And what if the propinquity of these poor remains be gage and promise of a sympathy of souls unveiled and unhidden by false semblances of the body? Then should death indeed be the crown of a long desire and give me at the last the fellowship into which life denied initiation. Surely, as Coleridge dreamed, there is a sex in souls, which, disengaged from the coarse companionship of the flesh, shall see into each other's crystal deeps. Thence, in new life, when the last recondite secret is withholden no longer, there shall come forth those qualities and powers that ennobled man and woman in mortality; they shall come forth in all their several strength and beauty, divinely animate, and reflecting upon each other bright rays and soft colours invisible upon these misty oceans of our navigation.
It is not terrible to think, at times, on death, for that _danse macabre_ which troubled the fancy of our forefathers is now danced out, and the silent figure that knocks at every door comes not as a grinning skeleton but as one of more gentle countenance than any art can express. The natural change, which to William Blake was but the passing out of one room into another, is well personified in the merciful figure with the kind eyes, coming at the sounded hour to lead away into quietness. My solitude has taught me to know well those noble efforts which art has made to lift from our bowed backs the burden of the fear of death: I like to look upon that youthful Thanatos carved upon a column from the temple of the Ephesian Diana, and every year the red leaves of autumn persuade my steps to that village rich in elms where lived one who also saw death so, and laboured to draw the frightened eyes of men from the hour-glass and the skull to the gracious vision of the deliverer and friend. There hands which were dear to him have raised a place of leave-taking upon a green slope, a house of farewell set upon the shore to receive the last pledges from the living to the absolved and unburdened dead.
When first I saw Compton it was a cloudless noon in August, the day of days in which to come alone into this silent place. Out of the fiery heat beaten from wall and path like a blinding spray of light, it is a passage into a dimness of cool space, an air glaucous as the shade of olives. There from the circuit of a dome look down kind faces of immortal youth, in form and habit too tranquil for our life, but made homely to us by the mercy in their eyes, and some quality of the white soft hands which draws all weariness and all pain towards them. To me it was as though some furious struggle in the waves were over, and swooning out of life I had awakened upon a floor of translucent ocean, where, in a gracious and tempered light, beings of a compassion too intense for earth, each with a gesture that was not yet a touch, were charming all the bruises of the lost battle away. Surely this is true vision of things to come, and to such mercy we shall awaken. It cannot be that when the eyes reopen they shall see the forms of dark apparitors, or that the ears shall hear Æacus and Rhadamanthys speaking in dim halls their cold, irrevocable dooms. No, but there shall be a pause and respite upon the way from one to another life, and none may be conceived more grateful than this rest, as it were a sojourn beneath waters of Eunoë, where a flood of dear memories foreboding good shall absolve us from the mortal sin of fear.