Felpham Cottage, of cottages the prettiest,
September 11, 1801.
Next time I have the happiness to see you, I am determined to paint another portrait of you from life in my best manner, for memory will not do in such minute operations; for I have now discovered that without nature before the painter's eye, he can never produce anything in the walks of natural painting. Historical designing is one thing, and portrait-painting another, and they are as distinct as any two arts can be. Happy would that man be who could unite them!
P.S.—Please to remember our best respects to Mr. Birch, and tell him that Felpham men are the mildest of the human race. If it is the will of Providence, they shall be the wisest. We hope that he will, next summer, joke us face to face.
God bless you all!
November 8th, 1801: (Hayley to Johnson again) * * * 'And now let me congratulate you on having travelled so well through the Odyssey!' (an edition of Cowper's Homer, with the translator's final touches, which the clergyman was bringing out). ' Blake and I read every evening that copy of the Iliad which your namesake' (the bookseller)' of St. Paul's was so good as to send me; comparing it with the first edition, and with the Greek, as we proceed. We shall be glad to see the Odyssey also, as soon as it is visible.'
This and other passages in the correspondence show the familiar intimacy which had been established between the literary gentleman and the artist. The latter evidently spent much of his time, and most of his working hours, in Hayley's library, in free companionship with its owner; which in the case of so proud and sensitive a man as Blake can only have been due to much delicacy and genial courtesy on the part of his host; whose manners, indeed, were those of a polished gentleman of the old school. We can, for a moment, see the oddly assorted pair; both visionaries, but in how different a sense! the urbane amateur seeing nothing as it really was; the painter seeing only, so to speak, the unseen: the first with
