Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/185

 death was a pleasant feeling, and its joys supreme, even in what to spectators may have seemed the terrible passing hour. This sensation, like all others, cannot be verbally described; it was as if the keenest pleasures known to us in the body were infinitely prolonged and strung out over the entire nerve-sea, instead of a single organ or two. I cannot perhaps convey my meaning to some people better than by saying that the sensation was akin to the feeling of an instantaneous relief from the most excruciating pain—the toothache, for instance. I was not, at first, conscious of possessing a body; not even the ultra-sublimated material one of which we hear so much said in these latter days; but a higher, nobler consciousness was mine—namely, a supremely radiant soul-majesty. My ears did not hear; but Sound—Nature's music—the delicious, but still melodies of earth and space, and all things else, seemed to pour in upon my ravished soul, in rich full streams, through a thousand avenues. The eye did not see, but I was all sight. There was no organ of locomotion, as on the earth, nor were such needed; but my spirit seemed to be all motion, and it knew instinctively, that by the power of the thought-wish, it could reach any point within the boundaries of earth where it longed and willed to be; but not a single yard beyond it. Let it be here distinctly understood, that the condition in which I now found myself, was precisely the same as that of the higher class of spiritual beings, when they are in the peculiar state wherein they can for a limited period, and to a certain extent, become connected with this world, wherein they have once lived, and from which they have passed over