tself "I" on
the Earth. 'Bending before men,' says Novalis, 'is a reverence
done to this Revelation in the Flesh. We touch Heaven when we
lay our hand on a human Body.' And the Body of one Dead;--a
temple where the Hero-soul once was and now is not: Oh, all
mystery, all pity, all mute awe and wonder; Supernaturalism
brought home to the very dullest; Eternity laid open, and the
nether Darkness and the upper Light-Kingdoms;--do conjoin there,
or exist nowhere! Sauerteig used to say to me, in his peculiar
way: "A Chancery Lawsuit; justice, nay justice in mere money,
denied a man, for all his pleading, till twenty, till forty years
of his Life are gone seeking it: and a Cockney Funeral, Death
reverenced by hatchments, horsehair, brass-lacker, and
unconcerned bipeds carrying long poles and bags of black
silk:--are not these two reverences, this reverence for Death
and that reverence for Life, a notable pair of reverences among
you English?"

Abbot Samson, at this culminating point of his existence, may,
and indeed must, be left to vanish with his Life-scenery from the
eyes of modern men. He had to run into France, to settle with
King Richard for the military service there of his St.
Edmundsbury Knights; and with great labour got it done. He had
to decide on the dilapidated Coventry Monks; and with great
labour, and much pleading and journeying, got them reinstated;
dined with them all, and with the 'Masters of the Schools of
Oxneford,'--the veritable Oxford _Caput_ sitting there at dinner,
in a dim but undeniable manner, in the City of Peeping Tom! He
had, not without labour, to controvert the intrusive Bishop of
Ely, the intrusive Abbot of Cluny. Magnanimous Samson, his life
is but a labour and a journey; a bustling and a justling, till
the still Night come. He is sent for again, over sea, to advise
King Richard touching certain Peers of England, who had taken the
Cross, but never followed it to Palestine; whom the Pope is
inquiring after. The magnanimous Abbot makes preparation for
departure; departs, and--And Jocelin's Boswellean Narrative,
suddenly shorn through by the scissors of Destiny, ends. There
are no words more; but a black line, and leaves of blank paper.
Irremediable: the miraculous hand that held all this theatric-
machinery suddenly quits hold; impenetrable Time-Curtains rush
down; in the mind's eye all is again dark, void; with loud
dinning in the mind's ear, our real-phantasma