An age of unutterable misery seemed crowded into a brief
moment. All the events of my past life, a life, as it then seemed to
me, made up of folly and crime, rose distinct before me, like accusing
witnesses, as if the recording angel had unrolled to my view the full
and black catalogue of my unnumbered sins:--
'O'er the soul Winters of memory seemed to roll,
And gather, in that drop of time,
A life of pain, an age of crime.'
"I felt that what I had done was beyond recall; and the Phantom of Death,
as it drew nearer, wore an aspect darker and more terrible. I thought
of the coffin, the shroud, and the still and narrow grave, into whose
dumb and frozen solitude none but the gnawing worm intrudes. And then
my thoughts wandered away into the vagueness and mystery of eternity, I
was rushing uncalled for into the presence of a just and pure God, with
a spirit unrepenting, unannealed! And I tried to pray and could not;
for a heaviness, a dull strange torpor crept over me. Consciousness
went out slowly. 'This is death,' thought I; yet I felt no pain,
nothing save a weary drowsiness, against which I struggled in vain.
"My next sensations were those of calmness, deep, ineffable, an
unearthly quiet; a suspension or rather oblivion of every mental
affliction; a condition of the mind betwixt the thoughts of wakefulness
and the dreams of sleep.
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