French “Pensée.” “Pansies, that’s for thoughts.” Ophelia in _Hamlet_. (4) _Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting._ This thought Wordsworth owed, consciously or unconsciously, to Plato. Though he tells us in the Fenwick note that he did not mean to _inculcate_ the belief, there is no doubt that he clung to the notion of a life pre-existing the present, on grounds similar to those on which he believed in a life to come. But there are some differences in the way in which the idea commended itself to Plato and to Wordsworth. The stress was laid by Wordsworth on the effect of terrestrial life in putting the higher faculties to sleep, and making us “forget the glories we have known.” Plato, on the other hand, looked upon the mingled experiences of mundane life as inducing a gradual but slow remembrance (ἀνάμνεσις) of the past. Compare Tennyson’s _Two Voices_, and Wordsworth’s sonnet, beginning-- Man’s life is like a sparrow, mighty king. (5) _Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”_ _With all the Persons,_ _i.e._ with the _dramatis personæ_. (6) … _thou Eye among the blind,_ _That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep._ There is an admirable parallel illustration of Wordsworth’s use of this figure (describing one sense in terms of another), in the lines in _Airey-Force Valley_-- A soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs. (7) _Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,_ _And custom lie upon thee with a weight,_ _Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!_ Compare with this, the lines in the fourth book of _The Excursion_, beginning-- Alas! the endowment of immortal power Is matched unequally with custom, time. (8) _Fallings from us, vanishings._ The outward sensible universe, visible and tangible, seeming to fall away from us, as unreal, to vanish in unsubstantially. See the explanation of this youthful experience in the Fenwick note. That confession of his boyish days at Hawkshead, “many times, while going to school, have I grasped at a wall or tree, _to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality_” (by which he explains those-- Fallings from us, vanishings, etc.), suggests a similar experience and confession of Cardinal Newman’s in his _Apologia_ (see p. 67). The late Rev. Robert Perceval Graves, of Windermere, and afterwards of Dublin, wrote to me in 1850:--“I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying, that at a particular stage of his mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he _had to reconvince himself of its existence by clasping a tree, or something that happened to be near him_. I could not help connecting this fact with that obscure passage in his great _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_, in which he speaks of--