Instances occur, and not very rarely, where the delirium ceases, and the mind again for a time becomes clear and the sensations keen, to be followed, however, ere long by a return of delirium, or it may be of coma, or a rapid sinking of all the bodily powers and speedy death. But along with this temporary clearing of the mental powers, and in proof of its illusiveness, there are the usual signs of bodily failure--a pinching of the features, coldness of the surface, cold sweats, and a feeble rapid pulse. Active delirium and violence are but rarely associated with the act of dying,--they are indeed scarcely compatible with it. They may pave the way to it, but when the act of dying really begins, they cease and give way to that low, rambling, muttering delirium, with which all watchers by the death-bed are so familiar. It is especially at the stage of transition from the one to the other of these states, that we meet with that return of intelligence--that ‘lightening up before death’ which has impressed and surprised mankind from the earliest ages. “We have all observed,” writes Sir Henry Halford, “the mind clear up in an extraordinary manner in the last hours of life, when terminated even in the ordinary course of nature; but certainly still more remarkably when it has been cut short by disease, which had affected, for a time the intellectual faculties. We have seen it become capable of exercising a subtle judgment, when the passions which had been accustomed to bias and embarrass its decisions whilst they existed, are extinguished at the approach of death; and when the inferences which wisdom had drawn from experience of the former behaviour of men, were now made available to a correct estimate of their future conduct, in the sense of Milton’s lines--” ‘When old experience does attain To something like prophetic strain.’[29] “This is most frequently the case when the resistance of the constitution against the influence of the disease has been long protracted, or when the struggle, though short, has been very violent.”[30]