My Library

“With inexpressible alarm, I felt that life itself was fast ebbing from me, and that death was slowly and surely grasping, clutching, freezing my vitals. I was dying. Presently—it appeared as if a long interregnum had occurred between the last previous conscious moment, and the present instantaneous, but positive agony—a sudden, sharp, tingling pang, like that of hot needles thrust in the flesh, shot through my brain. This was followed by a sinking sensation, as if the body had resigned itself to passive dissolution, and then came, with electric rapidity, a succession of the most cruel agonies ever endured by mortal man. When it ceased consciousness had ceased also, and I fell to the floor as one suddenly dead, to the amazement of the company, as was afterwards declared. “How long this physical inanition lasted, I cannot now say, but during it the spiritual part of me was roused to a tenfold degree of activity, consciousness and power; for it saw things in a new and cryptic light, and far more distinctly than it ever had through the bodily eyes. An increase of hearing power accompanied this accretion of sight, and I heard a voice, precisely like that heard when my mother died, and when about to throw myself into the sea, which said, ‘Awake! a lesson awaits you;’ and with this there came a partial rousing from the lethargy, and I was led upstairs and threw myself upon a sofa, mechanically, at the same time fixing my eyes