And the spirit of the woman that long ago had done the wrong, also found incarnation again; and the two meeting, are drawn to each other by what people call love, but what is really Greater Memory, the recollection of past lives.  But now all is happiness for them, because the weaker and worse part of each has really died and has been left hundreds of years behind, and only the higher nature has been born again.  All that ought not to have been is not; but all that ought to be now is.  This is really an evolutionary teaching, but it is also poetical license, for the immoral side of mankind does not by any means die so quickly as the poet supposes.  It is perhaps a question of many tens of thousands of years to get rid of a few of our simpler faults.  Anyway, the fancy charms us and tempts us really to hope that these things might be so.

While the poets of our time so extend the history of a love backwards beyond this life, we might expect them to do the very same thing in the other direction.  I do not refer to reunion in heaven, or anything of that sort, but simply to affection continued after death.  There are some very pretty fancies of the kind.  But they can not prove to you quite so interesting as the poems which treat the recollection of past life.  When we consider the past imaginatively, we have some ground to stand on.  The past has been—­there is no doubt about that.  The fact that we are at this moment alive makes it seem sufficiently true that we were alive thousands or millions of years ago.  But when we turn to the future for poetical inspiration, the case is very different.  There we must imagine without having anything to stand upon in the way of experience.  Of course if born again into a body we could imagine many things; but there is the ghostly interval between death and birth which nobody is able to tell us about.  Here the poet depends upon dream experiences, and it is of such an experience that Christina Rossetti speaks in her beautiful poem entitled “A Pause.”

  They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
    And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay,
    While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way. 
  I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
  Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves: 
  Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
    My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:—­
  Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.

  At length there came the step upon the stair,
    Upon the lock the old familiar hand: 
  Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
    Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
  Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
    Put on a glory, and my soul expand.