A friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep
side of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those
who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass
into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among
More's masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause:
"After that they againe retourned beene,
They in that garden planted be agayne,
And grow afresh, as they had never seene
Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne.
Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne,
And then of him are clad with other hew,
Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne,
Till thither they retourn where first they grew:
So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new."
The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but
know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for
perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid
plausibilities and uncertainties.