een unable to sleep. He remembered that also afterwards, as a sort of
typical thing--a white vision of heat about him, clinging closely,
through the languid scent of the ointments put upon the place to make
it well.

Also, as he felt this pressure upon him of the sensible world, then, as
often afterwards, there would come another sort of curious questioning
how the last impressions of eye and ear might happen to him, how they
would find him--the scent of the last flower, the soft yellowness of
the last morning, the last recognition of some object of affection,
hand or voice; it could not be but that the latest look of the eyes,
before their final closing, would be strangely vivid; one would go with
the hot tears, the cry, the touch of the wistful bystander, impressed
how deeply on one! or would it be, perhaps, a mere frail retiring of
all things, great or little, away from one, into a level distance?

For with this desire of physical beauty mingled itself early the fear
of death--the fear of death [190] intensified by the desire of beauty.
Hitherto he had never gazed upon dead faces, as sometimes, afterwards,
at the Morgue in Paris, or in that fair cemetery at Munich, where all
the dead must go and lie in state before burial, behind glass windows,
among the flowers and incense and holy candles--the aged clergy with
their sacred ornaments, the young men in their dancing-shoes and
spotless white linen--after which visits, those waxen, resistless faces
would always live with him for many days, making the broadest sunshine
sickly. The child had heard indeed of the death of his father, and
how, in the Indian station, a fever had taken him, so that though not
in action he had yet died as a soldier; and hearing of the
"resurrection of the just," he could think of him as still abroad in
the world, somehow, for his protection--a grand, though perhaps rather
terrible figure, in beautiful soldier's things, like the figure in the
picture of Joshua's Vision in the Bible--and of that, round which the
mourners moved so softly, and afterwards with such solemn singing, as
but a worn-out garment left at a deserted lodging. So it was, until on
a summer day he walked with his mother through a fair churchyard. In a
bright dress he rambled among the graves, in the gay weather, and so
came, in one corner, upon an open grave for a child--a dark space on
the brilliant grass--the black mould lying heaped up round it, weighing
down the littl