“Here we are at last!” said the raven⁴. “What a long way it is! In half the time I could have gone to Paradise and seen my cousin—him, you remember, who never came back to Noah! Dear! dear! it is almost winter!”

 

“Winter!” I cried; “it seems but half a day since we left home!”

 

“That is because we have travelled so fast,” answered the raven. “In your world you cannot pull up the plumb-line you call gravitation, and let the world spin round under your feet! But here is my wife’s house! She is very good to let me live with her, and call it the sexton’s cottage!”

 

“But where is your churchyard—your cemetery⁵—where you make your graves, I mean?” said I, seeing nothing but the flat heath.

 

The raven stretched his neck, held out his beak⁶ horizontally, turned it slowly round to all the points of the compass, and said nothing.

 

I followed the beak with my eyes, and lo, without church or graves, all was a churchyard! Wherever the dreary⁷ wind swept, there was the raven’s cemetery! He was sexton of all he surveyed! lord of all that was laid aside! I stood in the burial-ground of the universe; its compass the unenclosed heath, its wall the gray horizon, low and starless! I had left spring and summer, autumn and sunshine behind me, and come to the winter that waited for me! I had set out in the prime of my youth, and here I was already!—But I mistook. The day might well be long in that region, for it contained the seasons. Winter slept there, the night through, in his winding-sheet of ice; with childlike smile, Spring came awake in the dawn; at noon, Summer blazed abroad in her gorgeous beauty; with the slow-changing afternoon, old Autumn crept in, and died at the first breath of the vaporous, ghosty night.

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