LETTER XIX.

The Man of Active Life and the Man of Retirement contrasted -Favourable Position of the latter for observing Mental Phenomena-Description of a singular Retrospective Feeling -Attempt to account for it-Notice of a peculiarly vivid Impression sometimes experienced in the Depth of Night.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

The last letter which I addressed to you was, I fear, little adapted to interest a man who has too many external cares on his hands to bestow any time on the consideration of obscure and fugitive mental phenomena. Yet you formerly delighted in such speculations, and, trusting to the strength of your early tastes, I will venture to proceed with the design already announced.

When I compare your situation and my own, I am reminded of a passage in a recent writer, which contrasts, in a lively manner, the cir

cumstances of two poets, and which may be taken as a general picture of the difference between the man of active life and the man of retirement. The one is described as plunging into the world, stemming its flood, and riding upon its waves; the other as loitering about the little pool of his own fancies, throwing crumbs to the gold and silver fish he has put into it.* There may be a good deal of trifling in the employment so fancifully ascribed to the recluse, but it must be recollected that, as he is thus placed at leisure to direct his attention to his own feelings-as he is thus, by the necessity of his position, intent on watching their fluctuating surface and variable hues, he is enabled to mark phenomena which escape observation in the bustle of social pleasure, and the all-engrossing pursuits of business. And although what he thus perceives may be invisible to the man of the world, yet, if it really exists in nature, and is not the consequence of any idiosyncracy or peculiarity of constitution, it will be recognised in description, and recognised with pleasure by

* Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, Vol. I. p. 138.

those who would have been incapable of seeing it unless it had been pointed out to their observation. Some of the highest pleasures we receive from the pages of the poet, the moralist, and the philosopher, and, I may add, of the novelist and historian, arise from the vividness with which ideas and feelings before latent in our minds, are presented to our apprehension by the hand of genius, at whose master-touch they stand out in bold relief from the obscurity in which they had previously lurked. We delight to behold, in clear and definite outline, what we have long been dimly conscious of; to see fixed by a powerful spell what we are half aware has often passed through our minds with a rapidity which baffled the efforts of memory to arrest it; to have in palpable shape before us, what has hitherto only emerged from darkness like a spectre, and vanished before we could trace the lineaments. But I find I am making too great "a flourish of trumpets" to usher in the subject which I have to introduce. The obscure feeling to which I alluded in my last letter, and to which I have now to draw your attention, scarcely belongs to the

class just described: I am doubtful whether it will be recognised as soon as pointed out.

I am inclined to think it an effect of a peculiar constitution of the nervous system. I had frequently experienced it myself long before I had met with any one to whom it appeared to be known. It is a fanciful impression in regard to what we are actually engaged in doing,—an impression that the actors, the scene, and all the attendant circumstances, are exactly the same as we have met with before; that we are, in fact, going through a passage of our lives which we have gone through at some former period of our existence, that we are performing our part for the second time. This feeling I recollect in my own case to have been, on some occasions, vivid but not lasting. In all my multifarious reading, I have never met with more than three writers who appear to have experienced any thing analagous to it-our countrymen, Thomas Hope and Robert Southey, and the celebrated Göthe. The former, with great skill and felicity, describes a similar impression in the following beautiful passage:

"The sun of the third day was already lengthening the partial shadows that precede its disappearance, when I entered on an extended heath, to whose beautiful and varied weeds heaven's declining luminary lent at that instant the glowing transparency which announces its proximate setting. With singular force did the gaudy scene revive all the deep-felt impressions which objects of a similar description had once made on my younger mind in the plains of Ak-hissar; or, rather, it produced one of those moments in my life, when my sensations became so exactly the counterpart of what they had once been at some definite prior period, perhaps long gone by, as to suggest the idea of my having, in a new point of space, reverted to an already experienced point of time, and of my going over afresh some former portion of my existence already elapsed."

The German author expresses himself with less precision, and, as I am acquainted with the passage only through the medium of a translation, I may be mistaken in supposing

* Anastasius, Vol. III. p. 418.