heir
sensations.

I should find it impossible adequately to describe the vividness
with which my whole past life presented itself to my perception; not
as a procession of events, filling a succession of years, but as a
whole--a total--suddenly held up to me as in a mirror, indescribably
awful, combined with the simultaneous acute and almost despairing
sense of _loss_, of _waste_, so to speak, by which it was
accompanied. This instantaneous, involuntary retrospect was followed
by a keen and rapid survey of the religious belief in which I had
been trained, and which then seemed to me my only important
concern....

The tension, physical and mental, of the very short space of time in
which these processes took place, gave way to a complete exhaustion,
in which, strangely enough, I found the sort of satisfaction that a
child does in crooning itself to sleep, in singing, one after
another, every song I could call to memory; and my repertory was a
very numerous one, composed of English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish specimens, which I "chanted
loudly, chanted lowly," sitting on the floor, through the rest of
the night, till the day broke, and my sense of danger passed away,
but not the recollection of the never-to-be-forgotten experience it
had brought to me.

I have often since wondered if any number of men going into action
on a field of battle are thus impressed. Several thousands of human
beings, with the apparition of their past life thus suddenly
confronting them, is not a bad suggestion of the Day of Judgment.

I have heard it asserted that the experience I have here described
was only that of persons who, in the full vigor of life and health,
were suddenly put in peril of immediate death; and that whatever
regret, repentance, or remorse might afflict the last moments of
elderly persons, or persons prepared by previous disease for
dissolution, this species of revelation, by the sudden glare of
death, of the whole past existence was not among the phenomena of
death-beds.

As a curious instance of the very mistaken inferences frequently
drawn from our actions by others, when the storm had sufficiently
subsided to allow of our very kind friend, the captain, leaving his
post of vigilant watch on deck, to come and inquire after his poor