Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and WomenMacDonald, George
Science
Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
MacDonald, George
Fantasy fiction
My spirit rejoiced. They left me to my repose. I felt as if a cool hand
had been laid upon my heart, and had stilled it. My soul was like a
summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet
glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the
wind of the twilight has begun to blow. The hot fever of life had gone
by, and I breathed the clear mountain-air of the land of Death. I had
never dreamed of such blessedness. It was not that I had in any way
ceased to be what I had been. The very fact that anything can die,
implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either
take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and
arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to
lead a purely spiritual life. If my passions were dead, the souls of
the passions, those essential mysteries of the spirit which had
imbodied themselves in the passions, and had given to them all their
glory and wonderment, yet lived, yet glowed, with a pure, undying fire.
They rose above their vanishing earthly garments, and disclosed
themselves angels of light. But oh, how beautiful beyond the old form!
I lay thus for a time, and lived as it were an unradiating existence;
my soul a motionless lake, that received all things and gave nothing
back; satisfied in still contemplation, and spiritual consciousness.
Ere long, they bore me to my grave. Never tired child lay down in his
white bed, and heard the sound of his playthings being laid aside for
the night, with a more luxurious satisfaction of repose than I knew,
when I felt the coffin settle on the firm earth, and heard the sound of
the falling mould upon its lid. It has not the same hollow rattle
within the coffin, that it sends up to the edge of the grave. They
buried me in no graveyard. They loved me too much for that, I thank
them; but they laid me in the grounds of their own castle, amid many
trees; where, as it was spring-time, were growing primroses, and
blue-bells, and all the families of the woods
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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