Have you ever thought of, or desired to know, the real meaning of that sign, seen with the human eyes of his soul by the disciple whom the Lord loved? Yes, of course you have! and what a grand and noble verse you always thought it! “And the Sea——” Softly, good friend,—I know you can say it off glibly and pompously enough, as you have heard it read a thousand times; but is it, then, merely a piece of pomp? mere drumming and trumpeting, to tell you—what might have been said in three words—that all the dead rose again, whether they had been bedridden, or drowned, or slain? If it means no more than that, is it not, to speak frankly, bombast, and even bad and half unintelligible bombast?—for what does ‘Death’ mean, as distinguished from the Sea,—the American lakes? or Hell as distinguished from Death,—a family vault instead of a grave? But suppose it is not bombast, and does mean something that it would be well you should think of,—have you yet understood it,—much less, thought of it? Read the whole passage from the beginning: “I saw the Dead, small and great, stand before God. And the Books were opened;”—and so to the end. ‘Stand’ in renewed perfectness of body and soul—each redeemed from its own manner of Death. For have not they each their own manner? As the seed by the drought, or the thorn,—so the soul by the soul’s hunger, and the soul’s pang;—athirst in the springless sand; choked in the return-wave of Edom; grasped by the chasm of the earth: some, yet calling “out of the depths;” but some—“Thou didst blow with Thy wind, and the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the mighty waters.” But now the natural grave, in which the gentle saints resigned their perfect body to the dust, and perfect spirit to Him who gave it;—and now the wide sea of the world, that drifted with its weeds so many breasts that heaved but with the heaving deep;—and now the Death that overtook the lingering step, and closed the lustful eyes;—and now the Hell, that hid with its shade, and scourged with its agony; the fierce and foul spirits that had forced its gates in flesh: [109]—all these the Loved Apostle saw compelled to restore their ruin; and all these, their prey, stand once again, renewed, as their Maker made them, before their Maker. “And the Sea gave up the Dead which were in it, and Death, and Hell, the dead which were in them.” Not bombast, good reader, in any wise; nor a merely soothing melody of charming English, to be mouthed for a ‘second lesson.’ But is it worse than bombast, then? Is it, perchance, pure Lie? Carpaccio, at all events, thought not; and this, as I have told you, is the first practical opinion of his I want you to be well informed of. Since that last Fors was written, one of my friends found for me the most beautiful of all the symbols in the picture of the Dream;—one of those which leap to the eyes when they are understood, yet which, in the sweet enigma, I had deliberately twice painted, without understanding.