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—
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things;
Fallings from us, vanishings; etc.”