preserved of Palmer's early labours. But all seemed fair in the light of fond retrospect. Twenty-eight years after Blake's death Samuel Palmer addressed a letter to Mr. Gilchrist, long and full of interesting particulars relating to Blake's opinions on art; but the gist of the estimate of the man is conveyed in few words. "In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age; a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence, an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. He was a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwardness, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy."
A very important witness to Blake's demeanour and opinions in his later years is Henry Crabb Robinson the diarist, whom we have already met as a visitor to Blake's exhibition, and who had made him the subject of an essay in a German periodical. Robinson was the right man in the right place, not being a mystic or enthusiast to fall down at Blake's feet, nor yet a man of the world to deride him as a visionary, but an inquisitive observer of great intellectual range and most kindly and tolerant disposition, ready to allow that things might exist of which his philosophy had not dreamed, and whom abnormal opinions, if held in evident sincerity, might startle but could hardly shock. "It is strange," says he, "that I who have no imagination, nor any power beyond that of a logical understanding, should yet have a great respect for religious mystics." Thrown into Blake's company in 1825, he has recorded his conversations with him at considerable length in his delightful diary, as yet but partially published. His description of Blake's "interesting appearance" agrees with that of his own circle. "He is pale, with a Socratic countenance, and an expression of great sweetness, though with something of languor about it except when animated, and then he has about him an air of inspiration. The tone and manner are incommunicable. There are a natural sweetness and gentility about him which are delightful." Having heard of Blake's visions, Robinson was not surprised to find him asserting that the visionary gift was innate in all men, and only torpid for want of cultivation; but he must have had much ado to digest such statements as that the world was flat, that Wordsworth was a Pagan, and that "what are called the vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world." Not understanding that by atheism
