This was written in or around 1830 by a poet named Leticia Elizabeth Landon. I had never heard of her before, but stumbled on this passage which made me think about Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality":
"Methinks we must have known some former state
More glorious than our present, and the heart
Is haunted with dim memories, shadows left
By past magnificence; and hence we pine
With vain aspirings, hopes that fill the eyes
With bitter tears for their own vanity.
Remembrance makes the poet; 'tis the past
Lingering within him, with a keener sense
Than is upon the thoughts of common men
Of what has been, that fills the actual world
With unreal likenesses of lovely shapes,
That were and are not; and the fairer they,
The more their contrast with existing things,
The more his power, the greater is his grief.
--Are we then fallen from some noble star,
Whose consciousness is as an unknown curse,
And we feel capable of happiness
Only to know it is not of our sphere?"
Leticia Elizabeth Landon, The Poetical Works, 118
