thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend
In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?"

The second method of explaining the descent of souls into this
life is by the supposition that the stable bliss, the uncontrasted
peace and sameness, of the heavenly experience, at last wearies
the people of Paradise, until they seek relief in a fall. The
perfect sweetness of heaven cloys, the utter routine and safety
tire, the salient spirits, till they long for the edge and hazard
of earthly exposure, and wander down to dwell in fleshly bodies
and breast the tempest of sin, strife, and sorrow, so as to give a
fresh charm once more to the repose and exempted joys of the
celestial realm. In this way, by a series of recurring lives below
and above, novelty and change with larger experience and more
vivid contentment are secured, the tedium and satiety of fixed
happiness and protection are modified by the relishing opposition
of varied trials of hardship and pain, the insufferable monotony
of immortality broken up and interpolated by epochs of surprise
and tingling dangers of probation.

"Mortals, behold! the very angels quit
Their mansions unsusceptible of change,
Amid your dangerous bowers to sit
And through your sharp vicissitudes to range!"

Thus round and round we run through an eternity of lives and
deaths. Surfeited with the unqualified pleasures of heaven, we
"straggle down to this terrene nativity:" When, amid the sour
exposures and cruel storms of the world, we have renewed our
appetite for the divine ambrosia of peace and sweetness, we
forsake the body and ascend to heaven; this constant recurrence
illustrating the great truths, that alternation is the law of
destiny, and that variety is the spice of life.

But the most common derivation of the present from a previous life
is that which explains the descent as a punishment for sin. In
that earlier and loftier state, souls abused their freedom, and
were doomed to expiate their offences by a banished, imprisoned,
and burdensome life on the earth. "The soul," Plutarch writes,
"has removed, not from Athens to Sardis, or from Corinth to
Lemnos, but from heaven to earth; and here, ill at ease, and
troubled in this new and strange place, she hangs her head like a
decaying plant."

Hundreds of passages to the same purport might easily be cited
from as many ancient writers. Sometimes this fall of souls from
their original estate was represented as a simultaneous event: a
part of t