received answers to the perplexities I have propounded to you, and that
you yourself, ere you came to read me, propounded to yourself.

* * * * *

Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man
like you or any man. What he knew, you know, any man knows. But he most
aptly stated it in his passage that begins "Not in utter nakedness, not
in entire forgetfulness. . ."

Ah, truly, shades of the prison-house close about us, the new-born
things, and all too soon do we forget. And yet, when we were new-born we
did remember other times and places. We, helpless infants in arms or
creeping quadruped-like on the floor, dreamed our dreams of air-flight.
Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and
monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born
with fear, with memory of fear; and _memory is experience_.

As for myself, at the beginnings of my vocabulary, at so tender a period
that I still made hunger noises and sleep noises, yet even then did I
know that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped
the word "king," remembered that I had once been the son of a king.
More--I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and
worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not
yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in
the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all
that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and
troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate itself in me and