the other hand, is the preface to the Excursion. He told me six months ago that it caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him. I have in his hand a copy of the extract[1] & the following note . . . When I first saw B. at Mr. Aders's he very earnestly asked me: 'Is Mr. W. a sincere real Christian?' In reply to my answer he said, 'If so, what does he mean by the
- ↑ [For Blake's autograph copy and annotations of extracts from Wordsworth's Preface to The Excursion and from Bk. 1 of The Recluse see Appendix, pp. 159 et seq.]
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