! dark Sepulchre that closes upon all which the
Flesh bears, but Vestibule of the vast regions which the Soul shall
pass, how leaped my heart within me when I first fathomed thy real
spell!

Yes! never shall I forget the rapture with which I hailed the light that
dawned upon me at last! Never shall I forget the suffocating, the full,
the ecstatic joy with which I saw the mightiest of all human hopes
accomplished; and felt, as if an angel spoke, that there is a life
beyond the grave! Tell me not of the pride of ambition; tell me not
of the triumphs of science: never had ambition so lofty an end as the
search after immortality! never had science so sublime a triumph as the
conviction that immortality will be gained! I had been at my task the
whole night,--pale alchymist, seeking from meaner truths to extract the
greatest of all! At the first hour of day, lo! the gold was there: the
labour for which I would have relinquished life was accomplished; the
dove descended upon the waters of my soul. I fled from the house. I was
possessed as with a spirit. I ascended a hill, which looked for leagues
over the sleeping valley. A gray mist hung around me like a veil; I
paused, and the great sun broke slowly forth; I gazed upon its majesty,
and my heart swelled. "So rises the soul," I said, "from the vapours
of this dull being; but the soul waneth not, neither setteth it, nor
knoweth it any night, save that from which it dawneth!" The mists rolled
gradually away, the sunshine deepened, and the face of Nature lay in
smiles, yet silently, before me. It lay before me, a scene that I had
often witnessed and hailed and worshipped: _but it was not the same_; a
glory had passed over it; it was steeped in a beauty and a holiness, in
which neither youth nor poetry nor even love had ever robed it before!
The change which the earth had undergone was like that of some being we
have loved, when death is passed, and from a mortal it becomes an angel!

I uttered a cry of joy, and was then as silent as all around me. I felt
as if henceforth there was a new compact between Nature and myself. I
felt as if every tree and blade of grass were henceforth to be eloquent
with a voice and instinct with a spell. I felt as if a religion had
entered into the earth, and made oracles of all that the earth bears;
the old fables of Dodona were to become realized, and _the very leaves_
to be hallowed by a sanctity and to murmur with a truth. I was no longer
only a