Complete. De Quincey’s translation.

I HAD been reading an excellent dissertation of Krüger’s upon the old vulgar error which regards the space from one earth and sun to another as empty. Our sun, together with all its planets, fills only the 31,419,460,000,000,000th part of the whole space between itself and the next solar body. Gracious Heavens! thought I, in what an unfathomable abyss of emptiness were this universe swallowed up and lost, if all were void and utter vacuity except the few shining points of dust which we call a planetary system! To conceive of our earthly ocean as the abode of death and essentially incapable of life, and of its populous islands as being no greater than snail shells, would be a far less error in proportion to the compass of our planet than that which attributes emptiness to the great mundane spaces; and the error would be far less if the marine animals were to ascribe life and fullness exclusively to the sea, and to regard the atmospheric ocean above them as empty and untenanted. According to Herschel, the most remote of the galaxies which the telescope discovers lie at such a distance from us, that their light, which reaches us at this day, must have set out on its journey two millions of years ago; and thus by optical laws it is possible that whole squadrons of the starry hosts may be now reaching us with their beams, which have themselves perished ages ago. Upon this scale of computation for the dimensions of the world, what heights and depths and breadths must there be in this universe—in comparison of which the positive universe would be itself a nihility, were it crossed, pierced, and belted about by so illimitable a wilderness of nothing! But is it possible that any man can for a moment overlook those vast forces which must pervade these imaginary deserts with eternal surges of flux and reflux, to make the very paths to those distant starry coasts voyageable to our eyes? Can you lock up in a sun or in its planets their reciprocal forces of attraction! Does not the light stream through the immeasurable spaces between our earth and the nebula which is furthest removed from us? And in this stream of light there is as ample an existence of the positive, and as much a home for the abode of a spiritual world, as there is a dwelling-place for thy own spirit in the substance of the brain. To these and similar reflections succeeded the following dream:—

    Methought my body sank down in ruins, and my inner form stepped out appareled in light; and by my side there stood another form which resembled my own, except that it did not shine like mine, but lightened unceasingly. “Two thoughts,” said the Form, “are the wings with which I move: the thought of Here, and the thought of There. And, behold! I am yonder,”—pointing to a distant world. “Come, then, and wait on me with thy thoughts and with thy flight, that I may show to thee the universe under a veil.” And I flew along with the Form. In a moment our earth fell back, behind our consuming flight, into an abyss of distance; a faint gleam only was reflected from the summits of the Cordilleras, and a few moments more reduced the sun to a little star; and soon there remained nothing visible of our system except a comet which was traveling from our sun with angelic speed in the direction of Sirius. Our flight now carried us so rapidly through the flocks of solar bodies—flocks past counting, unless to their heavenly Shepherd—that scarcely could they expand themselves before us into the magnitude of moons, before they sank behind us into pale nebular gleams; and their planetary earths could not reveal themselves for a moment to the transcendent rapidity of our course. At length Sirius and all the brotherhood of our constellations and the galaxy of our heavens stood far below our feet as a little nebula amongst other yet more distant nebulæ. Thus we flew on through the starry wildernesses: one heaven after another unfurled its immeasurable banners before us, and then rolled up behind us; galaxy behind galaxy towered up into solemn altitudes before which the spirit shuddered; and they stood in long array through which the Infinite Being might pass in progress. Sometimes the Form that lightened would outfly my weary thoughts; and then it would be seen far off before me like a coruscation amongst the stars—till suddenly I thought again to myself the thought of There, and then I was at its side. But, as we were thus swallowed up by one abyss of stars after another, and the heavens above our heads were not emptier, neither were the heavens below them fuller; and as suns without intermission fell into the solar ocean like waterspouts of a storm which fall into the ocean of waters: then at length the human heart within me was overburdened and weary, and yearned after some narrow cell or quiet oratory in this metropolitan cathedral of the universe. And I said to the Form at my side, “O Spirit! has then this universe no end?” And the Form answered and said, “Lo! it has no beginning.”

