of the term atheist, so as not to include him in the ordinary reproach, Yet he afterwards spoke of Dante's being then with God. I was more successful when he also called Locke an atheist, and imputed to him wilful deception. He seemed satisfied with my admission, that Locke's philosophy led to the atheism of the French school. He reiterated his former strange notions on morals—would allow of no other education than what lies in the cultivation of the fine arts and the imagination.
As he spoke of frequently seeing Milton, I ventured to ask, half ashamed at the time, which of the three or four portraits in Hollis's Memoirs was the most like? He answered: "They are all like, at different ages. I have seen him as a youth, and as an old man, with long flowing beard. He came lately as an old man. He came to ask a favour of me; said he had committed an error in his Paradise Lost, which he wanted me to correct in a poem or picture, But I declined; I said I had my own duties to perform." "It is a presumptuous question," I replied, "but might I venture to ask what that could be?" "He wished me to expose the falsehood of his doctrine taught in the Paradise Lost, that sexual intercourse arose out of the Fall." ... At the time that he asserted his own possession of the gift of vision, he did not boast of it as peculiar to himself: "All men might have it if they would."
On the 24th December I called a second time on him. On this occasion it was that I read to him Wordsworth's Ode on the supposed pre-existent state (Intimations of Immortality). The subject of Wordsworth's religious character was discussed when we met on the 18th of February, and the 12th of May (1826). I will here bring together Blake's declarations concerning Wordsworth, I had been in the habit, when reading this marvellous Ode to friends, of omitting one or two passages, especially that—
—"But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"
lest I should be rendered ridiculous, being unable to explain precisely what I admired. Not that I acknowledged this to be a fair test. But with Blake I could fear nothing of the kind. And it
