Chapter VII: Introduction (4)

“If metempsychosis is included in the scheme of the divine government of the world, this difficulty disappears altogether. Considered from this point of view, every one is born into the state which he has fairly earned by his own previous history. He carries with him from one stage of existence to another the habits or tendencies which he has formed, the dispositions which he has indulged, the passions which he has not chastised, but has voluntarily allowed to lead him into vice and crime. No active interference of retributive justice is needed, except in selecting for the place of his new birth a home with appropriate surroundings—perhaps such a home as through his evil passions he has made for others. The doctrine of inherited sin and its consequences is a hard lesson to be learned. We submit with enforced resignation to the stern decree, corroborated as it is by every day’s observation of the ordinary course of this world’s affairs, that the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. But no one can complain of the dispositions and endowments which he has inherited, so to speak, from himself; that is, from his former self in a previous stage of existence. If, for instance, he has neglected his opportunities and fostered his lower appetites in his childhood, if he was then wayward and self-indulgent, indolent, deceitful, and vicious, it is right and just that, in his manhood and old age, he should experience the bitter consequences of his youthful follies. If he has voluntarily made himself a brute, a brute he must remain. The child is father of the man, who often inherits from him a sad patrimony. There is an awful meaning, if we will but take it to heart, in the solemn announcement of the angel in the apocalyptic vision: ‘He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still!’ And it matters not, so far as the justice of the sentence is concerned, whether the former self, from whom we receive this heritage, was the child who, not many years ago, bore the same name with our present self, or one who bore a different name, who was born in another age and perhaps another hemisphere, and of whose sad history we have not now the faintest remembrance. We know that our personal identity actually extends farther back, and links together more passages of our life, than what is now present to consciousness; though it is true that we have no direct evidence of this continuity and sameness of being beyond what is attested by memory. But we may have indirect evidence of it from the testimony of others in the case of our own infancy, or from revelation, or through reasoning from analogy and from the similarity of cases and characters. The soul, said the Hindoos, is in the body like a bird in a cage, or like a pilot who steers a ship, and seeks a new vessel when the old one is worn out.

“Nothing prevents us, however, from believing that the probation of any one soul extends continuously through a long series of successive existences upon earth, each successive act in the whole life history being retributive for what went before. For this is the universal law of being, whether of matter or mind; everything changes, nothing dies in the sense of being annihilated. What we call death is only the resolution of a complex body into its constituent parts, nothing that is truly one and indivisible being lost or destroyed in the process. In combustion or any other rapid chemical change, according to the admission of the materialists themselves, not an atom of matter is ever generated or ever ceases to be; it only escapes from one combination to enter upon another. Then the human soul, which, as we know from consciousness, is absolutely one and indivisible, only passes on after the dissolution of what was once its home to animate another body. In this sense we can easily accept the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Our future life is not, at any rate not while the present administration of this world’s affairs continues, to be some inconceivable form of merely spiritual being. It will be clothed again with a body, which may or may not be in part the same with the one which it has just left. Leibnitz held that the soul is never entirely divorced from matter, but carries on some portion of what was its earthly covering into a subsequent stage of existence.... We can easily imagine and believe that every person now living is a _re_presentation of some one who lived perhaps centuries ago under another name, in another country, it may be not with the same line of ancestry, and yet one and the same with him in his inmost being and essential character. His surroundings are changed; the old house of flesh has been torn down and rebuilt; but the tenant is still the same. He has come down from some former generation, bringing with him what may be either a help or a hindrance; namely, the character and tendencies which he there formed and nurtured. And herein is retribution; he has entered upon a new stage of probation, and in it he has now to learn what the character which he there formed naturally leads to when tried upon a new and perhaps broader theatre. If this be not so, tell me why men are born with characters so unlike and with tendencies so depraved. In a sense far more literal than was intended by the poet, it may be true of every country churchyard, that

‘Some mute inglorious Milton there may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’

They bring with them no recollection of the incidents of their former life, as such memory would unfit them for the new part which they have to play. But they are still the same in the principles and modes of conduct, in the inmost springs of action, which the forgotten incidents of their former life have developed and strengthened. They are the same in all the essential points which made them formerly a blessing or a curse to all with whom they came immediately in contact, and through which they will again become sources of weal or woe to their environment. Of course, these inborn tendencies may be either exaggerated or chastised by the lessons of a new experience, by the exercise of reflection, and by habitually heeding or neglecting the monitions of conscience. But they still exist as original tendencies, and as such they must make either the upward or the downward path more easy, more natural, and more likely to reach a goal so remote that it would otherwise be unattainable.

