Only one little sight, one plant
Woods have in May, etc.
(3) The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat.
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,