ores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with
satisfaction, tr r r conk! and each in his turn, down to the
flabbiest paunched, repeats the same, that there be no mistake;
and then the bowl goes round again and again, until the sun
disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under
the pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and
pausing for a reply." 16

The doctrine of the metempsychosis, which was the priest's threat
against sin, was the poet's interpretation of life. The former
gave by it a terrible emphasis to the moral law; the latter
imparted by it an unequalled tenderness of interest to the
contemplation of the world. To the believer in it in its fullest
development, the mountains piled towering to the sky and the
plains stretching into trackless distance were the conscious dust
of souls; the ocean, heaving in tempest or sleeping in moonlight,
was a sea of spirits, every drop once a man. Each animated form
that caught his attention might be the dwelling of some ancestor,
or of some once cherished companion of his own. Hence the Hindu's
so sensitive kindness towards animals:

16 Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, p. 137.

"Crush not the feeble, inoffensive worm: Thy sister's spirit wears
that humble form. Why should thy cruel arrow smite yon bird? In
him thy brother's plaintive song is beard. Let not thine anger on
thy dog descend: That faithful animal was once thy friend."

There is a strange grandeur, an affecting mystery, in the view of
the creation from the stand point of the metempsychosis. It is an
awful dream palace all aswarm with falling and climbing creatures
clothed in ever shifting disguises. The races and changes of being
constitute a boundless masquerade of souls, whose bodies are
vizards and whose fortunes poetic retribution. The motive
furnished by the doctrine to self denial and toil has a peerless
sublimity. In our Western world, the hope of acquiring large
possessions, or of attaining an exalted office, often stimulates
men to heroic efforts of labor and endurance. What, then, should
we not expect from the application to the imaginative minds of the
Eastern world of a motive which, transcending all set limits,
offers unheard of prizes, to be plucked in life after life, and at
the end unveils, for the occupancy of the patient aspirant, the
Throne of Immensity? No wonder that, under the propulsion of a
motive so exhaustless, a motive not remote nor abstr