"Never, sir!" "I have!...

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 not whence it came.

At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures, of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared.

It was a fairy's funeral!" Blake settled at Felpham to be near Hayley, for whom he had a number of commissions to execute.

He engraved illustrations to Hayley's works, and painted eighteen heads for Hayley's library--among them, Shakespeare, Homer, and Hayley himself; but all have vanished, the present owner knows not where.
In some verses which Blake addressed to Anna Flaxman, the wife of the sculptor, in September, 1800, a few days before moving from London to the Sussex coast, he says:-- This song to the flower of Flaxman's joy; To the blossom of hope, for a sweet decoy; Do all that you can and all that you may To entice him to Felpham and far away.
Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there; The ladder of Angels descends through the air, On the turret its spiral does softly descend, Through the village then winds, at my cot it does end.
[Sidenote: THE PROPHETS AT FELPHAM] Blake's house still stands, a retired, thatched cottage, facing the sea, but some distance from it.