A Dead Man's Diary by Coulson Kernahan

It has always been a favourite fancy of mine that I should like to die upon some sunny, songful morning, in spring or early summer. The thought of dying in the night, and of finding this thin and aërial something, which I have learned to call "my soul," being driven remorselessly nightward, as Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise; the seeing it in imagination, a spectral, unsubstantial shadow of myself, flitting a-shivering out into the black-wombed darkness, and fumbling with filmy hands that it might clasp the closer around it the warm familiar robe of flesh, only to find that robe fallen away for ever -- this thought, I must confess, fills me at all times with an abhorrent loathing and dread.

To look up by night at the cold glitter of the stars, and to fancy my disembodied spirit winging its weary way thereto, through fathomless leagues of void and voiceless ether, causes me ever to shiver, and to turn shudderingly to earth again; but the thought of passing peacefully away upon some sunny, summer morning seems less like dying than like stepping out of doors to be among the birds and the butterflies. _Then_ the heaven of my hopes would not seem so very distant after all (and oh! how much more heavenly and homelike would that heaven appear did I but know it to be _this_ side of the stars! ), and my first entry into the dim and shadowy realm of the spirit-world would seem the less strange and unfamiliar for my having to pass out on my way to it through the fields, the flowers, and the sunshine that I love so well.