2°<« S. No 65., Jan. 17. '67.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



51 



■we could anticipate that part of the conversation which 

 has not yet taken place." 



That this feeling is not an uncommon one may 

 be gathered from a late publication by Mr. Sa- 

 muel Warren : 



"I am strongly disposed to think," he says, "that 

 every person who has meditated upon the operations of his 

 own mind, has occasionally, and suddenly, been startled 

 with a notion that it possesses qualities and attributes of 

 which he has nowhere seen any account. I do not know 

 how to express it, but I have several times had a transient 

 consciousness of mere ordinary incidents then occurring, 

 having somehow or other happened before, accompanied 

 by a vanishing idea of being able to predict the sequence. 

 I once mentioned this to a man of powerful intellect, and 

 he said, ' So have I.' " — Lecture at Hull, §-c., p. 48. 



Sir E. B. Lytton, who has several allusions in 

 his works to this feeling of reminiscence, describes 

 it as " that strange kind of inner and spiritual 

 memory, which often recalls to us places an3 

 persons we have never s^en before, and which 

 Platonists would resolve to be the unquenched 

 and struggling consciousness of a former life." 

 He also somewhere expresses surprise that the 

 idea of the soul's pre-existence has not been made 

 available for the purposes of poetry ; but the dis- 

 tinguislied writer must have forgotten, at the 

 moment, Wordsworth's grand ode. Does not 

 Milton, also, who had imbibed from his college 

 friend Henry More an early bias to the study of 

 Plato, whose philosophy nourished most of the fine 

 spirits of that day, hint at the same opinion in 

 those exquisite lines in Comus ? 



" The soul grows clotted by contagion, 

 Imbodies and embrutes, till she quite lose 

 The divine property of her first being. 

 Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp, 

 Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres. 

 Lingering and sitting by a new made grave. 

 As loth to leave the body that it loved." 



1. 467. 



This, by the way, seems a favourite illustration 

 with our elder divines, one of the greatest of 

 whom has a noble passage, not unworthy of being 

 -placed beside the verses of Milton. (See Scott's 

 Christian Life, chap. iii. sect. i. ; and compare 

 Dr. H. More's Immortality of the Soul, book ii. 

 ch. xvi., and Sir Kenelm Digby on Heligio Me- 

 dici, p. 91. ; Sir T. Browne's Works, fol. 1686.) 



The testimony of Lord Lyndsay, in his de- 

 scription of the Valley of the Kadisha (^Letters, 

 p. 351., ed. 1847), Is too interesting to be passed 

 over : 



" We saw the river Kadisha, like a silver thread, de- 

 scending from Lebanon. The whole scene bore that 

 strange and shadowy resemblance to tiie wondrous land- 

 scape delineated in ' Kubla Khan,' that one so often feels 

 in actual life, when the whole scene around you appears 

 to be reacting after a long interval, — j'our friends seated 

 in the same juxta-position, the subjects of conversation 

 the same, and shifting with the same ' dream-like ease,' 

 that you remember at some remote and indefinite period 

 of pre-existence ; you always know what will come next. 



and sit spell-bound, as it were, in a sort of calm ex- 

 pectancy." 



But perhaps the most remarkable narrative of 

 the occurrence of this strange sensation is that to 

 be found in a little Memoir of the lute William. 

 Hone, the Parodist, who appears to have been led 

 by its experience to doubt for the first time the 

 truth of the system of materialistic atheism which, 

 for thirty years of his life, he had most unfortu- 

 nately adopted. The strong intimation which the 

 incident seemed to convey to his mind of the in- 

 dependence of the soul upon the body gave rise 

 to inquiries, which terminated in his becoming a 

 convert to the truth of the Christian religion. 

 The story, as related by himself to several of his 

 friends, is as follows. Being called, in the course 

 of business, to a house in a certain street in a part 

 of London quite new to him, he had noticed to 

 himself, as he walked along, that he had never 

 been there before. 



" I was shown," he said, " into a room to wait. On 

 looking round, to my astonishment everything appeared 

 perfectly familiar to me : I seemed to recognize every ob- 

 ject. 1 said to myself, what is this? I was never here 

 before, and yet 1 have seen all this : and, if so, there is a 

 very peculiar knot in the shutter." 



He opened the shutter, and found the knot ! 

 Now, then, thought he, " Here is something I can- 

 not explain on my principles ; there must be some 

 power beyond matter." The thought then sug- 

 gested, adds his biographer, never left him, till he 

 was brought from " the horror of great darkness " 

 — from the atheism of which he ever spoke with 

 shuddering memories, into the glorious light of 

 revelation. 



And now, what shall we say of this mysterious 

 impression ? Is it in reality from some former 

 life that these gleams of inner memory come 

 which are occasionally permitted to haunt our 

 minds ? 



" May there not," it has been asked, " exist senses still 

 imperfectly defined by physiological science, mysteries of 

 the soul still undeveloped, a mockery to the learned, but 

 of profound conviction to more delicate organizations? 

 Or are there new diseases of the mind as of the body, the 

 result of higher civilization, and artificial modes of life, 

 inducing a greater delicacy and susceptibility of the 

 nervous system ? Or are we indebted to our more active 

 and refined enquiry, and more accurate habits of mental 

 analysis for making us acquainted with mental phe- 

 nomena, which existed before unobserved and unre- 

 corded ? " 



The most plausible solution seems to be that 

 given by a learned medical writer, the late Dr. 

 Wigan, in his work on The Duality of the Mind, 

 London, 1844. After describing the sudden flash 

 of reminiscence which accompanies the sensation 

 in question, he adds, — 



" All seems to be remembered, and to be now attracting 

 attention for the second time ; never is it supposed to be 

 the third time. And this delusion occurs only when the 

 mind has been exhausted by excitement, or is, from in- 



