On the receipt of your request, I
looked up the account of my first visit to Farringford, and there, to
my profound astonishment, I found described that experience of your
father's which, in the mouth of the Ancient Sage, was made the ground
of an important argument against materialism and in favour of
personal immortality eight-and-twenty years afterwards. In no other
poem during all these years is, to my knowledge, this experience once
alluded to. I had completely forgotten it, but here it was recorded
in black and white. If you turn to your father's account of the
wonderful state of consciousness superinduced by thinking of his own
name, and compare it with the argument of the Ancient Sage, you will
see that they refer to one and the same phenomenon.
And more, my son! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And past into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine--and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of Self
The gain of such large life as match'd with ours
Were Sun to spark--unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.
Any words about Tennyson as a politician are apt to excite the
sleepless prejudice which haunts the political field. He probably,
if forced to "put a name to it," would have called himself a Liberal.
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