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 have it that this rabbit was the spirit of Tom, and he persisted in the fancy with not a little earnestness. Of Keats's fondness for wine--his appreciation of it as a flavour grateful to the palate, and to the abstract sense of enjoyment--there are numerous traces throughout his writings. We all remember the famous lines in his "Ode to a Nightingale"-- "Oh for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,... Oh for a beaker full of the warm South!" &c.-- lines which seem a little forced into their context, and of which the only tangible meaning there is that the luxury and dreamy inspiration of wine-drinking would relieve the poet's mind from the dull and painful realities of life, and assist his imagination into the dim vocal haunts of the nightingale. There is also in "Lamia" a conspicuous passage celebrating "The happy vintage--merry wine, sweet wine." On claret--as to which we have heard the evidence of Haydon--there is a long tirade in a letter addressed to George Keats and his wife in February 1819. I give it in a condensed form:--