“To make this more clear, let me refer to the pregnant distinction so admirably illustrated by Kant between what he calls the Intelligible Character and the Empirical or acquired Character. The former is the primitive foundation on which the latter, which directly determines our conduct for the time being, is built. To a great extent, though not entirely, we are what we are through the influence of what have been our surroundings—through our education, our companions, our habits, and our associations. But these influences must have had a primitive basis to work upon, and can only modify the operation of the native germs, not change their nature; and they will modify these more or less profoundly according as they are more or less amenable to outside influences and manifest more or less decidedly a bias in one direction or another. What the future plant will be depends much more on the specific nature of the seed which is sown than on the fertility or barrenness of the soil into which it is cast. The latter only determine whether it shall be a vigorous plant or a weak one, whether in fact it shall grow at all or only rot in the ground; but they do not determine the specific direction of its development, whether it shall be an oak, a willow, or an ivy-bush. The Empirical or acquired Character, as it is open to observation, is a phenomenon; it is what the man _appears_ to be, or what he has become under the shaping influence of the circumstances to which he has been exposed. But the Intelligible Character, the inmost kernel of his real being, is a noumenon, and escapes external observation; we can judge of its nature only indirectly from its effects; that is to say, from the conduct which it has coöperated to produce. A change taking place in any substance must be the joint result of two factors; namely, its proper cause operating upon it from without, and the thing’s own nature or internal constitution. Thus the same degree of heat acts very differently upon different substances, say, on wax, iron, water, clay, or powder. In like manner, a given motive, say, the desire of wealth, when acting on different persons, though with the same strength or intensity, may lead to very dissimilar results; it makes one man a thief and another a miser, renders one envious and another energetic and industrious. If frequently indulged, it forms a fixed habit, and thus becomes an element in the acquired or empirical character.

“Now Kant, with the bias of a necessitarian, places our freedom and our responsibility in the realm of noumena, attributing them exclusively to our Intelligible Character. As to the acquired character when once formed, he says we _must_ act in accordance with it, and therefore we are not accountable for the particular act to which it led, since that we could not help. After I have once formed a habit of lying or stealing, should an opportunity and temptation recur, I _must_ repeat the offense. But our inborn character, which expresses what we really are, as a noumenon, lies outside of time, space, and causality, and therefore cannot be led astray by temptation or external circumstances, but is entirely free. Herein solely consists our merit or our guilt. Hence Kant would make us responsible not for the particular crime, which we could not help committing, but for being such a person as to be capable of that crime. We are accountable not for what we do, but for what we are. We are to be punished not for stealing this horse, but for being a rogue, or thief in grain, for being naturally inclined to stealing....

“I know not how it may seem to others, but to me there is something inexpressibly consolatory and inspiring in the thought that the great and good of other days have not finally accomplished their earthly career, have not left us desolate, but that they are still with us, in the flesh, though we know them not, and though in one sense they do not really know themselves, because they have no remembrance of a former life in which they were trained for the work which they are now doing. But they are essentially the same beings, for they have the same intellect and character as before, and sameness in these two respects is all that constitutes our notion of personal identity. We are unwilling to believe that their beneficent activity was limited to one short life on earth, at the close of which there opened to them an eternity without change, without farther trial or action, and seemingly having no other purpose than unlimited enjoyment. Such a conception of immortality is exposed to Schopenhauer’s sarcasm, that if effort and progress are possible only in the present life, and no want or suffering can be endured except as the penalties of sin, there remains for heaven only the weariness of nothing to do. An eternity either of reward or punishment would seem to be inadequately earned by one brief period of probation. It is far more reasonable to believe that the future life which we are taught to expect will be similar to the present one, and will be spent in this world, though we shall carry forward to it the burden or the blessing entailed upon us by our past career. Besides the spiritual meaning of the doctrine of regeneration, besides the new birth which is ‘of water and of the Spirit,’ there may be a literal meaning in the solemn words of the Saviour, ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’...

