University of Virginia Library

THOUGHTS.

The day was closing in, and as I sat watching
the scarcely moving foliage of a neighbouring
elm, my mind gradually sank into a
state of luxurious repose, amounting to total
unconsciousness of all the busy sights and
sounds of earth.

It seemed to me as if I were seated by a
calm, deep lake, surrounded by graceful and
breezy shrubbery, and listening to most delicious
music. The landscape differed from
anything I had ever seen. Light seemed to
be in every thing, and to emanate from every
thing, like a glory. Yet I felt at home; and

could I see a painting of it, I should know it
as readily as the scenes of my childhood.
And so it is with a multitude of thoughts that
come suddenly into the soul, new as visitants
from farthest Saturn, yet familiar as a mother's
voice. Whence do they come? Is
Plato's suggestion something more than poetry?
Have we indeed formerly lived in a
luminous and shadowless world, where all
things wear light as a garment? And are
our bright and beautiful thoughts but casual
glimpses of that former state? Are all our
hopes and aspirations nothing but recollections?
Is it to the fragments of memory's
broken mirror we owe the thousand fantastic
forms of grandeur, or of loveliness, which
fancy calls her own?

And the gifted ones, who now and then
blaze upon the world, and “darken nations
when they die,”—do they differ from other
mortals only in more cloudless reminiscences
of their heavenly home?

Or are we living, separate existences, at one
and the same time. Are not our souls wandering
in the spirit-land while our bodies are

on earth? And when in slumber, or deep
quietude of thought, we cast off `this mortal
coil,' do we not gather up images of reality,
that seem to us like poetry? Might not the
restless spirit of Byron have indeed learned
of “archangels ruined” those potent words,
which, like infernal magic, arouse every
sleeping demon in the human heart?

Are dreams merely visits to our spirithome;
and are we in sleep really talking with
the souls of those whose voice we seem to
hear?

As death approaches and earth recedes,
do we not more clearly see that spiritual
world, in which we have all along been living,
though we knew it not? The dying
man tells us of attendant angels hovering
round him. Perchance it is no vision—they
may have often been with him, but his inward
eye was dim, and he saw them not.
What is that mysterious expression, so holy
and so strange, so beautiful yet so fearful, on
the countenance of one whose soul has just
departed? Is it the glorious light of attendant

seraphs, the luminous shadow of which
rests awhile on the countenance of the dead?
Does infancy owe to this angel crowd its peculiar
power to purify and bless?