themes, having no natural connexion, which by pure accident have
consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created
palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and
cannot be such incoherencies. The fleeting accidents of a man's life,
and its external shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongruous; but the
organizing principles which fuse into harmony, and gather about fixed
predetermined centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may have
accumulated from without, will not permit the grandeur of human unity
greatly to be violated, or its ultimate repose to be troubled in the
retrospect from dying moments, or from other great convulsions.

Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffocation, as in
drowning; and, in the original Opium Confessions, I mentioned a case of
that nature communicated to me by a lady from her own childish
experience. The lady is still living, though now of unusually great age;
and I may mention--that amongst her faults never was numbered any levity
of principle, or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity; but, on
the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, too harsh perhaps,
and gloomy--indulgent neither to others nor herself. And, at the time of
relating this incident, when already very old, she had become religious
to asceticism. According to my present belief, she had completed her
ninth year, when playing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into
one of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse of time
nobody ever knew, she was saved from death by a farmer, who, riding in
some distant lane, had seen her rise to the surface; but not until she
had descended within the abyss of death, and looked into its secrets, as
far, perhaps, as ever human eye _can_ have looked that had permission to
return. At a certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike
her--phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eye-balls; and
immediately a mighty theatre expanded within her brain. In a moment, in
the twinkling of an eye, every act--every design of her past life lived
again--arraying themselves not as a succession, but as parts of a
coexistence. Such a light fell upon the whole path of her life backwards
into the shades of infancy, as the light perhaps which wrapt the
destined apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light blinded for a
season; but hers poured celestial vision upon the brain, so that her
consciousness became omniprese