ted with still pools, and alive with running waters!
I would write songs to make their hearts swell, and tales to make
them glow! I would turn the forces of the world into such channels of
invention as to make them laugh with the joy of wonder! Love possessed
me! Love was my life! Love was to me, as to him that made me, all in
all!

Suddenly I found myself in a solid blackness, upon which the ghost of
light that dwells in the caverns of the eyes could not cast one fancied
glimmer. But my heart, which feared nothing and hoped infinitely, was
full of peace. I lay imagining what the light would be when it came,
and what new creation it would bring with it--when, suddenly, without
conscious volition, I sat up and stared about me.

The moon was looking in at the lowest, horizontal, crypt-like windows
of the death-chamber, her long light slanting, I thought, across
the fallen, but still ripening sheaves of the harvest of the great
husbandman.--But no; that harvest was gone! Gathered in, or swept away
by chaotic storm, not a sacred sheaf was there! My dead were gone! I was
alone!--In desolation dread lay depths yet deeper than I had hitherto
known!--Had there never been any ripening dead? Had I but dreamed them
and their loveliness? Why then these walls? why the empty couches? No;
they were all up! they were all abroad in the new eternal day, and had
forgotten me! They had left me behind, and alone! Tenfold more terrible
was the tomb its inhabitants away! The quiet ones had made me quiet with
their presence--had pervaded my mind with their blissful peace; now I
had no friend, and my lovers were far from me! A moment I sat and stared
horror-stricken. I had been alone with the moon on a mountain top in the
sky; now I was alone with her in a huge cenotaph: she too was staring
about, seeking her dead with ghastly gaze! I sprang to my feet, and
staggered from the fearful place.

The cottage was empty. I ran out into the night.

No moon was there! Even as I left the chamber, a cloudy rampart had
risen and covered her. But a broad shimmer came from far over the heath,
mingled with a ghostly murmuring music, as if the moon were raining
a light that plashed as it fell. I ran stumbling across the moor, and
found a lovely lake, margined with reeds and rushes: the moon behind
the cloud was gazing upon the monsters' den, full of clearest, brightest
water, and very still.--But the musical murmur went on, filling the
quiet air, and drawi