completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs, the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves; in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. It is humanity itself now--abstract humanity--that [73] figures as the transmigrating soul, accumulating into its "colossal manhood" the experience of ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body. So it may be. There was nothing of all that, however, in the mind of the great English poet at the beginning of this century whose famous Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood, in which he made metempsychôsis his own, must still express for some minds something more than merely poetic truth. For Pythagoreanism too, like all the graver utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore also a constant tradition in its history, which will recur; fortifying this or that soul here or there in a part at least of that old sanguine assurance about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his disciples. Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the lines which perhaps suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so- called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines have shown themselves not otherwise than at home. [74] Happy, those days, he declares, Before I understood this place, Appointed for my second race; Or taught my soul to fancy ought But a white celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love; But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. O! how I long to travel back And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain, Where first I left my glorious train.-- But Ah! my soul with too much stay Is drunk; and staggers in the way. Some men a forward motion love, But I backward steps would move; And when this dust falls to the urn In that state I came return.