“I should be sorry to believe that that remarkable group of excellent scholars, thinkers, and divines, the Port-Royalists, who upheld the cause of Jansenism for three quarters of a century, have finally passed away from earth. On the contrary, if anywhere in these later times the model of a Christian scholar and historian could be found, we might well say that the spirit of Tillemont lives again in him. If we could find one who united in himself all the best qualities of a Christian teacher, stainless in heart and life, we might well believe that it was Lancelot in another earthly form. For either Pascal or Arnauld, it must be admitted that we should not know where to look; if their spirits are yet in this world, they must be in the obscurity of some lowly station.[28]

“All this speculation, I repeat, is completely fanciful, and can serve no other purpose than to show, even if the doctrine of metempsychosis were true, that we should not be able to identify one person in any two of his successive appearances upon earth. We surely could not know of him in this respect any more than he knows of himself; and, as already said, the total break in memory at the beginning of every successive life must prevent the newly born from recognizing the oneness of his own being with any former existence in an earthly shape.

“Curiously enough this want of self-knowledge is confessed in the only case in which we have a direct assertion in Scripture (if language is to be interpreted in its ordinary literal meaning and not strained into a figurative sense), that one of the heroes of the olden time had reappeared upon earth under a new name, as the forerunner of a new dispensation. At the time of the Saviour there appears to have been a general expectation among the Jews that the coming of the Messiah was to be heralded by the reappearance upon earth of the prophet Elijah, this expectation being founded upon the text in Malachi: ‘Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.’ Early in the public ministry of John the Baptist, we read that the belief prevailed among his hearers that this prophecy was fulfilled in him. But when directly asked, ‘Art thou Elias?’ he replied, ‘I am not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No.’ He had no memory of his former life under that name; and though he must have been aware of the popular belief upon the subject, and of the many points of similarity between his own career and that of the great restorer of the worship of the true God at an earlier period, he was too honest to claim an authority which he did not positively know to belong to him.

“Yet we learn that our Lord subsequently twice declared, in very distinct language, that Elijah and John the Baptist were really one and the same person. Once, while John was still alive but in prison, Jesus told the multitude who thronged around him, ‘Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist;’ and he directly goes on to assert, ‘If ye will receive it, _this is Elias_, which was for to come.’ (Matt. xi. 14.) And again, after John was beheaded, Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Elias is come already and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed.’ ‘Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist.’ (Matt. xvii. 12, 13.) Still again, in the scene on the mount of Transfiguration. ‘Behold there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias;’ and it is said of the three disciples who were then in company with Jesus that, ‘When they were awake, they saw his glory and the two men that stood with him.’ (Luke ix. 30, 32.) That the commentators have not been willing to receive, in their obvious and literal meaning, assertions so direct and so frequently repeated as these, but have attempted to explain them away in a non-natural and metaphorical sense, is a fact which proves nothing but the existence of an invincible prejudice against the doctrine of the transmigration of souls....

“Assuming the doctrine to be well founded, it is for every person to determine with what character he will leave the world at the close of one stage of his earthly being, believing that with this same character thus trained for weal or woe he is inevitably at once to begin a new life, and thus either to rise or fall farther than ever. It seems to me that the dogma of a future life, so prolonged through a countless succession of other lives on earth until it becomes an immortality, is thus brought home to one with a force, a vividness and certainty, of which in no other form it is susceptible. It has been said that no prudent man, if the election were offered to him, would choose to live his present live over again; and as he whom the world calls _prudent_ does not usually cherish any lofty aspirations, the saying is probably true. We are all so conscious of the many errors and sins that we have committed that the retrospect is a saddening one; and worldly wisdom would probably whisper, ‘It is best to stop here, and not try such a career over again.’ But every one would ardently desire a renewal of his earthly experience if assured that he could enter upon it under better auspices, if he believed that what we call death is not the end of all things even here below, but that the soul is then standing upon the threshold of a new stage of earthly existence, which is to be brighter or darker than the one it is just quitting, according as there is carried forward into it a higher or lower purpose....

