ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for
pain, while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you--after some
days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless
torpor; and this was termed _Death_ by those who stood around me.

Words are vague things. My condition did not deprive me of sentience.
It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the extreme quiescence of
him, who, having slumbered long and profoundly, lying motionless and
fully prostrate in a mid-summer noon, begins to steal slowly back into
consciousness, through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without
being awakened by external disturbances.

I breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had ceased to
beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless. The senses were
unusually active, although eccentrically so--assuming often each
other's functions at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably
confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense. The
rose-water with which your tenderness had moistened my lips to the
last, affected me with sweet fancies of flowers--fantastic flowers,
far more lovely than any of the old Earth, but whose prototypes we
have here blooming around us. The eye-lids, transparent and bloodless,
offered no complete impediment to vision. As volition was in abeyance,
the balls could not roll in their sockets--but all objects within the
range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less
distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into
the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which
struck the front or interior surface. Yet, in the former instance,
this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as
_sound_--sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting
themselves at my side were light or dark in shade--curved or angular
in outline. The hearing, at the same time, although excited in degree,
was not irregular in action--estimating real sounds with an
extravagance of precision, not less than of sensibility. Touch had
undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were tardily
received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted always in the
highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure of your sweet fingers
upon my eyelids, at first only recognized through vision, at length,
long after their removal, filled my whole being with a sensual de