of the narrow house —­ the blackness of the absolute Night —­ the silence like a sea that overwhelms —­ the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm —­ these things, with the thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed —­ that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead —­ these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil.  We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth —­ we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.  And thus all narratives upon this topic have an interest profound; an interest, nevertheless, which, through the sacred awe of the topic itself, very properly and very peculiarly depends upon our conviction of the truth of the matter narrated.  What I have now to tell is of my own actual knowledge —­ of my own positive and personal experience.

For several years I had been subject to attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy, in default of a more definitive title.  Although both the immediate and the predisposing causes, and even the actual diagnosis, of this disease are still mysterious, its obvious and apparent character is sufficiently well understood.  Its variations seem to be chiefly of degree.  Sometimes the patient lies, for a day only, or even for a shorter period, in a species of exaggerated lethargy.  He is senseless and externally motionless; but the pulsation of the heart is still faintly perceptible; some traces of warmth remain; a slight color lingers within the centre of the cheek; and, upon application of a mirror to the lips, we can detect a torpid, unequal, and vacillating action of the lungs.  Then again the duration of the trance is for weeks —­ even for months; while the closest scrutiny, and the most rigorous medical tests, fail to establish any material distinction between the state of the sufferer and what we conceive of absolute death.  Very usually he is saved from premature interment solely by the knowledge of his friends that he has been previously subject to catalepsy, by the consequent suspicion excited, and, above all, by the non-appearance of decay.  The advances of the malady are, luckily, gradual.  The first manifestations, although marked, are unequivocal.  The fits grow successively more and more distinctive, and endure each for a longer term than the preceding.  In this lies the principal security from inhumation.  The unfortunate whose first attack should be of the extreme character which is occasionally seen, would almost inevitably be consigned alive to the tomb.