just these things. As Tennyson writes:

"Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--

"Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare."[228]

[228] The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports
of himself as follows:--

"I have never had any revelations through anaesthetics, but a kind of
waking trance--this for lack of a better word--I have frequently had,
quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon
me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once,
as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality,
individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless
being, and this not a confused state but 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. I am ashamed of my feeble
description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?"

Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this
condition: "By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It
is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated
with absolute clearness of mind." Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473.

Sir James Crichton-Browne has given the technical name of "dreamy
states" to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent
consciousness.[229] They bring a sense of mystery and of the
metaphysical duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of
perception which seems imminent but which never completes itself. In
Dr. Crichton-Browne's opinion they connect themselves with the
perplexed and scared disturbances of self-consciousness which
occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned
alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically
insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward ladder, to
insanity; our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The divergence
shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phenomenon's
connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to
the context by which we set it off.

[229] The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish
Lecture, on Dreamy Mental States, London, Bailliere, 1895.