How, indeed, should it be otherwise? What science could ever hope to measure the infinite possibilities of psychical combination? And the present in every countenance is a recombination of the past;--the living is always a resurrection of the dead. The sympathies and the fears, the hopes and the repulsions that faces inspire, are but revivals and reiterations,--echoes of sentiency created in millions of minds by immeasurable experience operating through immeasurable time. My friend of this hour, though no more identical with his forefathers than any single ripple of a current is identical with all the ripples that ever preceded it, is nevertheless by soul-composition one with myriads known and loved in other lands and in other lives,--in times recorded and in times forgotten,--in cities that still remain and in cities that have ceased to be,--by thousands of my vanished selves.
When you first saw her your heart leaped, and a tingling shocked through all your blood like a gush of electricity. Simultaneously your senses were changed, and long so remained.
That sudden throb was the awakening of your dead;--and that thrill was made by the swarming and the crowding of them;--and that change of sense was wrought only by their multitudinous desire,--for which reason it seemed _an intensification_. They remembered having loved a number of young persons somewhat resembling her. But where, or when, they did not recollect. They--(and They, of course, are You)--had drunk of Lethe many times since then.
The true name of the River of Forgetfulness is the River of Death--though you may not find authority for the statement in classical dictionaries. But the Greek story, that the waters of Lethe bring to weary souls oblivion of the past, is not quite true. One draught will indeed numb and becloud some forms of memory,--will efface the remembrance of dates and names and of other trifling details;--but a million draughts will not produce total oblivion. Even the destruction of the world would not have that result. _Nothing is absolutely forgotten except the non-essential._ The essential can, at most, only be dimmed by the drinking of Lethe.
It was because of billions of billions of memories amassed through trillions of lives, and blended within you into some one vague delicious image, that you came to believe a certain being more beautiful than the sun. The delusion signified that she happened to resemble this composite,--mnemonic shadowing of all the dead women related to the loves of your innumerable lives. And this first part of your experience, when you could not understand,--when you fancied the beloved a witch, and never even dreamed that the witchery might be the work of ghosts, was--the Period of Wonder.