Wordsworth also affords an excellent example of our
contention that cosmic consciousness does not come to us at any specific
age or time. Wordsworth distinctly says that as a child he possessed this
faculty, as for example his oft-repeated words, both in conversation and in
his biography:
"Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of
death, as a state applicable to my own being. It was not so much from
feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came, as from a sense of the
indomitableness of the spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories
of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might
become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to
heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of
external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that
I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial
nature. 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.
Pages:
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315