. The cloudless sun-lights of
Syria--those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the disciples plucking
the ears of corn--that _must_ be summer; but above all, the very name of
Palm Sunday (a festival in the English Church) troubled me like an
anthem. "Sunday!" what was _that_? That was the day of peace which
masked another peace, deeper than the heart of man can comprehend.
"Palms!" what were they? _That_ was an equivocal word; palms in the
sense of trophies expressed the pomps of life; palms as a product of
nature expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still, even this explanation
does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace and by the summer, by
the deep sound of rest below all rest, and of ascending glory, that I
had been haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood near to those deep
images both in time and in place. The great event of Jerusalem was at
hand when Palm Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was near in
place to Jerusalem. Yet what then was Jerusalem? Did I fancy it to be
the _omphalos_ (navel) of the earth? That pretension had once been made
for Jerusalem, and once for Delphi; and both pretensions had become
ridiculous as the figure of the planet became known. Yes, but if not of
the earth, for earth's tenant Jerusalem was the _omphalos_ of mortality.
Yet how? There on the contrary it was, as we infants understood, that
mortality had been trampled under foot. True; but for that very reason,
there it was that mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater. There
it was indeed that the human had risen on wings from the grave; but for
that reason, there also it was that the Divine had been swallowed up by
the abyss; the lesser star could not rise before the greater would
submit to eclipse. Summer therefore had connected itself with death, not
merely as a mode of antagonism, but also through intricate relations to
Scriptural scenery and events.

Out of this digression, which was almost necessary for the purpose of
showing how inextricably my feelings and images of death were entangled
with those of summer, I 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
was 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