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 concurred in Alice Meynell's last statement, and have felt that the mysterious power which is impressing itself in their verse is the genius of dead poets, mysteriously finding expression in their disciple's song. A characteristic example of this attitude is Alfred Noyes' account of Chapman's sensations, when he attempted to complete Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_. Chapman tells his brother poets: I have thought, sometimes, when I have tried To work his will, the hand that moved my pen Was mine and yet--not mine. The bodily mask Is mine, and sometimes dull as clay it sleeps With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come, Oracular glories, visionary gleams, And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings. [Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.] The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead wife shall inspire his poetry. One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes: