as it says in the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'

About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer
evening in a pine-wood of my father's; half a mile away was a
quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to
me, inside of me: 'Just take a walk toward the cliff'; and as if someone
else said: 'Don't go that way at all'--mere whispers then, which
gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful
contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet high,
and I fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished
mother that 'someone had pushed me' over the edge, and that someone else
'had caught me' at the bottom!

One night, soon after my eleventh birthday, lying in bed, the thought
struck me that my life must be of great importance to some thing or
things which I could not see; that two Powers, which hated each other,
must be continually after me, one wishing for some reason to kill me,
and the other for some reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so
and so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like
other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for--something.
Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and
primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so
that such Biblical expressions as 'The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying'
have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice
was heard: I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that
originally man had more ears than two; nor should have been surprised to
know that I, in these latter days, more or less resembled those primeval
ones.

But not a creature, except perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I