descry beginning or end of the couches. They stretched away and away, as
if for all the disparted world to sleep upon. For along the far receding
narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and on each slept a lonely
sleeper. I thought at first their sleep was death, but I soon saw it was
something deeper still--a something I did not know.

The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I could
never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or character;
now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge barn made into
a dwelling of tombs. She looked colder than any moon in the frostiest
night of the world, and where she shone direct upon them, cast a bluish,
icy gleam on the white sheets and the pallid countenances--but it might
be the faces that made the moon so cold!

Of such as I could see, all were alike in the brotherhood of death, all
unlike in the character and history recorded upon them. Here lay a man
who had died--for although this was not death, I have no other name to
give it--in the prime of manly strength; his dark beard seemed to flow
like a liberated stream from the glacier of his frozen countenance; his
forehead was smooth as polished marble; a shadow of pain lingered about
his lips, but only a shadow. On the next couch lay the form of a girl,
passing lovely to behold. The sadness left on her face by parting was
not yet absorbed in perfect peace, but absolute submission possessed the
placid features, which bore no sign of wasting disease, of "killing care
or grief of heart": if pain had been there, it was long charmed asleep,
never again to wake. Many were the beautiful that there lay very
still--some of them mere children; but I did not see one infant. The
most beautiful of all was a lady whose white hair, and that alone,
suggested her old when first she fell asleep. On her stately countenance
rested--not submission, but a right noble acquiescence, an assurance,
firm as the foundations of the universe, that all was as it should
be. On some faces lingered the almost obliterated scars of strife, the
marrings of hopeless loss, the fading shadows of sorrows that had seemed
inconsolable: the aurora of the great morning had not yet quite melted
them away; but those faces were few, and every one that bore such brand
of pain seemed to plead, "Pardon me: I died only yesterday!" or, "Pardon
me: I died but a century ago!" That some had been dead for ages I knew,
not merely by their unutt