CHAPTER I.
EXPLAINS MY TITLE.
It has always been a favourite fancy of mine that I should like to die upon some sunny, songful morning, in spring or early summer. The thought of dying in the night, and of finding this thin and aërial something, which I have learned to call "my soul," being driven remorselessly nightward, as Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise; the seeing it in imagination, a spectral, unsubstantial shadow of myself, flitting a-shivering out into the black-wombed darkness, and fumbling with filmy hands that it might clasp the closer around it the warm familiar robe of flesh, only to find that robe fallen away for ever—this thought, I must confess, fills me at all times with an abhorrent loathing and dread.
To look up by night at the cold glitter of the stars, and to fancy my disembodied spirit winging its weary way thereto, through fathomless leagues of void and voiceless ether, causes me ever to shiver, and to turn shudderingly to earth again; but the thought of passing peacefully away upon some sunny, summer morning seems less like dying than like stepping out of doors to be among the birds and the butterflies. Then the heaven of my hopes would not seem so very distant after all (and oh! how much more heavenly and homelike would that heaven appear did I but know it to be this side of the stars!), and my first entry into the dim and shadowy realm of the spirit-world would seem the less strange and unfamiliar for my having to pass out on my way to it through the fields, the flowers, and the sunshine that I love so well.
To me, however, in the utter solitude of midnight waking, and in the scarcely less utter solitude of day-dreaming in the midst of men, the thought which ever most oppresses me in the contemplation of death, is not so much the Unknown which lies beyond, as the thought of its awful loneliness,—the thought that human faces may shine on my face, human hands lie clasped in mine, and human voices bear me company up to the very boundary line of that still and silent land, but that when that boundary line is once reached, all these must fail and forsake me, and I must turn to face the unknown darkness naked, desolate, and alone.
But why do I allow my thoughts, you say, to brood thus morbidly upon death and the death moment? I will tell you. Because I who now write to you have—save only in the last and uttermost giving up of the spirit—been for some narrow space of time dead; because on me there once fell that thin and impalpable veil which cuts off, as by a wall of vast and impenetrable night, the dead one from those whom he leaves behind.
The facts of the matter are simply these. Some years ago I became seriously ill, grew worse day by day, and was pronounced dying, and finally dead. Dead I apparently was, and dead I remained to all intents and purposes for the greater part of two days, after which, to the intense and utter astonishment of my friends and of the physicians, I exhibited symptoms of returning vitality, and in the course of a week or two was convalescent. The medical and scientific aspects of the case are, I am assured by those most competent to judge, of unusual interest, but it is not to them that I now wish to direct attention. It is rather to that dim borderland betwixt life and death, wherein the spirit hovers on uncertain pinion, as if hesitating whether to return to the body it has lately tenanted, or to wing its way to the shadowy heights of the world Unseen.
Where, during those two-score hours, I would ask, was my soul, ghost, or life-principle? Had it passed into some intermediate spirit-realm, there to await till the Father of Spirits should command it either finally to quit the mortal habitation in which it had so long found a home, or to return thereto till such time as He should call it to Himself? Or was it still hovering over the body, struggling and striving to free itself from the fetters which bound it to that which, without it, were but a senseless and inanimate clod?
To that question I am prepared with an answer, and so strange a one, that I cannot hope my story will be regarded with anything but incredulity, nor can I reasonably expect it to be otherwise, for I am aware that what I am about to relate I myself should reject unhesitatingly were it proffered me on the testimony of another.
