•THE STORY OF MY HEART' i8^. 



o 



laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it 

 were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life.' In 

 Tennyson the influence of such trances must be sought 

 in his religious ideas and in whatever there is beyond 

 the visible and tangible in his handling of Nature, 

 One of the youngest and most interesting of poets now 

 alive — Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie — has described the 

 trance ' upon a hill, alone,' almost in the words of 

 Jefferies : 



' . . . And then suddenly, — 



While perhaps twice my heart was dutiful 



To send my blood upon its little race, — 



I was exalted above surety, 



And out of time did fall.' * 



Other poets have had similar experiences, if we may 

 judge by results. A few have preserved some traces of 

 the moments themselves. Shelley's ' May Morning,' 

 for example, ' when I walked forth upon the glittering 

 grass,' may have brought him some such exaltation. 

 Wordsworth's ' Ode ' is in part a recollection of experi- 

 ences of this kind interpreted by him as ' intimations of 

 immortality.' Myers plainly called genius ' a kind of 

 exalted but undeveloped clairvoyance '; and something 

 like this trance happens to many who have not artistic 

 genius ; but the effect, in solution, whether in literature 

 or art or conduct, may not be easily perceptible, and the 

 extreme brevity of the entrancement may help it to be 

 ignored. 



To Jefferies, then, we have to be grateful for describing 

 so vividly a matter of which the evidence cannot be too 

 great. Lying on the turf of Liddington Hill, he was 

 quite alone, having shaken off ' the petty circumstances 

 and the annoyances of existence ' during the climb 

 through ' rich pure air ' up the steep slope. 



' I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. 

 Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, 

 the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I 



* Poevis and Interludes (John Lane). 



