vermore its twin elements, activity and desire."

But there is something unsatisfactory, even sad and dreary, in
this prospect of incessant migration. Must not the pilgrim pine
and tire for a goal of rest? Exhausted with wanderings, sated with
experiments, will he not pray for the exempted lot of a contented
fruition in repose? One must weary at last of being even so
sublime a vagabond as he whose nightly hostelries are stars. And,
besides, how will sundered friends and lovers, between whom, on
the road, races and worlds interpose, ever over take each other,
and be conjoined to journey hand in hand again or build a bower
together by the way? A poet of finest mould, in happiest mood,
once saw a leaf drop from a tree which overhung a mirroring
stream. The reflection of the leaf in the watery sky hollow far
below seemed to rise from beneath as swiftly as the object fell
from above; and the two, encountering at the surface, became one.
Then he sang, touching with his strain the very marrow of deepest
human desire,

"How speeds, from in the river's thought,
The spirit of the leaf that falls,
Its heaven in that calm bosom wrought,
As mine among yon crimson walls!
From the dry bough it spins, to greet
Its shadow on the placid river:
So might I my companions meet,
Nor roam the countless worlds forever!"

Moreover, some elements of this theory are too grotesque, are the
too rash inferences from a too crude induction, to win sober
credit to any extent. It is easy to devise and carry out in
consistent descriptive details the hypothesis that the soul has
risen, through ten thousand transitions, from the condition of red
earth or a tadpole to its present rank, and that,

"As it once crawl'd upon the sod, It yet shall grow to be a god;"

but what scientific evidence is there to confirm and establish the
supposition as a truth? Why, if it be so, to borrow the humorous
satire of good old Henry More,

"Then it will follow that cold stopping curd And harden'd moldy
cheese, when they have rid Due circuits through the heart, at last
shall speed Of life and sense, look thorough our thin eyes And
view the close wherein the cow did feed Whence they were milk'd:
grosse pie crust will grow wise, And pickled cucumbers sans doubt
philosophize!"

The form of this general outline stalks totteringly on stilts of
fancy, and sprawls headlong with a logical crash at the first
critical probe.

The final theory of the destination of souls,