The day died away, and I was aware that it was growing dark--yet the same terrible conceit still overwhelmed me. Nor was it confined to the boundaries of the apartment--it extended, although in a more definite manner, to all objects, and, perhaps I will not be understood in saying that it extended also to all _sentiments_. My fingers as they lay cold, clammy, stiff, and pressing helplessly one against another, were, in my imagination, swelled to a size according with the proportions of the Antoeus. Every portion of my frame betook of their enormity. The pieces of money--I well remember--which being placed upon my eyelids, failed to keep them effectually closed, seemed huge, interminable chariot-wheels of the Olympia, or of the Sun. Yet it is very singular that I experienced no sense of weight--of gravity. On the contrary I was put to much inconvenience by that buoyancy--that tantalizing _difficulty of keeping down_, which is felt by the swimmer in deep water. Amid the tumult of my terrors I laughed with a hearty internal laugh to think what incongruity there would be--could I arise and walk--between the elasticity of my motion, and the mountain of my form. * * * * * The night came--and with it a new crowd of horrors. The consciousness of my approaching interment, began to assume new distinctness, and consistency--yet never for one moment did I imagine _that I was not actually dead_. "This then"--I mentally ejaculated--"this darkness which is palpable, and oppresses with a sense of suffocation--this--this--is indeed _death_. This is death--this is death the terrible--death the holy. This is the death undergone by Regulus--and equally by Seneca. Thus--thus, too, shall I always remain--always--always remain. Reason is folly, and Philosophy a lie. No one will know my sensations, my horror--my despair. Yet will men still persist in reasoning, and philosophizing, and making themselves fools. There is, I find, no hereafter but this. This--this--this--is the only Eternity!--and what, O Baalzebub!--_what_ an Eternity!--to lie in this vast--this awful void--a hideous, vague, and unmeaning anomaly--motionless, yet wishing for motion--powerless, yet longing for power--forever, forever, and forever!" But the morning broke at length--and with its misty and gloomy dawn arrived in triple horror the paraphernalia of the grave. Then--and not till then--was I fully sensible of the fearful fate hanging over me. The phantasms of the night had faded away with its shadows, and the actual terrors of the yawning tomb left me no heart for the bug-bear speculations of Transcendentalism.