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.

The woman is dead. In the room where her body died, flowers have been
placed, offerings to the dead. Also there are flowers upon the bed. The
ghost of the woman observes all this, but she does not feel either glad or
sad because of it; she is thinking only of the living lover, who was not
there when she died, but far away. She wants to know whether he really
loved her, whether he will really be sorry to hear that she is dead.
Outside the room of death the birds are singing; in the fields beyond the
windows peasants are working, and talking as they work. But the ghost does
not listen to these sounds. The ghost remains in the room only for love's
sake; she can not go away until the lover comes. At last she hears him
coming. She knows the sound of the step; she knows the touch of the hand
upon the lock of the door. And instantly, before she sees him at all, she
first feels delight. Already it seems to her that she can smell the
perfume of the flowers of heaven; it then seems to her that about her
head, as about the head of an angel, a circle of glory is shaping itself,
and the real heaven, the Heaven of Love, is at hand.

How very beautiful this is. There