Lulled by the music, I gave myself up, in the quiet nook in which I had niched myself, to my fancies, and, absorbed in the kingdom of sound, soon forgot all around me. At last I thought myself dead, and yet I fancied myself a visitor of that Gothic chapel we wished to build, dear Julia, and standing before my own tomb. In the centre of the church, on a white marble sarcophagus, lay a figure wrapped in thick folds of drapery, with a wolf and a lamb at his feet. Another pedestal of the same form was vacant. I approached, and read the following inscriptions on the marble. On the end under the head of the recumbent figure were the following words,
In thy bosom, O God!
Rests his imperishable spirit,
For the eternal law of life
Is death and resurrection.
At the opposite end was written;
His childhood was deprived of its greatest blessing,—
Loving education in the paternal house.
His youth was stormy, and vain, and foolish,
But never estranged from Nature and from God.
On the one side,
Serious and melancholy was his manhood;—
It would have been shrouded in night,
Had not a loving woman,
Like the sun, with clear benign beams,
Oft changed the dark night into cheerful day.
On the other side,
Length of days was denied him:
What were his works and his deeds?
They live and bloom around you.
What else he strove for, or attained, on earth,—
To others it availed much, to himself little.
And now I thought much of you, and of all I love, and I felt a sort of pious sorrow for myself;—and as the sudden pause of the music awoke me from my dream, the silent tears were actually upon my cheek, so that I was almost ashamed to be seen.