  Suddenly, however, the heavens above us appeared to be emptied, and not a star was seen to twinkle in the mighty abyss; no gleam of light to break the unity of the infinite darkness. The starry hosts behind us had all contracted into an obscure nebula: and at length that also had vanished. And I thought to myself, “At last the universe has ended”: and I trembled at the thought of the illimitable dungeon of pure, pure darkness which here began to imprison the creation: I shuddered at the dead sea of nothing, in whose unfathomable zone of blackness the jewel of the glittering universe seemed to be set and buried forever; and through the night in which we moved I saw the Form which still lightened as before, but left all around it unilluminated. Then the Form said to me in my anguish—“Oh! creature of little faith! Look up! the most ancient light is coming!” I looked; and in a moment came a twilight—in the twinkling of an eye a galaxy—and then with a choral burst rushed in all the company of stars. For centuries gray with age, for millennia hoary with antiquity, had the starry light been on its road to us; and at length out of heights inaccessible to thought it had reached us. Now then, as through some renovated century, we flew through new cycles of heavens. At length again came a starless interval; and far longer it endured, before the beams of a starry host again had reached us.

  As we thus advanced forever through an interchange of nights and solar heavens, and as the interval grew still longer and longer before the last heaven we had quitted contracted to a point, and as once we issued suddenly from the middle of thickest night into an Aurora Borealis, the herald of an expiring world, and we found throughout this cycle of solar systems that a day of judgment had indeed arrived; the suns had sickened, and the planets were heaving—rocking, yawning in convulsions, the subterraneous waters of the great deeps were breaking up, and lightnings that were ten diameters of a world in length ran along—from east to west—from Zenith to Nadir; and here and there, where a sun should have been, we saw instead through the misty vapor a gloomy, ashy, leaden corpse of a solar body, that sucked in flames from the perishing world, but gave out neither light nor heat; and as I saw, through a vista which had no end, mountain towering above mountain, and piled up with what seemed glittering snow from the conflict of solar and planetary bodies; then my spirit bent under the load of the universe, and I said to the Form, “Rest, rest; and lead me no further: I am too solitary in the creation itself; and in its deserts yet more so: the full world is great, but the empty world is greater; and with the universe increase its Zaarahs.”

  Then the Form touched me like the flowing of a breath, and spoke more gently than before: “In the presence of God there is no emptiness: above, below, between, and round about the stars, in the darkness and in the light, dwelleth the true and very universe, the sum and fountain of all that is. But thy spirit can bear only earthly images of the unearthly; now then I cleanse thy sight with euphrasy; look forth, and behold the images.” Immediately my eyes were opened; and I looked, and I saw as it were an interminable sea of light,—sea immeasurable, sea unfathomable, sea without a shore. All spaces between all heavens were filled with happiest light; and there was a thundering of floods: and there were seas above the seas, and seas below the seas; and I saw all the trackless regions that we had voyaged over; and my eye comprehended the furthest and the nearest; and darkness had become light, and the light darkness; for the deserts and wastes of the creation were now filled with the sea of light, and in this sea the suns floated like ash-gray blossoms, and the planets like black grains of seed. Then my heart comprehended that immortality dwelled in the spaces between the worlds, and death only amongst the worlds. Upon all the suns there walked upright shadows in the form of men; but they were glorified when they quitted these perishable worlds, and when they sank into the sea of light; and the murky planets, I perceived, were but cradles for the infant spirits of the universe of light. In the Zaarahs of the creation I saw—I heard—I felt—the glittering—the echoing—the breathing of life and creative power. The suns were but as spinning wheels, the planets no more than weavers’ shuttles, in relation to the infinite web which composes the veil of Isis,—which veil is hung over the whole creation, and lengthens as any finite being attempts to raise it. And in sight of this immeasurability of life, no sadness could endure; but only joy that knew no limit, and happy prayers.

  But in the midst of this great vision of the universe the Form that lightened eternally had become invisible, or had vanished to its home in the unseen world of spirits: I was left alone in the centre of a universe of life, and I yearned after some sympathizing being. Suddenly from the starry deeps there came floating through the ocean of light a planetary body; and upon it there stood a woman whose face was as the face of a Madonna; and by her side there stood a child, whose countenance varied not, neither was it magnified as he drew nearer. This child was a king, for I saw that he had a crown upon his head, but the crown was a crown of thorns. Then also I perceived that the planetary body was our unhappy earth; and, as the earth drew near, this child who had come forth from the starry deeps to comfort me threw upon me a look of gentlest pity and of unutterable love, so that in my heart I had a sudden rapture of joy such as passes all understanding, and I awoke in the tumult of my happiness.

  I awoke: but my happiness survived my dream; and I exclaimed—Oh! how beautiful is death, seeing that we die in a world of life and of creation without end, and I blessed God for my life upon earth, but much more for the life in those unseen depths of the universe which are emptied of all but the Supreme Reality, and where no earthly life nor perishable hope can enter.