ffecting
and revolutionary for my own mind, and one which (if any earthly
remembrance) will survive for me in the hour of death,--to remind some
readers, and to inform others, that in the original 'Opium Confessions'
I endeavored to explain the reason why death, _caeteris paribus_, is more
profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year; so far
at least as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents of
scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the
antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the
dark sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt
with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us.
And the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger
relief. But in my case there was even a subtler reason why the summer
had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of
death. And recollecting it, often I have been struck with the important
truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us
through perplexed combinations of _concrete_ objects, pass to us as
_involutes_ (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable
of being disentangled, than ever reach us _directly_ and in their own
abstract shapes. It had happened that amongst our nursery collection of
books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark
evenings, as my three sisters with myself sate by the firelight round
the guard of our nursery, no book was so much in request amongst us. It
ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. One young nurse, whom
we all loved, before any candle was lighted would often strain her eye
to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would
endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all
constitutionally touched with pensiveness; the fitful gloom and sudden
lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of
feelings; and they suited also the divine revelations of power and
mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man--man
and yet _not_ man, real above all things and yet shadowy above all
things, who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine--slept upon
our minds like early dawn upon the waters.

The nurse knew and explained to us the chief differences in Oriental
climates; and all these differences (as it happens) express themselves
in the great varieties of summer