[Illustration]
I
When you first saw her your heart leaped, and a tingling shocked through
all your blood like a gush of electricity. Simultaneously your senses
were changed, and long so remained.
That sudden throb was the awakening of your dead;--and that thrill was
made by the swarming and the crowding of them;--and that change of sense
was wrought only by their multitudinous desire,--for which reason it
seemed _an intensification_. They remembered having loved a number of
young persons somewhat resembling her. But where, or when, they did not
recollect. They--(and They, of course, are You)--had drunk of Lethe many
times since then.
The true name of the River of Forgetfulness is the River of
Death--though you may not find authority for the statement in classical
dictionaries. But the Greek story, that the waters of Lethe bring
to weary souls oblivion of the past, is not quite true. One draught
will indeed numb and becloud some forms of memory,--will efface the
remembrance of dates and names and of other trifling details;--but a
million draughts will not produce total oblivion. Even the destruction
of the world would not have that result. _Nothing is absolutely
forgotten except the non-essential._ The essential can, at most, only be
dimmed by the drinking of Lethe.
It was because of billions of billions of memories amassed through
trillions of lives, and blended within you into some one vague delicious
image, that you came to believe a certain being more beautiful than
the sun. The delusion signified that she happened to resemble this
composite,--mnemonic shadowing of all the dead women related to the
loves of your innumerable lives. And this first part of your experience,
when you could not understand,--when you fancied the beloved a witch,
and never even dreamed that the witchery might be the work of ghosts,
was--the Period of Wonder.