"Words cannot paint, even to thy eager soul, my friend, the winged swiftness, the onward, glowing hopefulness of my path through the fields of azure. I paused, at length, in a region of keen, pure, bluish light, such as beams from Jupiter to thy planet on a lovely October evening. "Here an immediate conviction pervaded me that this was home--was my appointed resting place; a full tide of hope and satisfaction similar to the emotion excited on my first acquaintance with thy poem flowed over this hour; a joyous confidence in the existence of Goodness and Beauty supplied for a season, the want of thy society. The delicious clearness of every emotion exalted my soul into a realm full of life. Some time elapsed in this state. The whole of my temporal existence passed in review before me. My thoughts, my actions, were placed in full relief before the cleared eye of my spirit. Beloved, thou wilt rejoice to know that thy Meta could then feel that her worst faults sprung from ignorance. As I was striving to connect my present state with my past, and, as it were, poising myself on the brink of space and time, the breath of another presence came across me, and, gradually evolving from the bosom of light, a figure rose before me, in grace, in sweetness, how excelling! Fixing her eyes on mine with the full gaze of love, she said, in flute-like tones, 'Dost thou know me, my sister?' "'Art thou not,' I replied, 'the love of Petrarch? I have seen the portraiture of thy mortal lineaments, and now recognize that perfect beauty, the full violet flower which thy lover's genius was able to anticipate.' "'Yes,' she said, 'I am Laura--on earth most happy, yet most sad; most rich, and yet most poor. I come to greet her whom I recognize as the inheritress of all that was lovely in my earthly being, more happy than I in her temporal state. I have sympathized, O wife of Klopstock! in thy transitory happiness. Thy lover was thy priest and thy poet; thy model and oracle was thy bosom friend. All that earth could give was thine; and I joyed to think on thy rewarded love, thy freedom of soul, and unchecked faith. Follow me now: we are to dwell in the same circle, and I am appointed to show thee thine abiding place.' "She guided me towards the source of that light which I have described to thee. We paused before a structure of dazzling whiteness, which stood on a slope, and overlooked a valley of exceeding beauty. It was shaded by trees which had that peculiar calmness that the shadows of trees have below in the high noon of summer moonlight-- '... trees which are still As the shades of trees below, When they sleep on the lonely hill, In the summer moonlight glow.'