“This doctrine also suggests, as it seems to me, a clearer and more satisfactory explanation than would otherwise be possible of the fall of man through disobedience and its consequences, as narrated in Genesis and interpreted by St. Paul. Certainly the primeval man, the Adam of each one of us, when he first through the inspiration of Deity ‘became a living soul,’ was born into a paradise, an Eden, of entire purity and innocence, and in that state he talked directly with God. There was also given to him through his conscience the revelation of a divine law, an absolute command, to preserve this blessed state through restraining his appetites and lower impulses to action, and making the love of holiness superior even to the love of knowledge. But man was tempted by his appetites to transgress this law; he aspired after a knowledge of good and evil, which can be attained only through experience of evil, and he thereby fell from innocence into a state of sin, which necessarily corrupted his whole future being. The habit of disobedience once formed, sin in the same person has a self-continuing and self-multiplying power. The stain carried down from a former life becomes darker and more inveterate in the life that follows. We have no reason to complain of the corruption of human nature, for the world is what we have made it to be by our own act. The burden has not been transmitted to us by others, but has been inherited from ourselves; that is, from our former selves. Redemption from it by man’s own effort thus became impossible. This is death, moral death, the only death of which a human soul is capable.

“Thus far we have considered metempsychosis as a means of retribution; that is, of awarding to each soul in the next future life upon which it is entering that compensation either of weal or woe which it has earned for itself,—has in fact necessarily entailed upon itself by its conduct in the life which it has just completed. But the transmigration of souls may be regarded also in another light, as that portion of the divine government of this world’s affairs which maintains distributive justice, since, through its agency, in the long run, all inequalities of condition and favoring or unfavoring circumstances may be compensated, and each person may have his or her equitable share of opportunities for good and of the requisite means for discipline and improvement. If our view be confined within the limits of a single earthly life, it must be confessed that the inequality is glaring enough, so that it seems to justify the honest doubts of the trembling inquirer, while it has offered a broad mark for the scoffs and declamation of the confirmed unbeliever.

“This hypothesis—and I do not claim for it any other character than that of a highly probable and consolatory hypothesis—also throws a new and welcome light upon the deep and dark problem of the origin of evil. In the first place, according to the views which have now been taken, the sufferings which are the immediate consequence and punishment of sin are properly left out of the account, since these evince the goodness of God no less than the happiness resulting from virtue, the purpose in both cases being to advance man’s highest interests by the improvement of his moral character; just as the affectionate parent rewards the obedience and punishes the faults of his child, love equally constraining him to adopt either course. And how many of the evils borne both by individuals and by communities are attributable directly to their own misconduct, to their willful disregard of the monitions of conscience! The body which is now languid from inaction through sloth, and enfeebled or racked by disease, might have been active, vigorous, and sound, prompt to second every wish of its owner, and ministering to his enjoyment through every sense and limb. And could we know all, could we extend our vision over the whole history of our former self, how would our estimate of this purely retributive character of our present suffering be enlarged and confirmed! It would then be evident that no portion of it is gratuitous or purposeless. And the community which is now torn with civil dissension, desolated by war, or prostrated in an unequal strife with its rivals, might have been peaceful, affluent, and flourishing, if rulers and ruled had heeded the stern calls of duty, instead of blindly following their own tumultuous passions. And as nations, too, have a continuous life, like that of a river, through a constant change of their constituent parts, many of their woes are clearly attributable to the misdeeds of their former selves. Once admit the great truth that virtue, not happiness, is man’s highest interest, and most of the pains of this life indicate the goodness and justice of God quite as much as its pleasures.

“But according to the theory which we are now considering, a still larger deduction must be made from the amount of apparent evil at any one time visible in the world. All the inequalities in the lot of mankind, which have prompted what are perhaps the bitterest of all complaints, and have served skeptics like Hume and J. S. Mill as a reason for the darkest imputations upon divine justice in the government of the world, disappear from the picture altogether. Excepting only what we have just considered, the retributive consequences of more or less sin, there are no inequalities. All start from the same point, and journey through the same vicissitudes of existence, exhausting sooner or later all varieties of condition. Prince and peasant, bond and free, barbarian and cultured, all share alike whatever weal or woe there is in the world, because all must at some future time change places with each other. But after these two large deductions from the amount complained of, what remains? Very little, certainly, which we cannot even now see through; that is, which we cannot assign an adequate reason for; and to the eye of faith nothing remains. The world becomes a mirror which reflects without blot or shadow the infinite goodness of its Creator and Governor. Death remains; but that is no evil, for what we call death is only the introduction to another life on earth, and if this be not a higher and better life than the one just ended, it is our own fault. Our life is really continuous, and the fact that the subsequent stages of it lie beyond our present range of immediate vision is of no more importance, and no more an evil, than the corresponding fact that we do not now remember our previous existence in antecedent ages. Death alone, or in itself considered, apart from the antecedent dread of it which is irrational, and apart from the injury to the feelings of the survivors, which is a necessary consequence of that attachment to each other from which, so much of our happiness springs, is not even an apparent evil; it is mere change and development, like the passage from the embryonic to the adult condition, from the blossom to the fruit.”

