ual pleasure as before.

And now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses, there
appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its exercise
I found a wild delight--yet a delight still physical, inasmuch as the
understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully
ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But
there seemed to have sprung up in the brain, that of which no words
could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct
conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It was the
moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time. By the absolute
equalization of this movement--or of such as this--had the cycles of the
firmamental orbs themselves, been adjusted. By its aid I measured the
irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, and of the watches of the
attendants. Their tickings came sonorously to my ears. The slightest
deviations from the true proportion--and these deviations were
omni-praevalent--affected me just as violations of abstract truth were
wont, on earth, to affect the moral sense. Although no two of the
time-pieces in the chamber struck the individual seconds accurately
together, yet I had no difficulty in holding steadily in mind the
tones, and the respective momentary errors of each. And this--this keen,
perfect, self-existing sentiment of duration--this sentiment existing
(as man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independently of
any succession of events--this idea--this sixth sense, upspringing from
the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the
intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal Eternity.

It was midnight; and you still sat by my side. All others had departed
from the chamber of Death. They had deposited me in the coffin. The
lamps burned flickeringly; for this I knew by the tremulousness of
the monotonous strains. But, suddenly these strains diminished in
distinctness and in volume. Finally they ceased. The perfume in my
nostrils died away. Forms affected my vision no longer. The oppression
of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom. A dull shock like that
of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by total loss of the
idea of contact. All of what man has termed sense was merged in the sole
consciousness of entity, and in the one abiding sentiment of duration.
The mortal body had been at length stricken with the hand of the deadly
Decay.

Yet had no