Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things; Fallings from us, vanishings; etc.” Professor Bonamy Price further confirms the explanation which Wordsworth gave of the passage, in a letter written to me in 1881, giving an account of a conversation he had with the poet, as follows:-- “OXFORD, _April 21, 1881_. “MY DEAR SIR,--You will be glad, I am sure, to receive an interpretation, which chance enabled me to obtain from Wordsworth himself of a passage in the immortal _Ode on Immortality_.… “It happened one day that the poet, my wife, and I were taking a walk together by the side of Rydal Water. We were then by the sycamores under Nab Scar. The aged poet was in a most genial mood, and it suddenly occurred to me that I might, without unwarrantable presumption, seize the golden opportunity thus offered, and ask him to explain these mysterious words. So I addressed him with an apology, and begged him to explain, what my own feeble mother-wit was unable to unravel, and for which I had in vain sought the assistance of others, what were those ‘fallings from us, vanishings,’ for which, above all other things, he gave God thanks. The venerable old man raised his aged form erect; he was walking in the middle, and passed across me to a five-barred gate in the wall which bounded the road on the side of the lake. He clenched the top bar firmly with his right hand, pushed strongly against it, and then uttered these ever-memorable words: ‘There was a time in my life when I had to push against something that resisted, to be sure that there was anything outside of me. I was sure of my own mind; everything else fell away, and vanished into thought.’ Thought, he was sure of; matter for him, at the moment, was an unreality--nothing but a thought. Such natural spontaneous idealism has probably never been felt by any other man. “BONAMY PRICE.” This, however, was not an experience peculiar to Wordsworth, as Professor Price imagined--and its value would be much lessened if it had been so--but was one to which (as the poet said to Miss Fenwick) “every one, if he would look back, could bear testimony.” The following is from S.T. Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_ (chap. xxii. p. 29, edition 1817)-- “To the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood_, the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante addresses to one of his own Canzoni-- Canzone, i’ credo, che saranno radi Color che tua ragione intendan bene: Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto. O lyric song, there will be few, think I, Who may thy import understand aright: Thou art for them so arduous and so high!