ch throws off
your particular grief as a duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers;
undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who
plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter,
who puts your name on the slab which has been waiting for you ever since
the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then
the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups,---Earth saying to the
mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom,
but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating
consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived
of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than
life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all,
wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good
old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in
fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the
sitting posture.

And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the formless
and position to the placeless. Neither did his thoughts spread
themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them. They came
confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--sometimes a
part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes connected fragments,
and sometimes only single severed stones.

They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I have
said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass turned
him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to him as
if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut not yet
half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground archives. He
coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the direction in which his
downward path was tending. It was an honest little cough enough, so far
as appearances went. But coughs are ungrateful things. You find one out
in the cold, take it up and nurse it and make everything of it, dress it
up warm, give it all sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry
it round in your bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog. And by-and-by
its little bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you
find it is a wolf