The Lantern

Book 329

PG

Hath passed away, admit we must that soul,

Shivered in all that body, perished too.

Nay, even when moving in the bounds of life,

Often the soul, now tottering from some cause,

Craves to go out, and from the frame entire

Loosened to be; the countenance becomes

Flaccid, as if the supreme hour were there;

And flabbily collapse the members all

Against the bloodless trunk--the kind of case

We see when we remark in common phrase,

"That man's quite gone," or "fainted dead away";

And where there's now a bustle of alarm,

And all are eager to get some hold upon

The man's last link of life. For then the mind

And all the power of soul are shook so sore,

And these so totter along with all the frame,

That any cause a little stronger might

Dissolve them altogether.--Why, then, doubt

That soul, when once without the body thrust,

There in the open, an enfeebled thing,

Its wrappings stripped away, cannot endure

Not only through no everlasting age,

But even, indeed, through not the least of time?

Then, too, why never is the intellect,

The counselling mind, begotten in the head,