before her death?  ’How many blessed groups this hour are wending!’] These notices of Mrs. Hemans would be very unsatisfactory to her intimate friends, as indeed they are to myself, not so much for what is said, but what for brevity’s sake is left unsaid.  Let it suffice to add there was much sympathy between us, and if opportunity had been allowed me to see more of her, I should have loved and valued her accordingly.  As it is, I remember her with true affection for her amiable qualities, and above all for her delicate and irreproachable conduct during her long separation from an unfeeling husband, whom she had been led to marry from the romantic notions of inexperienced youth.  Upon this husband I never heard her cast the least reproach, nor did I ever hear her even name him, though she did not forbear wholly to touch upon her domestic position; but never so as that any fault could be found with her manner of adverting to it.

511. Dead friends:  ’Immortals.’ [XV.]

Walter Scott died 21st Sept. 1832. 
S.T.  Coleridge " 25th July 1834. 
Charles Lamb " 27th Dec. 1834. 
Geo. Crabbe " 3rd Feb. 1832. 
Felicia Hemans " 16th May 1835.

512. *_Ode:  Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of early Childhood_. [Headed in I.F.  MSS.  ‘The Ode.’]

This was composed during my residence at Town-End, Grasmere.  Two years at least passed between the writing of the four first stanzas and the remaining part.  To the attentive and competent reader the whole sufficiently explains itself, but there may be no harm in adverting here to particular feelings or experiences of my own mind on which the structure of the poem partly rests.  Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being.  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