The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were;
but men and women are only half human. Every animal of
the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth
and of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived
to get a footing and to leave the print of its features
and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-
facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul,
--ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou
hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us
is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to
sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger.
If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If
he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is
our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events?
In splendid variety these changes come, all putting
questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer
by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time,
serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and
make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a
literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark
of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man
is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses
the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race;
remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the
facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know
their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word
should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these
Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and Leda, are