=Metempsychosis.= The idea of metempsychosis, the thought that at death the soul of a human being may pass into another mortal body or into a lower stage, into an animal or even a plant, has been used considerably in English fiction. This Oriental belief has its basis in antiquity, in animistic ideas in primitive culture. One of the earliest appearances of the theme in English fiction is that middle-eighteenth-century story of Dr. John Hawkesworth's,[168] an account of a soul that has not behaved itself seemly, so descends in the spiritual scale till it ends by being a flea. The German Hoffmann used the theme repeatedly, and Poe, who was to a certain extent influenced by his supernaturalism, employs it in several stories. In _A Tale of the Ragged Mountains_, the young man named Bedlo experiences, in dreams of extraordinary vividness, the life of battle, of confusion, ending in death, in a tropical city. He sees himself die, struck on the temple by a poisoned arrow. He is recognized by an elderly man as the exact counterpart of a Mr. Oldeb who perished in the manner dreamed of in a battle in Benares. Mr. Bedlo, while wandering in the mountains of Virginia, contracts a cold and fever, for the cure of which leeches are applied, but by mistake a poisonous sangsue is substituted for the leech, and the patient dies of a wound on the temple, similar to that caused by a poisoned arrow. Poe's concept in other stories is not that of the conventionally easy passage of the soul into the body of a new-born babe that wouldn't be expected to put up much of a fight, but he makes the psychic feature the central horror, saying in that connection that man is on the brink of tremendous psychical discoveries. In _Morella_ the theme is used with telling power, where the wife, once greatly loved but now loathed, on her deathbed tells her husband that her child will live after her. The daughter grows up into supernatural likeness of her mother, but remains nameless, since her father, for a reason he cannot analyze, hesitates to give her any name. But at last, as she stands before the altar to be christened, some force outside the father causes him to call her Morella. What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with the hues of death, as, starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded, "I am here"! [168] _The Transmigration of a Soul._ The young girl is found to be dead and the father says: "With my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed, with a long and bitter laugh, as I found no traces of the first in the charnel where I laid the second Morella."