"The church-bells toll a melancholy round, Calling the people to some other prayers, Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares, More hearkening to the sermon's horrid sound. Surely the mind of man is closely bound In some black spell: seeing that each one tears Himself from fireside joys and Lydian airs, And converse high of those with glory crowned. Still, still they toll: and I should feel a damp, A chill as from a tomb, did I not know That they are dying like an outburnt lamp,-- That 'tis their sighing, wailing, ere they go Into oblivion,--that fresh flowers will grow, And many glories of immortal stamp." His sonnet on Ben Nevis, 1818, is also an utterance of scepticism--speaking of heaven and hell as misty surmises, and of "the world of thought and mental might" as a realm of nebulosity. A letter to Leigh Hunt, May 1817, contains a phrase arraigning the God of Christians. To the clerical student Bailey, September 1818, he spoke out: "You know my ideas about religion. I do not think myself more in the right than other people, that nothing in this world is proveable." The latter clause appears to be carelessly elliptical in expression, the real meaning being "I think [not "I do _not_ think"] that nothing in this world is proveable." To Fanny Brawne, towards May 1820, he appealed "by the blood of that Christ you believe in." Haydon tells a noticeable anecdote--the only one, I think, which exhibits Keats as an admirer of that anti-imaginative order of intellect of which Voltaire was a prototype-- "He had a tending to religion when first I knew 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."