with any other poet whatever. Rowley and Chatterton also.' And at the end of this Essay he wrote, 'It appears to me as if the last paragraph beginning "Is it the spirit of the whole," etc., was written by another hand and mind from the rest of these Prefaces; they are the opinions of [] landscape-painter. Imagination is the divine vision not of the world, nor of man, nor from man as he is a natural man, but only as he is a spiritual man. Imagination has nothing to do with memory.'
1826
19th Feb. It was this day in connection with the assertion that[1] the Bible is the Word of God and all truth is to be found in it, he using language concerning man's reason being opposed to grace very like that used by the Orthodox Christian, that he qualified, and as the same Orthodox would say utterly nullified all he said by declaring that he understood the Bible in a Spiritual sense. As to the natural sense, he said Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. 'I have had,' he said, 'much intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, "I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven to them." 'I ask him in what language
- ↑ 'Some of Wordsworth's' crossed out.
