in an oyster shell. [Footnote: _Phaedrus_, 250.]

For the poet is apt to transfer Plato's praise of the philosopher to
himself, declaring that "he alone has wings, and this is just, for he is
always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in
recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which
He is what He is." [Footnote: _Ibid_., 249.]

If the poet exalts memory to this station, he may indeed claim that he
is not furtively adoring his own petty powers, when he reverences the
visions which Mnemosyne vouchsafes to him. And indeed Plato's account of
memory is congenial to many poets. Shelley is probably the most serious
of the nineteenth century singers in claiming an ideal life for the
soul, before its birth into this world. [Footnote: See _Prince
Athanase_. For Matthew Arnold's views, see _Self Deception_.]
Wordsworth's adherence to this view is as widely known as the _Ode on
Immortality_. As an explanation for inspiration, the theory recurs in
verse of other poets. One writer inquires,

Are these wild thoughts, thus fettered in my rhymes,
Indeed the product of my heart and brain?
[Footnote: Henry Timrod, _Sonnet_.]

and decides that the only way to account for the occasional gleams of
insight in his verse is by assuming a prenatal life for the soul.
Another maintains of poetry,

Her touch is a vibration and a light
From worlds before and after.
[Footnote: Edwin Markham, _Poetry_. Another recent poem on prenatal
inspiration is _The Dream I Dreamed Before I Was Born_ (1919), by
Dorothea Laurence Mann.]

Perhaps Alice Meynell's _A Song of Derivations_ is the most natural
and unforced of these verses. She muses:

... Mixed with memories not my own
The sweet streams throng into my breast.
Before this life began to be
The happy songs that wake in me
Woke long ago, and far apart.
Heavily on this little heart
Presses this immortality.

This poem, however, is not so consistent as the others with the Platonic
theory of reminiscence. It is a previous existence in this world, rather
than in ideal realms, which Alice Meynell assumes for her inspirations.
She continues,

I come from nothing, but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?
Down through long links of death and birth,
From the past poets of the earth,
My immortality is there.

Certain singers who seem not to have been affected by the philosophical
argument for reminiscence have concur