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:

Dear Santanta: beset as you clearly are this summer morn with intimations of mortality, I thought perhaps … Wordsworth’s Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood … ?

this is just the first stanza …