ave
lent into thy charge. Our friends, our loves, that lie there, will
they never bud again? Oh, that we might see them, if only for one
hour, if only for one moment!

"Some day we ourselves shall reach the unknown land, whither they have
already gone. But shall we see them again there? Shall we dwell with
them? Where are they, and what are they doing? They must be kept very
close prisoners, these dear dead of mine, to give me not one token!
And how can I make them hear me? My father, too, whose only hope I
was, who loved me with so mighty a love, why comes he never to me? Ah,
me! on either side is bondage, imprisonment, mutual ignorance; a
dismal night, where we look in vain for one glimmer!"[36]

[36] The glimmer shines forth in Dumesnil's _Immortalite_,
and _La Foi Nouvelle_, in the _Ciel et Terre_ of Reynaud,
Henry Martin, &c.

These everlasting thoughts of Nature, from having in olden times been
simply mournful, became in the Middle Ages painful, bitter, weakening,
and the heart thereby grew smaller. It seems as if they had reckoned
on flattening the soul, on pressing and squeezing it down to the
compass of a bier. The burial of the serf between four deal boards was
well suited to such an end: it haunted one with the notion of being
smothered. A person thus enclosed, if ever he returned in one's
dreams, would no longer appear as a thin luminous shadow encircled by
a halo of Elysium, but only as the wretched sport of some hellish
griffin-cat. What a hateful and impious idea, that my good, kind
father, my mother so revered by all, should become the plaything of
such a beast! You may laugh now, but for a thousand years it was no
laughing matter: they wept bitterly. And even now the heart swells
with wrath, the very pen grates angrily upon the paper, as one writes
down these blasphemous doings.

* * * * *

Moreover, it was surely a cruel device to transfer the Festival of the
Dead from the Spring, where antiquity had placed it, to November. In
May, where it fell at first, they were buried among the flowers. In
March, wherein it was afterwards placed, it became the signal for
labour and the lark. The dead and the seed of corn entered the earth
together with the same hope. But in November, when all the work is
done, the weather close and gloomy for many days to come; when the
folk return to their homes; when a man, re-seating himself by the
hearth, looks across on that pl