On these accounts it is that I find it
impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in the
endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not more affecting,
at least haunts my mind more obstinately and besiegingly in that season.
Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might have been
the immediate occasions of the following dream, to which, however, a
predisposition must always have existed in my mind; but having been once
roused it never left me, and split into a thousand fantastic varieties,
which often suddenly reunited, and composed again the original dream.
I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May, that it was Easter Sunday,
and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to
me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the very scene
which could really be commanded from that situation, but exalted, as was
usual, and solemnised by the power of dreams. There were the same
mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but the mountains
were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was interspace far
larger between them of meadows and forest lawns; the hedges were rich
with white roses; and no living creature was to be seen, excepting that
in the green churchyard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon the
verdant graves, and particularly round about the grave of a child whom I
had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld them, a little before
sunrise in the same summer, when that child died.
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