christmas Eve With the Spirits Author:Charles Dickens Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: doors locked, and yet all alight! I must enter and find how this gross negligence of the rules has been perpetrated. The door creaks ! even louder than the key d... more »id in the lock. I divide the sanctuary hangings before the door, and, O Heaven ! what a scene meets my sight! A brilliancy which has no need of such minor effects as gas, or daylight, lights, I might say, fires up the vast edifice, showing every rounded column and sculptural detail in their most vivid outlines. Above, below, around, sounds indescribable ; the very air harmonious and yet so drear: the very atmosphere seems thick with existence ! A congregation such as never before witnessed ; not seats alone occupied, every space, and even the air, eloquent with life. Life, and yet what life ? Such as I had never before witnessed, such as it is not given to mortals to understand ! Forms I had known long since; Faces, whose outlines, once so familiar, seemed as the breaking in of a dream, so long absent had they been from my vision: none are the usual attendants of the Cathedral, not even inhabitants of the city, and yet they have been. Yes, " have been !" A light dawns upon me—these are those who " once were !" I am with the dead, the dead and yet alive ! Am I one of them ? When did I die ? I cannot remember ! All seems as awful as it is inexplicable. A form approaches—one quite recently taken from his post on earth, his- post a sacred one and my chief. My Lord Bishop ? Take back thine hand, mortal: the inhabitants of the tomb have done with familiar greetings. No longer either " My Lord Bishop," I am now spirit with spirit: you are to me only mortal—the representative of mortality! Spirit, then, Good Spirit, tell me where I am ? why is this ? who am I ? Spirit alone, call me not Good Spirit ! Know you not, (...« less