22. In “Ways of the Spirit, and other Essays,” by Professor Frederick Henry Hedge, the twelfth chapter, upon “The Human Soul,” strongly advocates reincarnation. By the publishers’ consent we reprint the pages referring to it:—

“We reach back with our recollection and find no beginning of existence. Who of us knows anything except by report of the first two years of earthly life? No one remembers the time when he first said ‘I,’ or thought ‘I.’ We began to exist for others before we began to exist for ourselves. Our experience is not co-extensive with our being, and memory does not comprehend it. We bear not the root, but the root us.

“What is the root? We call it soul. _Our_ soul, we call it; properly speaking, it is not ours, but we are its. It is not a part of us, but we are a part of it. It is not one article in an inventory of articles which together make up our individuality, but the root of that individuality. It is larger than we are, and other than we are—that is, than our conscious self. The conscious self does not begin until some time after the birth of the individual. It is not aboriginal, but a product,—as it were, the blossoming of an individuality. We may suppose countless souls which never bear this product, which never blossom into self. And the soul which does so blossom exists before that blossom unfolds.

“How long before, it is impossible to say; whether the birth, for example, of a human individual is the soul’s beginning to be; whether a new soul is furnished to each new body, or the body given to a preexisting soul. It is a question on which theology throws no light, and which psychology but faintly illustrates. But so far as that faint illustration reaches it favors the supposition of preëxistence. That supposition seems best to match the supposed continued existence of the soul hereafter. Whatever had a beginning in time, it should seem must end in time. The eternal destination which faith ascribes to the soul presupposes an eternal origin. On the other hand, if the preëxistence of the soul were assured it would carry the assurance of immortality.

An obvious objection, and one often urged against this hypothesis, is the absence of any recollection of a previous life. If the soul existed before its union with this present organization, why does it never recall any circumstance, scene, or experience of its former state? There have been those who professed to remember a past existence; but without regarding those pretended reminiscences, or regarding them only as illusions, I answer that the previous existence may not have been a conscious existence. In that case there would have been no recorded experience, and consequently nothing to recall. But suppose a conscious existence antecedent to the present, the soul could not preserve the record of a former organization. The new organization with its new entries must necessarily efface the record of the old. For memory depends on the continuity of association. When the thread of that continuity is broken, the knowledge of the past is gone. If, in a state of unconsciousness, one were taken entirely out of his present surroundings; if falling asleep in one set of circumstances, like Christopher Sly in that play, he were to wake in another, were to wake to entirely new conditions; especially if during that sleep his body were to undergo a change,—he would lose on waking all knowledge of the former life for want of a connecting link between it and the new. And this, according to the supposition, is precisely what has happened to the soul at birth. The birth into the present was the death of the old,—‘a sleep and a forgetting.’ The soul went to sleep in one body, it woke in a new. The sleep is a gulf of oblivion between the two.

And a happy thing, if the soul preëxisted, it is for us that we remember nothing of its former life. The memory of a past existence would be a drag on the present, engrossing our attention much to the prejudice of this life’s interests and claims. The backward-looking soul would dwell in the past instead of the present, and miss the best uses of life.

But though on the supposition of a former existence the soul would not be likely to preserve the record of that existence, it would nevertheless retain the effect. It would not, on assuming its present conditions, be as though it had never before been. Its past experience would essentially modify it; it would take a character from its former state. If a moral and intellectual being, it would bring into the world of its present destination certain tendencies and dispositions, the growth of a previous life. And thus the moral law and the moral nature of the soul would assert themselves with retributions transcending the limits of a single existence, and reaching on from life to life of the pilgrim soul.

