d that
dread question. All Nature around seemed to murmur it. And suddenly, as
by a flash from heaven, the grand truth in Faber's grand reasoning
shone on me, and lighted up all, within and without. Alan alone, of all
earthly creatures, asks, "Can the Dead die forever?" and the instinct
that urges the question is God's answer to man! No instinct is given in
vain.

And born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul
from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent
that foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far
aloft from the Ocean.

"Know thyself," said the Pythian of old. "That precept descended from
Heaven." Know thyself! Is that maxim wise? If so, know thy soul. But
never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of soul but what
he acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer. In my awe, in my
rapture, all my thoughts seemed enlarged and illumined and exalted. I
prayed,--all my soul seemed one prayer. All my past, with its pride and
presumption and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling
for pardon before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine.
And, sure now, in the deeps of a soul first revealed to myself, that the
Dead do not die forever, my human love soared beyond its brief trial of
terror and sorrow. Daring not to ask from Heaven's wisdom that Lilian,
for my sake, might not yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my
soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might
ordain. And if surviving her--without whom no beam from yon material sun
could ever warm into joy a morrow in human life--so to guide my steps
that they might rejoin her at last, and, in rejoining, regain forever!

How trivial now became the weird riddle that, a little while before, had
been clothed in so solemn an awe! What mattered it to the vast interests
involved in the clear recognition of Soul and Hereafter, whether or not
my bodily sense, for a moment, obscured the face of the Nature I should
one day behold as a spirit? Doubtless the sights and the sounds which
had haunted the last gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber would strip
of their magical seemings; the Eyes in the space and the Foot in the
circle might be those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild's savage
children whom I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the
morning. The tremor of the ground (if not, as heretofore, explicable by
the illusory i