death. Poetry, which neglects no phenomena that are interesting to
the heart of man, has sometimes touched a little

'On the sublime attractions of the grave.'

But you think that these attractions, existing at times for the
adult, could not exist for the child. Understand that you are
wrong. Understand that these attractions do exist for the child;
and perhaps as much more strongly than they _can_ exist for the
adult by the whole difference between the concentration of a
childish love and the inevitable distraction upon multiplied
objects of any love that can affect any adult. . . . Could the
Erl-king's Daughter have revealed herself to me, and promised to
lead me where my sister was, she might have wiled me by the hand
into the dimmest forests upon earth."

But a beatific vision rose before him, one day in church, and he saw the
beautiful sister borne away in the clouds of heaven on a bed of filmy
whiteness, surrounded by a celestial throng; and he was somewhat
comforted. After twelve years, while he was a student at Oxford, the
vision returned to him, and he writes of it:--

"Once again, the nursery of my childhood expanded before me; my
sister was moaning in bed; I was beginning to be restless with
fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the nurse, but now
dilated to colossal proportions, stood as upon some Grecian stage
with her uplifted hand, and, like the superb Medea towering amongst
her children in the nursery at Corinth, smote me senseless to the
ground. Again I am in the chamber with my sister's corpse, again
the pomps of life rise up in silence, the glory of summer, the
Syrian sunlights, the frost of death. Dream forms itself
mysteriously within dream; within these Oxford dreams remoulds
itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,--the blue
heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne
steeped in the thought (but not the sight) of _'Who_ might sit
thereon;' the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my
return to earth. Once more the funeral procession gathers; the
priest, in his white surplice, stands waiting with a book by the
side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his shovel;
the coffin has sunk; the _dust to dust_ has descended. Again I was
in the church on a heavenly Sunday morning. Th