allegory or fantasy, needs a few words of preface, in order to clear
away at the outset any misunderstandings which may possibly arise in a
reader's mind. Nothing is further from my wish than to attempt any
philosophical or ontological exposition of what is hidden behind the
veil of death. But one may be permitted to deal with the subject
imaginatively or poetically, to translate hopes into visions, as I have
tried to do.

The fact that underlies the book is this: that in the course of a very
sad and strange experience--an illness which lasted for some two years,
involving me in a dark cloud of dejection--I came to believe
practically, instead of merely theoretically, in the personal
immortality of the human soul. I was conscious, during the whole time,
that though the physical machinery of the nerves was out of gear, the
soul and the mind remained, not only intact, but practically unaffected
by the disease, imprisoned, like a bird in a cage, but perfectly free in
themselves, and uninjured by the bodily weakness which enveloped them.
This was not all. I was led to perceive that I had been living life
with an entirely distorted standard of values; I had been ambitious,
covetous, eager for comfort and respect, absorbed in trivial dreams and
childish fancies. I saw, in the course of my illness, that what really
mattered to the soul was the relation in which it stood to other souls;
that affection was the native air of the spirit; and that anything which
distracted the heart from the duty of love was a kind of bodily
delusion, and simply hindered the spirit in its pilgrimage.

It is easy to learn this, to attain to a sense of certainty about it,
and yet to be unable to put it into practice as simply and frankly as
one desires to do! The body grows strong again and reasserts itself; but
the blessed consciousness of a great possibility apprehended and grasped