In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth, the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and a deep forgetfulness--only short of absolute--cuts it off from his every-day consciousness. In his present reality he finds himself in a land of darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking out only on the ghostly images that flit across his prison wall, cast there by the objects that move between his back and the light of a mysterious fire behind him and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the bodily eye: the estate of the lowly savage, whom superstition and ignorance seem to hold as their captive for ever. But, though his high home and his glory of other days have left no conscious memory in the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they have not departed without leaving a trace behind. For forgetfulness is not blank non-existence. The sample of humanity inherits the birthright of his fathers--he has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are his, if he can mature himself to take possession of them. He suffers from the pains of growth, from the sense of disparity between what he is and what he may and should be--from the noble uneasiness and dissatisfaction of a being who feels--if he does not know--his infinite potentialities. For these potentialities--otherwise they have no title even to that name--are also actualities, yet actualities which protest their own incompleteness, and crave imperiously for what they lack. What he has is his right, but his right only in so far as it is also his duty. It is as such, and only as such, that he still retains the soul in all its prerogatives: as the right, which is the duty, of knowledge. Such a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised, possession is what Plato has called _Eros_, or Love. But it is a Love whose wings are at first invisible, and who often seems rather to crawl among ignoble things than to soar in the free fresh air.