Imagine a young fisherman meditating--as he wandered with bent
head through the wilder woods on the steep banks of the burn, or
the little green levels which it overflowed in winter--of all
possible subjects what analogy there might be betwixt the body and
the soul in respect of derivation--whether the soul was traduced
as well as the body?--as his material form came from the forms
of his father and mother, did his soul come from their souls? or
did the Maker, as at the first he breathed his breath into the form
of Adam, still, at some crisis unknown in its creation, breathe
into each form the breath of individual being? If the latter theory
were the true, then, be his earthly origin what it might, he had
but to shuffle off this mortal coil to walk forth a clean thing,
as a prince might cast off the rags of an enforced disguise, and
set out for the land of his birth. If the former were the true,
then the wellspring of his being was polluted, nor might he by
any death fling aside his degradation, or show himself other than
defiled in the eyes of the old dwellers in "those high countries,"
where all things seem as they are, and are as they seem.
One day when, these questions fighting in his heart, he had for
the hundredth time arrived thus far, all at once it seemed as if
a soundless voice in the depth of his soul replied,
"Even then--should the wellspring of thy life be polluted with
vilest horrors such as, in Persian legends, the lips of the lost
are doomed to drink with loathings inconceivable--the well is
but the utterance of the water, not the source of its existence;
the rain is its father, and comes from the sweet heavens.
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