University of Virginia Library

III

Idea, god of Plato! one
With beauty, justice, truth and love:
Who, type by type, the world begun
From an ideal world above!
Reason, who into Nature wrought
Your real entities,—which are
Ideas,—giving to our star
Their beauty through reflected thought;
The reminiscences that flame,
Momental, through the mind of man,

4

Of things his memory can not name,
Lost things his knowledge can not scan,—
Hints of past periods are not these,
His soul hath lived since it had birth
In God?—Yea! who shall say that Earth
More ancient is than he who sees?