There is a strange thing about some of the gravestones which I didn't notice when I was here before. Or, rather, I oughtn't to call them stones. They are woods. Over the humbler tombs stand rude memorials, each consisting of two short, slightly ornamented posts with a short broad plank fastened between. The plank is painted white; and upon it, in black letters, are displayed the name and age and birth-and-death dates of the man or woman asleep below.
At the bottom of each inscription there is an abbreviated formula which puzzled me sorely. It runs: "Un D. P. s. v. p." Not until I had almost given up trying to guess what it might mean, was the riddle solved. Behind the chancel I found a larger and newer grave on which the legend was spelt out at large in full: "Un De Profundis, s'il vous plait."
It filled my eyes so full with sudden tears that the solid world seemed to be wavering and dissolving as I beheld it. And, at the same time, the dim mysterious world beyond seemed suddenly clear and near. It was no longer the wind in the pines that I heard: it was a multitudinous whispering of spirit-voices pleading close to my ear: "If you please!"
I am wondering to-night whether I ever really and truly believed until to-day in the immortality of the soul. I am wondering whether I have ever done more than assent to the doctrine mechanically as a part of my childhood's creed, and as a postulate on which rest many familiar things in our literature and civilization.
Yes and No. In a sense I have believed, in a sense I have not. Until to-day, I have only thought of the disembodied soul in one or other of three different ways. I have thought of the soul as a cold abstraction, a philosopher's name for an antithesis to the body. Again, after I've listened to ghost-tales, I've thought of it ignobly--as a horror, a scary, frightful spook, a foul shape of night swooping horribly across the short sunlit path of our little life to remind us of the immeasurable cold and unending dark beyond. Last of all, after some stately obsequies, I've thought of the soul as living some supernal, Gothic life in a churchly heaven--a heaven where the sky is not a dome, but a pointed roof resounding for ever and ever and ever with Gregorian chants. That is to say, at the best I have imagined the soul clothed in a mediæval vestment, and living exaltedly, in an incalculable remoteness from to-day's crowded world of living and breathing women and men.