spirit itself, and yet slumbers away into death after having seen it.  But the image it has seen, remains, in the eternal procreation, as a homogeneal existence, is again renewed, and the seeming death, from moment to moment, becomes the source of kind after kind of existences in ever-ascending series.  The soul aspires ever onward to love and to behold.  It sees the image more perfect in the brightening twilight of the dawn, in the ever higher-rising sun.  It sleeps again, dying in the clearer vision; but the image seen remains as a permanent kind; and the slumberer awakes anew and ever higher after its own image, till at length, in the full blaze of noonday, a being comes forth, which, like the eagle, can behold the sun and die not.  Then both live on, even when this bodily element, the mist and vapor through which the young eagle gazed, dissolves and falls to earth.”

“I am not sure that I understand you,” said Flemming; “but if I do, you mean to say, that, as the body continually changes and takes unto itselfnew properties, and is not the same to-day as yesterday, so likewise the soul lays aside its idiosyncrasies, and is changed by acquiring new powers, and thus may be said to die.  And hence, properly speaking, the soul lives always in the Present, and has, and can have, no Future; for the Future becomes the Present, and the soul that then lives in me is a higher and more perfect soul; and so onward forevermore.”

“I mean what I say,” continued the Professor; “and can find no more appropriate language to express my meaning than that which I have used.  But as I said before, pardon must be granted to the novelty of words, when it serves to illustrate the obscurity of things.  And I think you will see clearly from what I have said, that this earthly life, when seen hereafter from heaven, will seem like an hour passed long ago, and dimly remembered;—­that long, laborious, full of joys and sorrows as it is, it will then have dwindled down to a mere point, hardly visible to the far-reaching ken of the disembodied spirit.  But the spirit itself soars onward.  And thus death is neither an end nor a beginning.  It is a transition not from one existence to another, but from one state of existence to another.  No link is broken in the chain of being; any more than in passing from infancy to manhood, from manhood to old age.  There are seasons of reverie and deep abstraction, which seem to me analogous to death.  The soul gradually loses its consciousness of what is passing around it; and takes no longer cognizance of objects which are near.  It seems for the moment to have dissolved its connexion with the body.  It has passed as it were into another state of being.  It lives in another world.  It has flown over lands and seas; and holds communion with those it loves, in distant regions of the earth, and the more distant heaven.  It sees familiar faces, and hears beloved voices, which to the bodily senses are no longer visible and audible.  And this likewise is death; save that when we die, the soul returns no more to the dwelling it has left.”