The woman is dead. In the room where her body died, flowers have been
placed, offerings to the dead. Also there are flowers upon the bed. The
ghost of the woman observes all this, but she does not feel either glad or
sad because of it; she is thinking only of the living lover, who was not
there when she died, but far away. She wants to know whether he really
loved her, whether he will really be sorry to hear that she is dead.
Outside the room of death the birds are singing; in the fields beyond the
windows peasants are working, and talking as they work. But the ghost does
not listen to these sounds. The ghost remains in the room only for love's
sake; she can not go away until the lover comes. At last she hears him
coming. She knows the sound of the step; she knows the touch of the hand
upon the lock of the door. And instantly, before she sees him at all, she
first feels delight. Already it seems to her that she can smell the
perfume of the flowers of heaven; it then seems to her that about her
head, as about the head of an angel, a circle of glory is shaping itself,
and the real heaven, the Heaven of Love, is at hand.

How very beautiful this is. There is still one line which requires a
separate explanation--I mean the sentence about the sands of time running
golden. Perhaps you may remember the same simile in Tennyson's "Locksley
Hall":

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in His glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Here time is identified with the sand of the hour glass, and the verb "to
run" is used because this verb commonly expresses the trickling of the
sand from the upper part of the glass into the lower. In other words, fine
sand "runs" just like water. To say that the sands of time run golden, or
become changed into gold, is only a poetical way of stating that the time