CHAPTER OF DREAMS.
I.
WAS dead.
Dead as one perhaps dies when uncertain whether it is better to live or to die; dead without knowing when or how. I had indeed died painlessly, pleasantly, and mysteriously.
So easily had my life left my body, so little had it suffered in quitting the form of clay, that at first my body did not perceive the change.
Of the precise moment when from a living Turtle-dove I became a corpse, I remember nothing, unless it be that before death the moon shone brightly in a cloudless sky; and when my astonished spirit made out that it had fulfilled its duty on earth, the moon had not ceased to shine, and the sky was still cloudless. Probably my death, far from quenching the light of the moon, or sending the sky into mourning, had made no visible change in earth or heaven. What can it matter to fruitful nature whether a creature like me lives or dies? Yet after all, we are assured that a Sparrow shall not fall to the ground without its heavenly Father.