And then I went down to the sea,
    And heard it murmuring too,
  Part of an ancient mystery,
    All made of me and you: 
  How many a thousand years ago
    I loved, and you were sweet—­
  Longer I could not stay, and so
    I fled back to your feet.

The last stanza especially expresses the idea that I have been telling you about; but in a poem entitled “Greater Memory” the idea is much more fully expressed.  By “greater memory” you must understand the memory beyond this life into past stages of existence.  This piece has become a part of the nineteenth century poetry that will live; and a few of the best stanzas deserve to be quoted,

  In the heart there lay buried for years
  Love’s story of passion and tears;
  Of the heaven that two had begun
    And the horror that tore them apart;
  When one was love’s slayer, but one
    Made a grave for the love in his heart.

  The long years pass’d weary and lone
  And it lay there and changed there unknown;
  Then one day from its innermost place,
    In the shamed and ruin’d love’s stead,
  Love arose with a glorified face,
    Like an angel that comes from the dead.

  It uplifted the stone that was set
  On that tomb which the heart held yet;
  But the sorrow had moulder’d within
    And there came from the long closed door
  A dear image, that was not the sin
    Or the grief that lay buried before.

* * * * *

  There was never the stain of a tear
  On the face that was ever so dear;
  ’Twas the same in each lovelier way;
    ’Twas old love’s holier part,
  And the dream of the earliest day
    Brought back to the desolate heart.

  It was knowledge of all that had been
  In the thought, in the soul unseen;
  ’Twas the word which the lips could not say
    To redeem or recover the past. 
  It was more than was taken away
    Which the heart got back at the last.

  The passion that lost its spell,
  The rose that died where it fell,
  The look that was look’d in vain,
    The prayer that seemed lost evermore,
  They were found in the heart again,
    With all that the heart would restore.

Put into less mystical language the legend is this:  A young man and a young woman loved each other for a time; then they were separated by some great wrong—­we may suppose the woman was untrue.  The man always loved her memory, in spite of this wrong which she had done.  The two died and were buried; hundreds and hundreds of years they remained buried, and the dust of them mixed with the dust of the earth.  But in the perpetual order of things, a pure love never can die, though bodies may die and pass away.  So after many generations the pure love which this man had for a bad woman was born again in the heart of another man—­the same, yet not the same.