the handful out of its throat,
before I could disengage and carry off his body. They dared not molest
me as I brought him back."

"He has died well," said the lady.

My spirit rejoiced. They left me to my repose. I felt as if a cool hand
had been laid upon my heart, and had stilled it. My soul was like a
summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet
glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the
wind of the twilight has begun to blow. The hot fever of life had gone
by, and I breathed the clear mountain-air of the land of Death. I had
never dreamed of such blessedness. It was not that I had in any way
ceased to be what I had been. The very fact that anything can die,
implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either
take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and
arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to
lead a purely spiritual life. If my passions were dead, the souls of
the passions, those essential mysteries of the spirit which had imbodied
themselves in the passions, and had given to them all their glory and
wonderment, yet lived, yet glowed, with a pure, undying fire. They rose
above their vanishing earthly garments, and disclosed themselves angels
of light. But oh, how beautiful beyond the old form! I lay thus for
a time, and lived as it were an unradiating existence; my soul a
motionless lake, that received all things and gave nothing back;
satisfied in still contemplation, and spiritual consciousness.

Ere long, they bore me to my grave. Never tired child lay down in his
white bed, and heard the sound of his playthings being laid aside for
the night, with a more luxurious satisfaction of repose than I knew,
when I felt the coffin settle on the firm earth, and heard the sound of
the falling mould upon its lid. It has not the same hollow rattle within
the coffin, that it sends up to the edge of the grave. They buried me
in no graveyard. They loved me too much for that, I thank them; but they
laid me in the grounds of their own castle, amid many trees; where, as
it was spring-time, were growing primroses, and blue-bells, and all the
families of the woods

Now that I lay in her bosom, the whole earth, and each of her many
births, was as a body to me, at my will. I seemed to feel the great
heart of the mother beating into mine, and feeding me with her own life,
her own essential being and nature. I hear