Coleridge apparently knew that the human mind would receive it as experience.

The phrase is no slip on his part; the earlier editions had instead "almost atween the tips," which is astronomically justifiable, but in "Sibylline Leaves" and later he wrote it as in the text.
222--*And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my cross-bow!* It was an ancient belief, imaginatively revived by romantic poets, that when a person died his soul could be seen, or heard, or both, as it left the body, Cf.

Keats's "Eve of St.Agnes," first stanza; Rossetti's "Sister Helen;" and Kipling's "Danny Deever." 11, 226--*And thou art long*, etc.

"For the last two lines of this stanza," runs.

Coleridge's note to the passage in "Sibylline Leaves," "I am indebted to Mr.Wordsworth.It was on a delightful walk from Nether Stowey to Dulverton, with him and his sister, in the autumn of 1797, that this poem was planned, and in part composed." Wordsworth in later years declared that he contributed also lines 13-16, "and four or five lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point out." 245--*or ever*.