Slumber

In the deepest slumber,in swoon,in death,even in the grave all is NOT lost.Else there is no immortality for men.Arousing from the most profound of slumbers,we break the gossamer web of some dream.Yet in a second afterword(so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.In the return to life from sleep,there are two stages:first,that of the sense of mental or spiritual;secondly,that of the sense of physical existance.It seems probable that if,upon reaching the second stage,we could recall the impressions of the first,we should find these eloquent in the meories of the gulf beyond.And that gulf is--what?.How at least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb?But if the impressions of what I have termed the first stage,are not,at will recalled,yet after long interval,do they not come unbidden,while we markvel whence they come?He who has never swooned,is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familira faces in coals that glow;is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that many may not view;is not he ponders over the perfume of some novel flower;is not he whose brain goes bewlidered with the meaning of some musical cadance which has never arrested his attention.