All Nature was teeming with life, and he felt an answering thrill, when suddenly, as if from the very fountains…
- Date of account
- Published 1912
- Source
- Greek and Roman Ghost Stories
- Reference
- Greek and Roman Ghost Stories · selected passage 4
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English discussion of Greek and Latin source traditions
- Translation
- Lacy Collison-Morley citing classical sources in translation
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
All Nature was teeming with life, and he felt an answering thrill, when suddenly, as if from the very fountains of being within him, there welled up a consciousness of death, and with it the formless nothing, and a vision of himself lying cold, motionless, dumb in the black earth, while above him the birds sang, the tr…
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyAll Nature was teeming with life, and he felt an answering thrill, when suddenly, as if from the very fountains of being within him, there welled up a consciousness of death, and with it the formless nothing, and a vision of himself lying cold, motionless, dumb in the black earth, while above him the birds sang, the trees rustled in the wind, the rivers ran on in their course, and the living revelled in the warm sun, bathed in its divine light. This first vision of death often haunted him in later years;[11] and one realizes that such must often have been the feelings of the Romans, and still more often of the Greeks, for the joy of the Greek in life was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum æterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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