It was, indeed, at first but a dream with which the eyes of my sweet mistress inspired me, but from a dream it has grown into a belief, and in these last months into a conviction which I am sure nothing can shake.

If you can share it the long mourning of your life will be at an end.

For my own part I could never return to the old way of thinking without relapsing into unutterable despair.

To do so would be virtually to give up faith in any immortality at all worth speaking of.

For it is the long procession of our past selves, each with its own peculiar charm and incommunicable quality, slipping away from us as we pass on, and not the last self of all whom the grave entraps, which constitutes our chief contribution to mortality.