It is commonly conceded that there are native differences of character in men,—different propensities, tempers, not wholly explained by difference of circumstances or education. They show themselves where circumstances and education have been the same; they seem to be innate. These are sometimes ascribed to organization. But organization is not final. That, again, requires to be explained. According to my thinking, it is the soul that makes organization, not organization the soul. The supposition of a previous existence would best explain these differences as something carried over from life to life,—the harvest of seed that was sown in other states, and whose fruit remains, although the sowing is remembered no more.

“This was the theory of the most learned and acute of the Christian Fathers (Origen), and though never adopted and sanctioned by the church, has been occasionally revived in later time. Of all the theories respecting the origin of the soul it seems to me the most plausible, and therefore the one most likely to throw light on the question of a life to come.”

V.
THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION IN WESTERN LITERATURE.

Poets, the first instructors of mankind.—HORACE.

Poets are the truest diviners of nature.—BULWER-LYTTON.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves
understand.—PLATO.

Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration
should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead.—EMERSON.

We call those poets who are first to mark
Through earth’s dull mist the coming of the dawn,
Who see in twilight’s gloom the first pale spark
While others only note that day is gone.
HOLMES.

O brave poets, keep back nothing,
Nor mix falsehood with the whole.
Look up Godward! Speak the truth in
Worthy song from earnest soul!
Hold, in high poetic duty
Truest Truth, the fairest beauty.
MRS. BROWNING.

The spirit of the Poets came at morn
To Sinai, summoned by the Lord’s command,
Singers and Seers; those born and those unborn
The chosen souls of men, a solemn band.

The noble army ranged, in viewless might
Around that mountain peak which pierces heaven;
Greater and lesser teachers, sons of light,
Their number was ten thousand score and seven.

Then Allah took a covenant with his own,
Saying, “My wisdom and my word receive.
Speak of me unto men, known or unknown,
Heard or unheard: bid such as will believe.”

“Bear witness then,” spake Allah, “souls most dear,
I am your Lord, and ye heralds of mine.”
Thenceforward through all lands his Poets bear
The message of the mystery divine.
EDWIN ARNOLD.

V.
THE POETRY OF REINCARNATION IN WESTERN LITERATURE.

The poets are the seers of the race. Their best work comes from the intuitional heights where they dwell, conveying truths beyond reason, not understood even by themselves, but merely transmitted through them. They are the few tall pines towering above the common forest to an extraordinary exaltation, where they catch the earliest and latest sunbeams which prolong their day far beyond the limits below, and penetrating into the rare upper currents whose whisperings seldom descend to the crowd.

However diverse the forms of their expression, the heart of it is thoroughly harmonious. They are always prophets voicing a divine message received in the mount, and in these modern days they are almost the only prophets we have. Therefore it is not a mere pleasantry to collect their testimony upon an unusual theme. When it is found that, though working independently, they are in deep accord upon reincarnation, the inevitable conclusion is that their common inspiration means something—namely, that their gospel is worth receiving.

It may be objected that these poems are merely dreamy effusions along the same line of lunacy, with no real attachment to the solid foundations upon which all wholesome poetry is based; that they are kinks in the intellects of genius displaying the weakness of men otherwise strong. But so universal a feeling cannot be disposed of in that way, especially when it is found to contribute to the solution of life’s mystery. All the poets believe in immortality, though unaided reason and observation cannot demonstrate it. Some inexperienced people deride the fact that nearly all poetry centres upon the theme of Love—the most illogical and airy of sentiments. But the deepest sense of the world is nourished by the certainty of these “vague” truths. So the presence of reincarnation in the creed of the poets may give us courage to confide in our own impressions, for “all men are poets at heart.” What they have dared publish we may venture to believe and will find a source of strength.

It is well known that the idea of reincarnation abounds in oriental poetry. But as our purpose is to demonstrate the prevalence of the same thought among our own poets, most of whom are wholly independent of eastern influence, we shall here confine our attention to the spontaneous utterances of American and European poets. We shall find that the great majority of the highest occidental poets lean toward this thought, and many of them unhesitatingly avow it. For convenience we divide our study into four parts, comprising forty-two authors.

Part I. American Poets, (twelve.)

II. British Poets, (seventeen.)

III. Continental Poets, (six.)

IV. Platonic Poets, (seven.)