are in summer more voluminous, more massed, and are accumulated in far
grander and more towering piles; secondly, the light and the
appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted
to be types and characters of the infinite; and thirdly (which is the
main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally
forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death,
and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed
generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a
law of antagonism, and exist, as it were by mutual repulsion, they are
apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it
impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in
the endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not actually
more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and
besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident
which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following
dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in
my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split
into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined,
locked back into a startling unity, and restored the original dream.

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May; that it was Easter
Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it
seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the
very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but
exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the power of dreams. There
were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but
the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was
interspace far larger between them of savannahs and forest lawns; the
hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature was to be
seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle
tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round
about the grave of a child whom I had once tenderly loved, just as I
had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, in the same summer
when that child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said to
myself: "It yet wants much of sunrise; and it is Easter Sunday; and
that is the day on which they celebrate the first-fruits of
Resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten
to-day: for t