I can testify to it
from my personal experience. I know it. I can distinctly recall my
former life. I can tell you who I was, who my friends were, what I
did, what I felt, everything, down to the very dishes I preferred for
dinner.'
Chalks scanned Blake's features for an instant with an intentness that
suggested a mingling of perplexity and malice; then, all at once, I
saw a light flash in his eyes, which forthwith began to twinkle in a
manner that struck me as ominous.
'In my early youth,' Blake continued, 'this memory of mine was, if I
may so phrase it, piecemeal and occasional. Feeling that I was no
ordinary man, conscious of strange forces struggling in me, I would
obtain, as it were, glimpses, fleeting and unsatisfactory, into a
former state. Then they would go, not for long intervals to return. As
time elapsed, however, these glimpses, to call them so, became more
frequent and lasting, the intervals of oblivion shorter; and at last,
one day on Hampstead Heath, I identified myself in a sudden burst of
insight. I was walking on the Heath, and thinking of my
work--marvelling at a certain quality I had discerned in it, which, I
was convinced, would assure it everlasting life: a quality that
seemed not unfamiliar to me, and yet which I could associate with none
of the writers whose names passed in review before my mind; not with
Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, not with Wordsworth or Coleridge, Goethe
or Dante, not even with Homer.
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