the reason why death, other conditions remaining the same, is more
profoundly affecting in summer than in other parts of the year--so
far, at least, as it is liable to any modification at all from accidents
of scenery or season. The reason, as I there suggested, lies in the
antagonism between the tropical redundancy of life in summer and the
frozen sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the grave we haunt
with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us;
and, the two coming into collision, each exalts the other into stronger
relief. But, in my case, there was even a subtler reason why the summer
had this intense power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of
death. And, recollecting it, I am struck with the truth, that far more
of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed
combinations of _concrete_ objects, pass to us as _involutes_ (if I
may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being
disentangled, than ever reach us _directly_, and in their own abstract
shapes. It had happened, that amongst our vast nursery collection of
books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark
evenings, as my three sisters, with myself, sat by the firelight round
the _guard_ [7] of our nursery, no book was so much in request among us.
It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. Our younger nurse,
whom we all loved, would sometimes, according to her simple powers,
endeavor to explain what we found obscure. We, the children, were all
constitutionally touched with pensiveness: the fitful gloom and sudden
lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feelings;
and they suited, also, the divine revelations of power and mysterious
beauty which awed us. Above all, the story of a just man,--man, and yet
_not_ man, real above all things, and yet shadowy above all things,--who
had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, slept upon our minds like
early dawn upon the waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the chief
differences in Oriental climates; and all these differences (as it