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.
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