In his last note on the Hymn to Immortality, he describes his childhood solipsism: "I was often unable to think of external things as having an external existence, and communed with all that which I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in my immaterial nature. Many times, while going to school, I clung to a wall or a tree to recall me from this abyss of idealism to reality. This is consistent with the memories of. childhood recorded in the first Prelude of 1798-99, which take place in isolation, or appear to take place in isolation. In the rowboat episode, the 'spectacle' of the 'peak, black and enormous' which 'towered between me and the stars, and... he followed me' increases his awareness of solitude and of himself: his