THERE were grass-grown tumuli on the hills to which of old I used to walk,
sit down at the foot of one of them, and think. Some warrior had been
interred there in the antehistoric times. The sun of the summer morning
shone on the dome of sward, and the air came softly up from the wheat below,
the tips of the grasses swayed as it passed sighing faintly, it ceased, and
the bees hummed by to the thyme and heathbells. I became absorbed in the
glory of the day, the sunshine, the sweet air, the yellowing corn turning
from its sappy green to summer's noon of gold, the lark's song like a
waterfall in the sky. I felt at that moment that I was like the spirit of
the man whose body was interred in the tumulus; I could understand and feel
his existence the same as my own. He was as real to me two thousand years
after interment as those I had seen in the body. The abstract personality of
the dead seemed as existent as thought. As my
thought could slip back the twenty centuries in a moment to the forest-days
when he hurled the spear, or shot with the bow, hunting the deer, and could
return again as swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could endure from then
till now, and the time was nothing.

Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not cause
its extinction. Itwas no longer to the soul than my thought occupied to me.
Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, death did
not seem to me to affect the personality.In dissolution there was no
bridgeless chasm, no unfathomable gulf of separation; the spirit did not
immediately become inaccesible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurable
distance. Look at another person while living;
the soul is not visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely
because after death the soul is not visible is no demonstration that it does
not still live.
The condition of being unseen is the same condition which occurs
while the body is living, so that intrinsically there is nothing