All that’s impermanent Is but a likeness. The Unattainable Here findeth witness; The Indescribable, Here is it done; The Ever-womanly Leadeth us on. A wealth of occult meaning is packed into these eight closing lines of the grand drama, which is designed to depict the course of the soul from Heaven, through earth, back to Heaven. All that is impermanent, or of the earth, belonging to the realm of matter, is but a likeness, or symbol, designed for the instruction of man, who must learn to read the lesson if he is to progress. The Unattainable in the desires of those on and of the earth finds witness, or comes to pass, in the realization of all aspirations in the life beyond. The indescribable is done there, because man in the flesh has no senses adequate to comprehend those things pertaining to a higher plane of existence. The Ever-womanly is that which makes progress of the soul possible—the feminine principle which attracts the masculine, or pure spirit, to its opposite pole and thereby causes it to manifest itself. It is by these successive manifestations that the individual is carried forward, enriched by the experience which only thus, through the attraction of the Ever-womanly, or eternal feminine principle, is attained. So the Ever-womanly, or that whereby God the spirit is made manifest in matter, is the means to lead the soul of man on its course through the grandest possibilities of the Universe to the most exalted heights of the Indescribable. Wordsworth, in his _Ode on Immortality_, says: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Had had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From God, who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy; But he beholds the light, and whence it flows— He sees it in his joy. The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature’s priest. And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. It is very clear here that Wordsworth is setting down the theory of “Reincarnation.” For he says the soul had elsewhere its setting; in order to set elsewhere, it must have had elsewhere an existence. He also refers, quite as curiously as do Whitman and Whittier, to a coming from the east, as if he had memories of a previous life in some oriental land where such ideas prevailed. Shelley in _Prometheus Unbound_, sings: