Does anyone know a word or any words which help to describe the state of teetering on the brink of remembrance?

I remember seeing in a psychology textbook in a chapter on memory a wonderful description by... ah... possibly Mark Twain, I can't remember (oh the irony), all about the exquisite a agony of having a word on the tip of your tongue.

Now... how did that go?

Anyway, if it helps, this was brought to mind by a passage from the short story 'Legeia' by Edgar Allan Poe.

For context, the narrator is describing how aesthetic parallels between Legeia and the natural world (as along Diotima’s model of ascension) tantalize him with a sense of metempsychotic foreknowledge:

Quote:

There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact [...] that, in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression – felt it approaching – yet not quite be mine – and so at length entirely depart! And [...] I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine – in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven [...] in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books.