w him [autumn of
1816], but Leigh Hunt soon forced it from his mind. Never shall I
forget Keats once rising from his chair, and approaching my last
picture, Entry into Jerusalem. He went before the portrait of
Voltaire, placed his hand on his heart, and, bowing low,

'In reverence done, as to the power
That dwelt within, whose presence had infused
Into the plant sciential sap derived
From nectar, drink of gods,'

(as Milton says of Eve after she had eaten the apple), 'That's
the being to whom _I_ bend,' said he; alluding to the bending of
the other figures in the picture, and contrasting Voltaire with
our Saviour, and his own adoration with that of the crowd."

Notwithstanding the general vagueness or indifference of his mind in
religious matters, Keats seems to have been at most times a believer in
the immortality of the soul. Following that phrase of his already quoted
(from a letter to Bailey, November 1817) "Oh for a life of sensations
rather than of thoughts!" he proceeds: "It is 'a vision in the form of
youth,' a shadow of reality to come. And this consideration has further
convinced me--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite
speculation of mine--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having
what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a
fate can only befall those who delight in sensation, rather than hunger,
as you do, after truth. Adam's dream will do here: and seems to be a
conviction that imagination, and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as
human life, and its spiritual repetition." This allusion to "Adam's
dream" refers back to a fine phrase which had occurred shortly before in
the same letter--"Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream; he awoke,
and found it truth." In a letter written to George Keats and his wife,
shortly after the death of Tom, comes a very positive assertion--"I have
a firm belief in immortality, and so had Tom." This firm belief,
however, must certainly have faltered later on; for, as we have already
seen, one of Keats's letters to Miss Brawne, written in 1820, contains
the phrase "I long to believe in immortality." The reader may also refer
to the letter to Armitage Brown, September 1820, extracted in a previous
page. Of superstitious feeling I observe only one instance in Keats.
After Tom's death, a white rabbit appeared in the garden of Mr. Dilke,
and was shot by him: Keats would