I WAS sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at
length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses
were leaving me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was
the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that,
the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy
indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution --
perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel.
This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for
a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips
of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white -- whiter than
the sheet upon which I trace these words -- and thin even to
grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of
firmness -- of immoveable resolution -- of stern contempt of human
torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were still
issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I
saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no
sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror,
the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which
enwrapped the walls of the apartment. And then my vision fell upon
the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect
of charity, and seemed white and slender angels who would save me;
but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my
spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched
the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became
meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them
there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a
rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in
the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long
before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at
length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges
vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into
nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness
supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing
descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night
were the universe.
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I had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was
lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even
to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber -- no! In
delirium -- no! In a swoon -- no! In death -- no! even in the grave
all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from
the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some
dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been)
we remember not that we have dreamed. In the return to life from the
swoon there are two stages; first, that of the sense of mental or
spiritual; secondly, that of the sense of physical, existence. It
seems probable that if, upon reaching the second stage, we could
recall the impressions of the first, we should find these impressions
eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond. And that gulf is -- what?
How at least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb?
But if the impressions of what I have termed the first stage, are
not, at will, recalled, yet, after long interval, do they not come
unbidden, while we marvel whence they come? He who has never swooned,
is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in
coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad
visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the
perfume of some novel flower -- is not he whose brain grows
bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never
before arrested his attention.
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