‘Many hours must have elapsed ere I returned to any consciousness. My first sensation was feeling the cold wind across my face, which seemed to come from an open window. My eyes were closed, and the lids felt as if pressed down by a weight. My arms lay along my side, and though the position in which I lay was constrained and unpleasant, I could make no effort to alter it; I tried to speak, but I could not.
‘As I lay thus, the footsteps of many persons traversing the apartment broke upon my ear, followed by a heavy dull sound, as if some weighty body had been laid upon the floor; a harsh voice of one near me now said, as if reading, “William H———, aged thirty-eight years; I thought him much more.” The words rushed through my brain, and with the rapidity of a lightning flash every circumstance of my illness came before me; and I now knew that I had died, and that for my interment were intended the awful preparations about me. Was this then death? Could it be that though coldness wrapped the suffering clay, passion and sense should still survive, and that while every external trace of life had fled, consciousness should still cling to the cold corpse destined for the earth? Oh, how horrible, how more than horrible, the terror of the thought! Then I thought it might be what is termed a trance; but that poor hope deserted me as I brought to mind the words of the doctor, who knew too well all the unerring signs of death to be deceived by its counterfeit, and my heart sank as they lifted me into the coffin, and I felt that my limbs had stiffened, as I knew this never took place in a trance. How shall I tell the heart-cutting anguish of that moment, as my mind looked forward to a futurity too dreadful to think upon—when memory should call up many a sunny hour of existence, the loss of friends, the triumph of exertion, and then fall back upon the dread consciousness of the ever-buried life the grave closed over; and then I thought that perhaps sense but lingered round the lifeless clay, as the spirits of the dead are said to hover around the places and homes they have loved in life ere they leave them for ever, and that soon the lamp should expire upon the shrine when the temple that sheltered it lay mouldering and in ruins. Alas! how fearful to dream of even the happiness of the past, in that cold grave where the worm only is a reveller! to think that though
“Friends, brothers, and sisters are laid side by side,
Yet none have ere questioned, nor none have replied;”
yet that all felt in their cold and mouldering hearts the loves and affections of life, budding and blossoming as though the stem was not rotting to corruption that bore them. I brought to mind the awful punishment of the despot who chained the living to the dead man, and thought it mercy when compared to this.
‘How long I lay thus I know not, but the dreary silence of the chamber was again broken, and I found that some of my dearest friends were come to take a farewell look at me ere the coffin was closed upon me for ever. Again the horror of my state struck me with all its forcible reality, and like a meteor there shot through my heart the bitterness of years of misery condensed into the space of a minute. And then I remembered how gradual is death, and how by degrees it creeps over every portion of the frame, like the track of the destroyer, blighting as it goes, and said to my heart, All may yet be still within me, and the mind as lifeless as the body it dwelt in. Yet these feelings partook of life in all their strength and vigour; there was the will to move, to speak, to see, to live, and yet all was torpid and inactive, as though it had never lived. Was it that the nerves, from some depressing cause, had ceased to transmit the influence of the brain? Had these winged messengers of the mind refused their office? And then I recalled the almost miraculous efficacy of the will, exerted under circumstances of great exigency, and with a concentration of power that some men only are capable of. I had heard of the Indian father who suckled his child at his own bosom, when he had laid its mother in her grave; yet was it not the will had wrought this miracle? I myself have seen the paralytic limb awake to life and motion by the powerful application of the mind stimulating the nervous channels of communication, and awakening the dormant powers of vitality to their exercise. I knew of one whose heart beat fast or slow as he did will it. Yes, thought I, in a transport, the will to live is the power to live; and only when this faculty has yielded with bodily strength need death be the conqueror over us.
‘The thought of reanimation was ecstatic, but I dared not dwell upon it; the moments passed rapidly on, and even now the last preparations were about to be made, ere they committed my body to the grave. How was the effort to be made? If the will did indeed possess the power I trusted in, how was it to be applied? I had often wished to speak or move during my illness, yet was unable to do either. I then remembered that in those cases where the will had worked its wonders, the powers of the mind had entirely centred themselves in the one heart-filling desire to accomplish a certain object, as the athlete in the games strains every muscle to lift some ponderous weight. Thus I knew that if the heart could be so subjected to the principle of volition, as that, yielding to its impulse, it would again transmit the blood along its accustomed channels, and that then the lungs should be brought to act upon the blood by the same agency, the other functions of the body would be more readily restored by the sympathy with these great ones. Besides, I trusted that so long as the powers of the mind existed in the vigour I felt them in, that much of what might be called latent vitality existed in the body. Then I set myself to think upon those nerves which preside over the action of the heart—their origin, their course, their distribution, their relation, their sympathies; I traced them as they arose in the brain, and tracked them till they were lost in millions of tender threads upon the muscle of the heart. I thought, too, upon the lungs as they lay flaccid and collapsed within my chest, the life-blood stagnant in their vessels, and tried to possess my mind with the relation of these two parts to the utter exclusion of every other endeavoured then to transmit along the nerves the impulse of that faculty my whole hopes rested on. Alas! it was in vain. I tried to heave my chest and breathe, but could not; my heart sank within me, and all my former terrors came thickening around me, more dreadful by far as the stir and bustle in the room indicated they were about to close the coffin.
‘At this moment my dear friend B——— entered the room.
He had come many miles to see me once more, and they made way for him to approach me as I lay. He placed his warm hand upon my breast, and oh the throb it sent through my heart! Again, but almost unconsciously to myself, the impulse rushed along my nerves; a bursting sensation seized my chest, a tingling ran through my frame, a crashing, jarring sensation, as if the tense nervous cords were vibrating to some sudden and severe shock, took hold on me; and then, after one violent convulsive throe which brought the blood from my mouth and eyes, my heart swelled, at first slowly, then faster, and the nerves reverberated, clank! clank! responsive to the stroke. At the same time the chest expanded, the muscles strained like the cordage of a ship in a heavy sea, and I breathed once more.
‘While thus the faint impulse to returning life was given, the dread thought flashed on me that it might not be real, and that to my own imagination alone were referable the phenomena I experienced. At the same instant the gloomy doubt crossed my mind it was dispelled; for I heard a cry of horror through the room, and the words, “He is alive! he still lives!” from a number of voices around me. The noise and confusion increased.
I heard them say, “Carry out B——— before he sees him again; he has fainted!” Directions and exclamations of wonder and dread followed one upon another; and I can but call to mind the lifting me from the coffin, and the feeling of returning warmth I experienced as I was placed before a fire, and supported by the arms of my friend.