What is the source of that tender solemn melancholy that comes on us all as we feel the glad year dying?  It is melancholy that is not painful, and we can nurse it without tempting one stab of real suffering.  Each season brings its moods—­Spring is hopeful; Summer luxurious; Autumn contented; and then comes that strange time when our thoughts run on solemn things.  Can it be that we associate the long decline of the year with the dark closing of life?  Surely not—­for a boy or girl feels the same pensive, dreary mood, and no one who remembers childhood can fail to think of the wild inarticulate thoughts that passed through the immature brain.  Nay, our souls are from God; they are bestowed by the Supreme, and they were from the beginning, and cannot be destroyed.  From Plato downwards, no thoughtful man has missed this strange suggestion which seems to present itself unprompted to every mind.  Cicero argued it out with consummate dialectic skill; our scientific men come to the same conclusion after years on years of labour spent in investigating phenomena of life and laws of force; and Wordsworth formulated Plato’s reasoning in an immortal passage which seems to combine scientific accuracy with exquisite poetic beauty—­

     Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
       The soul that rises with us—­our life’s star—­
     Hath had elsewhere its setting
       And cometh from afar;
       Not in entire forgetfulness,
       And not in utter nakedness,
     But trailing clouds of glory do we come
     From God, Who is our home. 
       Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
     Shades of the prison-house begin to close
       Upon the growing boy,
     But he beholds the light, and whence it flows;
       He sees it in his joy. 
     The youth who daily farther from the east
       Must travel still is Nature’s priest,
       And by the vision splendid
       Is on his way attended;
     At length the man perceives it die away
     And fade into the light of coming day.

Had Wordsworth never written another line, that passage would have placed him among the greatest.  He follows the glorious burst with these awful lines—­

     But for those obstinate questionings
     Of sense and outward things,
     Fallings from us, vanishings;
       Blank misgivings of a creature
     Moving about in worlds not realized;
       High instincts before which our mortal nature
     Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

That is like some golden-tongued utterance of the gods; and thousands of Englishmen, sceptics and believers, have held their breath, abashed, as its full meaning struck home.

Yes; this mysterious thought that haunts our being as we gaze on the saddened fields is not aroused by the immediate impression which the sight gives us; it is too complex, too profound, too mature and significant.  It was framed before birth, and it proceeds direct from the Father of all souls, with whom we dwelt before we came to this low earth, and with whom we shall dwell again.  If any one ventures to deny the origin of our marvellous knowledge, our sweet, strange impressions, it seems to us that he must risk bordering on impiety.