Ah! that art of forgetting, which the
Athenian coveted as the best of boons,--when was it ever found through
effort or desire? In all scenes of beauty or of excitement, in the
allurements of society, in solitude and in sorrow, my heart still
turned to you with ceaseless longing, as if you alone could touch its
master-chord, and waken the harmonies which were struggling for
expression. By slow degrees, as I learned to dissever you from the
material world, there came a conviction of the nearness of your spirit,
sometimes so positive that I would waken from a reverie, in which I
was lost to sights and sounds around me, with a sense of having been
in your actual presence. I was aware of an effect rather than of an
immediate consciousness,--as if the magnetism of your touch had swept
over me, cooling the fever of my brain, and charming to deep
tranquillity my troubled heart. And thus I learned, through similar
experience, the same belief as yours. I have felt the continuous
nearness, the inseparable union of our spirits, as plainly as I feel
it now, with my hand clasped in yours, and reading in your eyes the
unutterable things which we can never hope to speak, because they are
foreshadowings of another existence.
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