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.