by scriptual scenery and events.

Out of this digression, for the purpose of showing how inextricably
my feelings and images of death were entangled with those of summer,
as connected with Palestine and Jerusalem, let me come back to the bed
chamber of my sister. From the gorgeous sunlight I turned around to
the corpse. There lay the sweet childish figure; there the angel face;
and, as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that no features
had suffered any change. Had they not? The forehead, indeed,--the
serene and noble forehead,--_that_ might be the same; but the frozen
eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from beneath them, the
marble lips, the stiffening hands, laid palm to palm, as if repeating
the supplications of closing anguish,--could these be mistaken for
life? Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those heavenly
lips with tears and never-ending kisses? But so it was _not_. I stood
checked for a moment; awe, not fear, fell upon me; and, whilst I stood,
a solemn wind began to blow--the saddest that ear ever heard. It was
a wind that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand
centuries. Many times since, upon summer days, when the sun is about
the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the
same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, [8] but saintly swell: it is in this
world the one great _audible_ symbol of eternity. And three times in my
life have I happened to hear the same sound in the same circumstances
--namely, when standing between an open window and a dead body on a
summer day.

Instantly, when my ear caught this vast Aeolian intonation, when my eye
filled with the golden fulness of life, the pomps of the heavens
above, or the glory of the flowers below, and turning when it settled
upon the frost which overspread my sister's face, instantly a trance