her grave; yet was it not
the will had wrought this miracle? I myself have seen the paralytic
limb awake to life and motion by the powerful application of the mind
stimulating the nervous channels of communication, and awakening the
dormant powers of vitality to their exercise. I knew of one whose heart
beat fast or slow as he did will it. Yes, thought I, in a transport,
the will to live is the power to live; and only when this faculty has
yielded with bodily strength need death be the conqueror over us.

'The thought of reanimation was ecstatic, but I dared not dwell upon it;
the moments passed rapidly on, and even now the last preparations were
about to be made, ere they committed my body to the grave. How was the
effort to be made? If the will did indeed possess the power I trusted
in, how was it to be applied? I had often wished to speak or move during
my illness, yet was unable to do either. I then remembered that in those
cases where the will had worked its wonders, the powers of the mind
had entirely centred themselves in the one heart-filling desire to
accomplish a certain object, as the athlete in the games strains every
muscle to lift some ponderous weight. Thus I knew that if the heart
could be so subjected to the principle of volition, as that, yielding
to its impulse, it would again transmit the blood along its accustomed
channels, and that then the lungs should be brought to act upon the
blood by the same agency, the other functions of the body would be
more readily restored by the sympathy with these great ones. Besides, I
trusted that so long as the powers of the mind existed in the vigour I
felt them in, that much of what might be called latent vitality existed
in the body. Then I set myself to think upon those nerves which preside
over the action of the heart--their origin, their course, their
distribution, their relation, their sympathies; I traced them as they
arose in the brain, and tracked them till they were lost in millions of
tender threads upon the muscle of the heart. I thought, too, upon the
lungs as they lay flaccid and collapsed within my chest, the life-blood
stagnant in their vessels, and tried to possess my mind with the
relation of these two parts to the utter exclusion of every other
endeavoured then to transmit along the nerves the impulse of that
faculty my whole hopes rested on. Alas! it was in vain. I tried to heave
my chest and breathe, but could not; my heart sank within me, and