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-prævalent — 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 not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic intuition.  I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the flesh, and, as the dreamer is sometimes aware of the bodily presence of one who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still dully felt that you sat by my side.  So, too, when the noon of the second day came, I was not unconscious of those movements which displaced you from my side, which confined me within the coffin, which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave, which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mould upon me, and which thus left me, in blackness and corruption, to my sad and solemn slumbers with the worm.

And here, in the prison-house which has few secrets to disclose, there rolled away days and weeks and months; and the soul watched narrowly each second as it flew, and, without effort, took record of its flight — without effort and without object.