* * * * *
A rapid change was now taking place in my sensations. The last shadows of connection flitted away from my meditations. A storm—a tempest of ideas, vast, novel, and soul-stirring, bore my spirit like a feather afar off. Confusion crowded upon confusion like a wave upon a wave. In a very short time Schelling himself would have been satisfied with my entire loss of self-identity. The crowd became a mass of mere abstraction.
About this period I became aware of a heavy fall and shock—but, although the concussion jarred throughout my frame, I had not the slightest idea of its having been sustained in my own proper person; and thought of it as of an incident peculiar to some other existence—an idiosyncrasy belonging to some other Ens.
It was at this moment—as I afterwards discovered—that having been suspended for the full term of execution, it was thought proper to remove my body from the gallows—this, the more especially as the real culprit had now been retaken and recognized.
Much sympathy was now exercised in my behalf—and as no one in the city appeared to identify my body, it was ordered that I should be interred in the public sepulchre early in the following morning. I lay, in the meantime, without signs of life—although from the moment, I suppose, when the rope was loosened from my neck, a dim consciousness of my situation oppressed me like the night-mare.
I was laid out in a chamber sufficiently small, and very much encumbered with furniture—yet to me it appeared of a size to contain the universe. I have never before or since, in body or in mind, suffered half so much agony as from that single idea. Strange! that the simple conception of abstract magnitude—of infinity—should have been accompanied with pain. Yet so it was. "With how vast a difference," said I, "in life and in death—in time and in eternity—here and hereafter, shall our merest sensations be imbodied!"
The day died away, and I was aware that it was growing dark—yet the same terrible conceit still overwhelmed me. Nor was it confined to the boundaries of the apartment—it extended, although in a more definite manner, to all objects, and, perhaps I will not be understood in saying that it extended also to all sentiments. My fingers as they lay cold, clammy, stiff, and pressing helplessly one against another, were, in my imagination, swelled to a size according with the proportions of the Antoeus. Every portion of my frame betook of their enormity. The pieces of money—I well remember—which being placed upon my eyelids, failed to keep them effectually closed, seemed huge, interminable chariot-wheels of the Olympia, or of the Sun.
Yet it is very singular that I experienced no sense of weight—of gravity. On the contrary I was put to much inconvenience by that buoyancy—that tantalizing difficulty of keeping down, which is felt by the swimmer in deep water. Amid the tumult of my terrors I laughed with a hearty internal laugh to think what incongruity there would be—could I arise and walk—between the elasticity of my motion, and the mountain of my form.
* * * * *
The night came—and with it a new crowd of horrors. The consciousness of my approaching interment, began to assume new distinctness, and consistency—yet never for one moment did I imagine that I was not actually dead.