return to the bedchamber of my sister. From the
gorgeous sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay the sweet
childish figure, there the angel face: and, as people usually fancy, it as
said in the house that no features had suffered any change. Had they not?
The forehead indeed, the serene and noble forehead, _that_ might be the
same; but the frozen eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from
beneath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as
if repeating the supplications of closing anguish, could these be mistaken
for life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly
lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it as _not_. I stood
checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood, a
solemn wind began to blow--the most mournful that ear ever heard.
Mournful! that is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields
of mortality for a hundred centuries. Many times since, upon a summer day,
when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising
and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell: it is
in this world the one sole _audible_ symbol of eternity. And three times
in my life I have happened to hear the same sound in the same
circumstances, viz. when standing between an open window and a dead body
on a summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast AEolian intonation, when my eye
filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps and glory of the heavens
outside, and turning when it settled upon the frost which overspread my
sister's face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault seemed to open in
the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I in spirit
rose as if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows
seemed to pursue the throne of God; but _that_ also ran before us and fled
away continually. The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever and
ever. Frost, gathering frost, some Sarsar wind of death, seemed to repel
me; I slept--for how long I cannot say; slowly I recovered my
self-possession, and found myself standing, as before, close to my
sister's bed.

Oh[8] flight of the solitary child to the solitary God--flight from the
ruined corpse to the throne that could not be ruined!--how rich wert thou
in truth for after years. Rapture of grief, that, being too mighty for a
child to sustain, foundest a happy oblivion in a heaven-born sleep, and
wit