WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NATURE RINGS DOWN THE CURTAIN UPON INDIVIDUAL LIFE. THE river of years streams through man's material organs; it abrades him and refines him; and inevitably he, outwardly, falls and sinks into the bosom of Nature. Not being illumined and sustained by the self-feeding hopes of youth, and destitute cf definite and substantial knowledge concerning his personal immortality, the pilgrim lowly bends both in body and in soul toward the earth, crushed by the weary weight of care-freighted years, and with the far-heavier load of dreary doubts concerning the What? and the Whither? Youth, the perpetual counterpart and companion of old age, endeavors to cheer the lonely traveller. The young heart uplifts its voice and distinctly chants in the thoughtful ear— "Let us sing the praise of Love~ And thy boundless blessings fall Doubting, dependent, ripened maturity, leans toward believing, self-adequate, self-asserting, inexperienced youth. Nature's spirit is always old, always new, never the same, always unchangeable, never saves anything, yet forever preserves and advances the human spirit. Let us, therefore, look carefully and steadily at her method, and learn how her heart's principles eliminate and preserve from annihilation the human mental structure. Imagine now a person in the death-chamber endowed with a faculty of seeing through the physical organization into all the vital labyrinths of the brain, into the life of the ganglia, into the wondrous chains of motion (positive and negative), into sensation (also positive and negative) as it works out its beautiful results in the secret centres of the eternal interior. "Death" is the word used to signify "the end of life,” spoken by persons who see not that seeming death is really "the beginning of life," and the opening of the sacred volume of eternity. But let us peer through the seeming into that which is within the veil. * I employ this language in a spirit of accommodation. What is here presented as something to be imagined, I have (as also hundreds of others have) witnessed clairvoyantly again and again. The person is now dying; and it is to be a rapid death. Observe something about temperature. The feet are cold; the hands hot and white; a coldness pervades the entire cuticle. See! What is that accumulating in the atmosphere just over the pillowed head? It is an ethereal emanation*-a golden magnetic halo-a throbbing, almost self-conscious atmosphere. The bodily temperature is now lowering rapidly. The coldness has extended upward from the toes to the knees, and from the finger-tips to the elbows; while, in exactly the same ratio, the emanation has ascended higher over the head. The arms are now cold to the shoulders, and the legs to the hips; and the emanation, although not higher in the air, is more expanded, with a compact white centre, resembling the bright nucleus of a miniature sun. This brilliant central spot is, in very truth, the brain of the new spiritual organism now 'forthcoming. The death-cold steals over the heaving breast, and around on either side the temperature is greatly diminished. Look now! The psychic emanation contains some proportion of every principle composing the soul -motion, life, sensation, ethers, essences, vital magnet *This is "Galenii," or the "psychic force," or the "Vasciel," or the "odic-light "-different terms for the mind's atmosphere. ism, vital electricity, instincts-and, much enlarged by accessions, it has floated up in a compact mass, and now occupies a higher altitude near the ceiling.* Now the lungs have ceased to breath, the pulse is still, the physical heart is motionless; while the brain-cells, the corpus callosum, the medulla, and the spinal cords and ganglia, are ablaze with contractive and expansive energies, which gently pulsate and seem to direct and govern themselves by a kind of automatic self-consciousness. See! The negative (gray) substance of the brain is interiorly throbbing-a slow, measured, profoundly-deep throb-not painful, but massive and harmonious, like the deep heart-beat of the sea. Look up! The exalted emanation, obedient to its own changless laws, is now elongated, and has attained a position at right-angles with the horizontal body below. Behold! See how the outlines of a beautiful human form is being fashioned within that emanation. Beneath, it is still tied by a white life-cord to the medulla and the corpus callosum within the brain.† * Sometimes this mass of emanation is formed far above the house, high up in the tranquil air, leagues away from the dying body. † Sometimes, in certain cases where the patient had been insane, I have observed that suddenly the thinking faculties would become rational while nearly every part of the body was cold and dead. This is attributable to the brain's momentum. I have also seen a dying person, even at the last feeble pulse-beat, rouse and impul Let us more closely watch and contemplate the wondrous processes now occurring. You observe that a very fine vitalic thread still connects the vortices and central fibres of dying brain with the lower extremities of the exalted outlined human being in the atmosphere. Notwithstanding the existence of this life-thread, which acts like a telegraphic conductor-conveying messages in opposite directions at the same moment-you observe that the shadowy image, enveloped in a golden emanation, continues almost imperceptibly to ascend skyward. There! What do I now see? A symmetricallyshaped human head, rising above the mass-slowly, beautifully rising out of the golden cloud of substantial principles. And now appear the outlines of a spiritual countenance a quiet face, and full of beauty, surpassing the power of words to delineate. Look again! behold, emerging, the fair neck and beautiful shoulders; and see! as we gaze out come, one after the other, in rapid succession, as if influenced and directed by the wand of a magician, all the parts of a new body—a bright, natural-looking, yet spiritual image-only a little less than the deserted physical body, a perfect sively rise up in bed to converse with a friend, but the next instant he was gone—the brain being the last to yield up the self-conscious life-principle. * The spiritual body is less only when the physical body had at |