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 was
_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; namely, 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 fullness 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
forever. I in spirit rose, as if on billows that also ran up the shaft
forever, 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.

O 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
dream, and within that sleep didst conceal a dream; whose meaning, in
after years, when slowly I deciphered, suddenly there flashed upon me
new light; and even by the grief of a child, as I will show you, reader,
hereafter, were confounded the falsehoods of philosophers.

In the 'Opium Confessions' I touched a little upon the extraordinary
power connected with opium (after long use) of amplifying the dimensions
of