Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/212

 English village church. One especially pleasant summer-walk is that by footpath to the village of Walberton, some five miles northward. Bognor was not then ugly and repulsive as great part of it is now. At all events, there were none of those ghastly blocks of untenanted, unfinished houses, dreary monuments of building infatuation, which lower upon the traveller and put him out of heart as he approaches from Felpham, looking like so many builders' night-mares; erections that bespeak an almost brutish absence of natural instincts for the beautiful or expressive in construction. It was only some nine years previous to Blake's residence in Sussex that Sir Richard Hotham, the retired hatter, had set Bognor going as a fashionable watering-place. He had found it a sequestered hamlet of smugglers. The 'retired and beautiful village of Hothamton,' as it was for a time called, included then but fifty houses, Hothampton Place, viz. and those which form now the eastern section of Bognor, visited or tenanted only by a select and aristocratic few.

By the sounding shore, visionary conversations were held with many a majestic shadow from the Past—Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton: 'All,' said Blake, when questioned on these appearances, 'all majestic shadows, grey but luminous, and superior to the common height of men.' Sometimes his wife accompanied him, seeing and hearing nothing, but fully believing in what he saw. By the sea, or pacing the pretty slip of garden in front of his house, many fanciful sights were witnessed by the speculative eyes. The following highly imaginative little scene was transacted there. It is related by Allan Cunningham. 'Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, madam?' he once said to a lady who happened to sit by him in company. 'Never, sir,' was the answer. 'I have!' said Blake, 'but not before last night. I was walking alone in my garden; there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound, and I knew