yson uses the term "trance" in describing them.

He says:

"A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood,
when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating
my own name to myself silently until all at once, as it were, out of the
intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being."

It is a fact that children of a peculiarly sensitive or psychic temperament
seem to have strange ideas regarding the name by which they are called, and
not infrequently become confused and filled with an inexplicable wonderment
at the sound of their own name. This phenomenon is much less rare than is
generally known.

In Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" this experience of entering into cosmic
consciousness is thus described:

"More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself,
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touched my limbs; the limbs
Were strange, not mine; and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words.
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world."

Tennyson's illumination is certain, clearly defined, distinct and
characteristic, although his poems are much less cosmic than those of
Whitman and of many others. There is, however, in the above, all that is
descriptive of that state of consciousness which accompanies liberation
from the illusion--the _enchantment_ of the merely mortal existence.

Words are, as Tennyson fitly says, but "shadows of a shadow-world"; how
then may we hope to define in terms comprehensible to sense-consciousness
only, emotions and experiences which involve loss of _self_, and at the
same time gain of the _Self_?

Tennyson's frequent excursions into the realm of spiritual consciousness
while still a child, bears out our contention that many children not
infrequently have this experience, and either through reserve or from lack
of ability to explain it, keep the matter to themselves; generally losing
or "outgrowing" the tendency as they enter the activities of school life,
and the mortal mind becomes dominant in them. This is especially true of
the rising generation, and we personally know several clearly defined
instances which have been reported