METAMORPHOSES.
Life is a current of spiritual forces. In perpetual tides, the stream traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspectives of things, receding from forehead and face into cerebellum and spine, to be replenished night by night from these springs of vigor. The Genius trims our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night. Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations. Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. Vast systems of sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences, absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life and light; as if stirred by the nocturnal impulse we climbed the empyrean, still crediting the superstition of our affinities with the starry orbs—
"Eternal fathers of whate'er exists below."
Or, pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the abyss of origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering umbilici, skirting the shores of our nativity; or, ascending spine-wise, traverse the hierarchy of gifts. How we grope strangely! Seeking the One amidst the many, we lose ourselves in finding the One we lost. We enter bodies of our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all sense of the personality,—despite these vagaries of the night, these opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber, and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. Some reliques of the ancient consciousness survive, recalling our previous history and experiences.[[N]]
"Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."
And but for our surface and distracted lives,—lived here for the most part in the senses,—we should have never lost the consciousness of our descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion—some more, some less—it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent into the flesh and decease out of it.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, Nor yet in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home."