nt at one moment to every feature in the
infinite review.

This anecdote was treated sceptically at the time by some critics. But
besides that it has since been confirmed by other experiences
essentially the same, reported by other parties in the same
circumstances who had never heard of each other; the true point for
astonishment is not the _simultaneity_ of arrangement under which the
past events of life--though in fact successive--had formed their dread
line of revelation. This was but a secondary phenomenon; the deeper lay
in the resurrection itself, and the possibility of resurrection, for
what had so long slept in the dust. A pall, deep as oblivion, had been
thrown by life over every trace of these experiences; and yet suddenly,
at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing rocket sent up from the
brain, the pall draws up, and the whole depths of the theatre are
exposed. Here was the greater mystery: now this mystery is liable to no
doubt; for it is repeated, and ten thousand times repeated by opium, for
those who are its martyrs.

Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy
which have inscribed themselves successively upon the palimpsest of your
brain; and, like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the
undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling upon light, the
endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the
hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these
can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping. In the
illustration imagined by myself, from the case of some individual
palimpsest, the Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was
_not_ displaced, by the monkish legend; and the monkish legend had
seemed to be displaced, but was _not_ displaced, by the knightly
romance. In some potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back into
its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering romance, light tarnished
with darkness, the semi-fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with
human falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life advances. The
romance has perished that the young man adored. The legend has gone that
deluded the boy. But the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the
child's hands were unlinked for ever from his mother's neck, or his lips
for ever from his sister's kisses, these remain lurking below all, and
these lurk to the last. Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that
can scorch away