eldest and most solemn Earth, blending even thy loveliness and joy with
a terror and an awe! thy sunshine is girt with clouds and circled with
storm and tempest; thy day cometh from the womb of darkness, and
returneth unto darkness, as man returns unto thy bosom. The green herb
that laughs in the valley, the water that sings merrily along the wood;
the many-winged and all-searching air, which garners life as a harvest
and scatters it as a seed,--all are pregnant with corruption and carry
the cradled death within them, as an oak banqueteth the destroying worm.
But who that looks upon thee, and loves thee, and inhales thy blessings
will ever mingle too deep a moral with his joy? Let us not ask whence
come the garlands that we wreathe around our altars or shower upon our
feasts: will they not bloom as brightly, and breathe with as rich a
fragrance, whether they be plucked from the garden or the grave? O
Earth, my Mother Earth! dark Sepulchre that closes upon all which the
Flesh bears, but Vestibule of the vast regions which the Soul shall
pass, how leaped my heart within me when I first fathomed thy real
spell!

Yes! never shall I forget the rapture with which I hailed the light that
dawned upon me at last! Never shall I forget the suffocating, the full,
the ecstatic joy with which I saw the mightiest of all human hopes
accomplished; and felt, as if an angel spoke, that there is a life
beyond the grave! Tell me not of the pride of ambition; tell me not of
the triumphs of science: never had ambition so lofty an end as the
search after immortality! never had science so sublime a triumph as the
conviction that immortality will be gained! I had been at my task the
whole night,--pale alchymist, seeking from meaner truths to extract the
greatest of all! At the first hour of day, lo! the gold was there: the
labour for which I would have relinquished life was accomplished; the
dove descended upon the waters of my soul. I fled from the house. I