sep. 22, 1900.

to-day i am calmer, and the hours have been passing in a long reverie; i have been thinking quietly over the past years. sometimes, as i lay with eyes closed, the old life came so near me that it almost seemed as if men and women and children, some of them dead and gone, had sate by me and spoken to me; little scenes and groups out of early years that i thought i had forgotten suddenly shaped themselves. it is as if my will had abdicated its sway, and the mind, like one who is to remove from a house in which he had long dwelt, is turning over old stores, finding old relics long laid aside in cupboards and lumber-rooms, and seeing them without sorrow, only lingering with a kind of tender remoteness over the sweet and fragrant associations of the days that are dead.

i have never doubted that i am to die, and to-day it seems as though i cared little when[250] the parting comes; death does not seem to me now like a sharp close to life, the yawning of a dark pit; but, as in an allegory, i seem to see a little dim figure, leaving a valley full of sunlight and life, and going upwards into misty and shapeless hills. i used to wonder whether death was an end, an extinction—now that seems impossible—my life and thought seem so strong, so independent of the frail physical accompaniments of the body; but even if it is an end, the thought does not afflict me. i am in the father’s hands. it is he that hath made us.