Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/184

Rh !—the man dies with a celestial strain or note of divinest harmony and seraphic melody ringing sweetest music through every avenue, vault, and chamber of his being. Now observe, and mark well this definition of Narwana; On earth the longest duration of any single musical note never exceeds a few moments; but this Note of which I speak, this Sunburst of celestial music, this instantaneous rapture lasts unchangingly, and FOREVER! It is unaltered, the sound, the music, the man, eternally the same, without an interval to suggest even the idea of monotone! It is an infinite melody, struck on an Eternal harp, enduring forever and aye!

Such is the Narwana of the good! The other, the Nihility of the evil and imperfect. Thus death has three Gates: the Iron one opens on Night—total extinction; the Silver one, on Immortal fields; the golden one on—What Gods may well aspire to!—if we are to believe what lordly and loftiest Seership tells us—and I am one who thus believes.

I, within the year 1873, met people whom I knew were under the ban of the bad Nihility. Elsewhere, in the volume of which this is a chapter, an account is given of a hoary-headed "man," of nearly seventy years, who sought, and expected, to prolong his own miserable and wretched life by absorbing that of a third young girl,—one of sixteen years,—he having already performed the burial-service over two prior victims; that old man is doomed to absolute extinction, unless saved by repentance, physical regeneration, and the growth of affection within him. It was not passion or lust only that urged him to prolong his own existence at the cost of others; to stretch out his wasted years by the awful crime of drinking the young life, and wrecking a child of so few summers; but the conscious and unconscious want of love was what urged him on to the deadly, selfish deed; he felt the need of the great base upon which immortality must be builded, or not at all. Many such as he there are.

But it does not follow that the monadal point, spark, or germ, constituting, underlying, and animating the old lecher, and others of his ilk; the detestable crew in whom lust reigns supreme; the