Page:Some unpublished letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau; a chapter in the history of a still-born book.djvu/120

 if something beautiful had happened—not death."

And something beautiful had indeed happened—another of the countless miracles that surround us here: a soul leveling this lift that it may go on to a higher; a soul that also had for its last countersign the "Æquanimitas" of the dying Roman Emperor; a soul that found 'perfect disease as agreeable as perfect health'; a soul to which this world was a paradise—a "Paradise Regained" by the clear sanity of supreme submission to the Maker; a soul that at the home-call left the only paradise it had ever seen and the purest delights that mere man can ever know,—left all as serenely and grandly as the setting sun sinks through the purple glory whose last refulgence gives the promise of another day.