See Sir W. Scott’s “Journal,” where a like impression is acknowledged on 17th February, 1828.
Tennyson also says in “The Two Voices:”
“Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
Of something felt, like something here,
Of something done, I know not where,
Such as no language may declare.”
[30] “Ay” must have the force of the Greek ἄι “alas”—and “ay me” be as the Latin hei mihi, “woe is me!” See also P. xl., 6.
[31] The early purple orchis is said to bear 200,000 seeds, and perhaps one grows to a plant.
[32] Coleridge says: “The Jacob’s ladder of Truth let down from heaven to earth, with all its numerous rounds, is now the common highway on which we are content to toil upward.”—Friend, viii.
[33] The doctrine of evolution may dispute this statement, and tell us that the type, or form, of the winged lizard of chaos, now fossilized in the rock, has been developed and continued in the reptile of the ditch; but its living self has perished, and its type is gone.
[34] “To die,—to sleep,—no more.”—Hamlet.
“But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.”