Well do I remember these conversations, dear Monos; but the epoch of the fiery overthrow was not so near at hand as we believed, and as the corruption you indicate did surely warrant us in believing.  Men lived; and died individually.  You yourself sickened, and passed into the grave; and thither your constant Una speedily followed you.  And though the century which has since elapsed, and whose conclusion brings up together once more, tortured our slumbering senses with no impatience of duration, yet my Monos, it was a century still.

‘Monos’.

Say, rather, a point in the vague infinity.  Unquestionably, it was in the Earth’s dotage that I died.  Wearied at heart with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever.  After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for pain, while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you—­after some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor; and this was termed Death by those who stood around me.

Words are vague things.  My condition did not deprive me of sentience.  It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the extreme quiescence of him, who, having slumbered long and profoundly, lying motionless and fully prostrate in a mid-summer noon, begins to steal slowly back into consciousness, through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without being awakened by external disturbances.

I breathed no longer.  The pulses were still.  The heart had ceased to beat.  Volition had not departed, but was powerless.  The senses were unusually active, although eccentrically so—­assuming often each other’s functions at random.  The taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense.  The rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my lips to the last, affected me with sweet fancies of flowers—­fantastic flowers, far more lovely than any of the old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here blooming around us.  The eye-lids, transparent and bloodless, offered no complete impediment to vision.  As volition was in abeyance, the balls could not roll in their sockets—­but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or interior surface.  Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as sound—­sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark in shade—­curved or angular in outline.  The hearing, at the same time, although excited in degree, was not irregular in action—­estimating real sounds with an extravagance of precision, not less than of sensibility.