is not Hayley that gives its glory to Felpham. The glory of
Felpham is that William Blake was happy there for nearly three years. It
was at Felpham that he saw the fairy's funeral. "Did you ever see a
fairy's funeral, ma'am?" he asked a visitor. "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. In a letter to Flaxman a little later, he
says, "Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual
than London. Heaven opens here on all sides its golden gates; the
windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants
are more distinctly heard, their forms more distinctly seen; and my
cottage is also a shadow of their houses." Beside the sea Blake communed
with the spirits of Dante and Homer, Milton and the Hebrew Prophets.

Blake's sojourn at Felpham ended in 1803. A grotesque and annoying
incident marred its close, the story of which, as told by the poet in a
letter to Mr. Butler, certainly belongs to the history of Sussex. It
should, however, first be state