A Dead Man's Diary by Coulson Kernahan

"Do you see that young man with the dark, delicate features? " she continued, giving an unexpected turn to the conversation. "I mean the one with the brown eyes that have so strange a look in them. He is a poet, and when he was on earth he was blind, but his songs were sad as the sighing of the wind in the pine trees, and sweet with sound, and perfume, and the love of woman. He and I were then, as now, the most devoted of friends, and it was our custom to spend one evening at least in each week together. Sometimes we talked of places or of pictures (in both of which, notwithstanding his blindness, he took a singular interest), sometimes of poetry or flowers. Not seldom he would sketch out for me the plot of some story he was writing, and often I would read aloud while he sat listening with tranquil face and closed eyes in his accustomed place by the fireside. I remember that on one occasion the piece which we thus read together was Jean Paul's Dream of the Dead Christ saying there is no God, and that when next I saw my poet-friend, he told me that after I had left him, he had fallen asleep, and dreamed a dream which he spoke of as 'the most impudent piece of plagiaristic imitation which ever was perpetrated,' and which he called his 'Dream of Eternal Rest.'

"As I sat here in the darkness which has now become to me like a house of which I am the only tenant,' he said, 'I fell asleep and dreamed that I saw my life lying behind me like the line of phosphorescent light which marks the track of a fallen star -- a line traced in darkness, and which arising in darkness dies away into darkness again; and in my dream an angel appeared unto me, and, laying his hand upon my shoulder, said, "Thou who probest the mysteries of life, and peerest into the time which is to be, arise, come with me, and I will show thee something of that which thou seekest. " So saying, he stretched forth his hand, which I clasped, and we set forth on our infinite journey.