I have said elsewhere 'A simple child That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death ?'[11] [11] In pencil on opposite page--But this first stanza of 'We are Seven' is Coleridge's Jem and all (Mr.Quillinan).
But it was not so much from the source 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.

At that time I was afraid of such processes.

In later periods of life I have deplored, as we have all reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines, 'Obstinate questionings,' &c.