Well, perhaps it is so, but it is because the conversation given above touches upon some points concerning which I am anxious that the reader should come to a right understanding before he enters upon my after-death experience, that I have inserted it here, and if a very few minutes' indulgence be granted me, I will say what I have to say as briefly as possible. I could, I am sure, by drawing a little on my imagination, have written a far more striking description of the sensations of death, than that which I have given in the preceding chapter, for of such description, in the sense of "working-up a situation" there is absolutely none. All that I have tried to do is to relate my story with a resolute avoidance of anything akin to the sensational. If aught of the sensational there be in the narrative, it is because the thing is sensational in itself, and not because I have attempted to make it so. As George Eliot says, it is far easier to draw a griffin, with wings and claws filled in according to our own fancy, than to correctly limn the outlines of a lion; and to keep to the truth has been the hardest part of my task.
When the mental picture or impression left on my mind is but an imperfect one, I have not attempted, as I might easily and perhaps pardonably have done, to fill in the missing outline from my imagination, but have given the picture or impression for what it is worth, and have left it so. My memory is, generally speaking, excellent, and during the first few hours of consciousness after the return of vitality, the recollection of that which I had seen was as fresh as are the events of yesterday. Within a week, however, I found that the greater part of it had gone from me, and that all my efforts to recall the mental pictures were unavailing. I have sometimes wondered if it can be possible that when my presence was missed from the realms into which I had so untimely wandered, some angelic messenger was despatched with instructions to wipe out from the tablets of my memory the records of my experiences. Whether it be so, or not, I cannot say, but this I do know, that had I commenced my diary within a week of my return to life, the booklet would have been one such as it is not often given to man to write. The subject, however, seemed then, and for a long time after, too solemn to be turned to account for "copy," and each of the several years which have elapsed since I died, has taken with it some part of the recollections that remained to me; and now that I have all too tardily set about my task, I have but blurred and broken reminiscences to offer in place of a life-like picture.
These reminiscences, vague, disconnected, and fragmentary as they are, I have given for what they are worth. If any reader think that I have overrated the value of my experiences, and that I have failed to verify the promise with which I started, I can only assure him that the failure is due, not to the insufficiency of what is strange and striking in my experiences, but to my inability to recall what I have seen, and to my incompetency to do fitting justice to my singular subject.
CHAPTER VI.
TELLS OF MY FIRST AWFUL AWAKENING IN HELL, AND OF THE SHAMEFUL SIN WHICH BROUGHT ME THITHER.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and, proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Shakespeare's 129th Sonnet.
Time, which is the name we give to our petty portion of Eternity, has no existence in that Eternity which has been defined as the "lifetime of the Almighty"; and so it was that though I remained in the spirit realm but two days, it seemed to me as if weeks, months, years, had elapsed between my death and the hour when I first became conscious of that death.
I have told you that as I lay a-dying, I felt my life slowly but steadily ebbing away, until at last there came a time—the moment of death, I believe it to have been—when the outward and deathward-setting tide seemed to reach its climax, and when I felt myself swept shoreward and lifeward again. I know there are some who will say that the turning-point which I have called the moment of death was nothing more or less than the moment which marked the decline of the disease, and the return of vitality, but this theory, plausible and even probable as it seems, leaves the strangest part of my experience unexplained, and I cannot entertain it; neither, I think, will the reader, when he has heard me out.