He has left several prose accounts of this mental
state, which often came to him through repeating his own name silently,
till all at once, as it wore, out of the intensity of the
consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to
resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused
state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest,
utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable
impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no
extinction, but the only true life[33]
It is a somewhat similar experience which is described in _In Memoriam_,
xcv.
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,
And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world.
And again in the conclusion of the _Holy Grail_--
Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that strikes his forehead is not air
But vision--yea, his very hand and foot--
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a A vision, nor that One
Who rose again.
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