Who illumine the dark places of earth?

The summons had come. 

Suddenly, I became insensible to earth and its surroundings. 

I had entered the dark icy tunnel—death—that forms a passage through space from your world to the next. 

As some lost traveller, wandering through falling snow over the glacial mountains of Switzerland, emerges suddenly on the sunny plains of Italy, so I, from the blackness about me, rushed out into a magnetic stream of light, through which, in some incomprehensible manner, I floated—

As you appear to float through the air in your nightly dreams. 

A lethargy that had, for a few seconds, enthralled my senses passed off, and I found myself looking out on a lovely landscape. 

A vast park stretched before me, covered with a moss-like verdure, ornamented with ethereal trees, whose myriads of small leaves, agitated by the magnetic air, broke like the spray of a fountain against the sky.

As I moved on through the air, towers and spires, minarets and buildings, resembling those of earth, passed before my eyes, while—here, and there—rose great cathedral-like structures of a pale, rosy, semi-transparent substance, looking not unlike palaces of ice, glowing in the rays of the setting sun. 

I was fearful that what I saw might prove to be phantasmagoria—a beautiful mirage—that would fade away, but it was real—

It was a beatified earth, even as a spirit is a glorified human being.

Life is real, life is earnest—

And the grave is not its goal—

Dust thou art, to dust returneth—

Was not spoken of the soul.

To hear, in the clear spirit air, these prophetic words of my muse, filled my soul with ineffable joy.

Then gathered about me my friends—

They were all there—

People whom I had seen borne to the grave in years past—

Friends of youth and manhood clustered about me. 

We spoke together. 

They congratulated me on my arrival in the better land. 

In sweet converse, they led me to a city of gold, a city lit by unearthly light, neither of the sun, nor of the moon, for the God of love gives it light. 

In that home of the soul, an effulgence magnetic rises from loving and true hearts that dwell there—

From myriads of benevolent souls who illume the dark places of earth and guide the ever-seeking, upward-reaching spirit of man into a state of harmony and love!

—Spirit Longfellow