V.

When I waked, I was still alone. There seemed to have been showers, for

the leaves and grass about me were wet; yet I felt no chill or dampness,

or any kind of injury from this fact. Rather I had a certain

refreshment, as if my sleeping senses had drunk of the peace and power

of the dew that flashed far and near about me. The intense excitement

under which I had labored since coming to this place was calmed. All the

fevers of feeling were laid. I could not have said whether there had

been what below we called night, or how the passage of time had marked

itself; I only knew that I had experienced the recuperation of night,

and that I sprang to the next duty or delight of existence with the

vigor of recurring day.

As I rose from the grass, I noticed a four-leaved clover, and

remembering the pretty little superstition we used to have about it, I

plucked it, and held it to my face, and so learned that the rain-drop in

this new land had perfume; an exquisite scent; as if into the essence of

brown earth and spicy roots, and aromatic green things, such as summer

rain distills with us from out a fresh-washed world, there were mingled

an inconceivable odor drawn out of the heart of the sky. Metaphysicians

used to tell us that no man ever imagined a new perfume, even in his

dreams. I could see that they were right, for anything like the perfume

of clover after a rain in Heaven, had never entered into my sense or

soul before. I saved the clover “for good luck,” as I used to do.

Overhead there was a marvel. There seemed to have been clouds--their

passing and breaking, and flitting--and now, behold the heavens

themselves, bared of all their storm-drapery, had drawn across their

dazzling forms a veil of glory. From what, for want of better knowledge,

I still called East to West, and North to South, one supernal prism

swept. The whole canopy of the sky was a rainbow.

It is impossible to describe this sight in any earthly tongue, to any

dwellers of the earth. I stood beneath it, as a drop stands beneath the

ocean. For a time I could only feel the surge of beauty--mere

beauty--roll above me. Then, I think, as the dew had fallen from the

leaf, so I sunk upon my knees. I prayed because it was natural to pray,

and felt God in my soul as the prism feels the primary color, while I

thanked Him that I was immortally alive. It had never been like this

before, to pray; nay, prayer itself was now one of the discoveries of

Heaven. It throbbed through me like the beat of a new heart. It seemed

to me that He must be very near me. Almost it was, as if He and I were

alone together in the Universe. For the first time, the passionate wish

to be taken into His very visible presence,--that intense desire which I

had heard of, as overpowering so many of the newly dead,--began to take

possession of me. But I put it aside, since it was not permitted, and a

consciousness of my unfitness came to me, that made the wish itself seem

a kind of mistake. I think this feeling was not unlike what we called

below a sense of sin. I did not give it that name at that time. It had

come to me so naturally and gradually, that there was no strain or pain

about it. Yet when I had it, I could no longer conceive of being without

it. It seemed to me that I was a stronger and wiser woman for it. A

certain gentleness and humility different from what I had been used to,

in my life of activity, wherein so many depended on me, and on the

decided faculties of my nature, accompanied the growing sense of

personal unworthiness with which I entered on the blessedness of

everlasting life.

I watched the rainbow of the sky till it had begun to fade--an event in

itself an exquisite wonder, for each tint of the prism flashed out and

ran in lightning across the heavens before falling to its place in the

primary color, till at last the whole spectacle was resolved into the

three elements, the red, the yellow, and the blue; which themselves

moved on and away, like a conqueror dismissing a pageant.

When this gorgeous scene had ended, I was surprised to find that though

dead and in Heaven, I was hungry. I gathered fruits which grew near, of

strange form and flavor, but delicious to the taste past anything I had

ever eaten, and I drank of the brook where the shells were, feeling

greatly invigorated thereby. I was beginning to wonder where my father

was, when I saw him coming towards me. He greeted me with his old

good-morning kiss, laying his hand upon my head in a benediction that

filled my soul.

As we moved on together, I asked him if he remembered how we used to say

below:

“What a heavenly day!”

Many people seemed to be passing on the road which we had chosen, but as

we walked on they grew fewer.

“There are those who wish to speak with you,” he said with a slight

hesitation, “but all things can wait here; we learn to wait ourselves.

You are to go to your mother now.”

“And not with you?” I asked, having a certain fear of the mystery of my

undertaking. He shook his head with a look more nearly like

disappointment than anything I had seen upon his face in this new life;

explaining to me, however, with cheerful acquiescence, that it was not

Willed that he should join me on my journey.

“Tell her that I come shortly,” he added, “and that I come alone. She

will understand. And have no fear; you have much to learn, but it will

come syllable by syllable.”

Now swiftly, at the instant while he spoke with me, I found myself alone

and in a mountainous region, from which a great outlook was before me. I

saw the kingdoms of heaven and the glory of them, spread out before me

like a map. A mist of the colors of amethyst and emerald interfused,

enwrapped the outlines of the landscape. All details grew blurred and

beautiful like a dream at which one snatches vainly in the morning. Off,

and beyond, the infinite ether throbbed. Yonder, like a speck upon a

sunbeam, swam the tiny globe which we called earth. Stars and suns

flashed and faded, revolving and waiting in their places. Surely it was

growing dark, for they sprang out like mighty light-houses upon the

grayness of the void.

The splendors of the Southern cross streamed far into the strange light,

neither of night nor day, not of twilight or dawn, which surrounded me.

Colored suns, of which astronomers had indeed taught us, poured

undreamed-of light upon unknown planets. I passed worlds whose

luminaries gave them scarlet, green, and purple days. “These too,” I

thought, “I shall one day visit.” I flashed through currents of awful

color, and measures of awful night. I felt more than I perceived, and

wondered more than I feared. It was some moments before I realized, by

these few astronomical details, that I was adrift, alone upon the

mystery and mightiness of Space.

Of this strange and solitary journey, I can speak so imperfectly, that

it were better almost to leave it out of my narrative. Yet, when I

remember how I have sometimes heard those still upon earth conceive,

with the great fear and ignorance inseparable from earth-trained

imagination, of such transits of the soul from point to point in ether,

I should be glad to express at least the incomplete impressions which I

received from this experience.

The strongest of these, and the sweetest, was the sense of safety--and

still the sense of safety; unassailable, everlasting; blessed beyond the

thought of an insecure life to compass. To be dead was to be dead to

danger, dead to fear. To be dead was to be alive to a sense of assured

good chance that nothing in the universe could shake.

So I felt no dread, believe me, though much awe and amazement, as I took

my first journey from Heaven to earth. I have elsewhere said that the

distance, by astronomical calculation, was in itself perhaps not

enormous. I had an impression that I was crossing a great sphere or

penumbra, belonging to the earth itself, and having a certain relation

to it, like the soul to the body of a man.

Was Heaven located within or upon this world-soul? The question occurred

to me, but up to this time, I am still unable to answer it. The transit

itself was swift and subtle as a thought. Indeed, it seemed to me that

thought itself might have been my vehicle of conveyance; or perhaps I

should say, feeling. My love and longing took me up like pollen taken by

the wind. As I approached the spot where my dear ones dwelt and sorrowed

for me, desire and speed both increased by a mighty momentum.

Now I did not find this journey as difficult as that other, when I had

departed, a freshly-freed soul, from earth to Heaven. I learned that I

was now subject to other natural laws. A celestial gravitation

controlled the celestial body, as that of the earth had compelled the

other. I was upborne in space by this new and mysterious influence. Yet

there was no dispute between it and the other law, the eternal law of

love, which drew me down. Between soul and body, in the heavenly

existence, there could be no more conflict than between light and an

ether wave.

I do not say that I performed this journey without effort or

intelligence. The little knowledge I ever had was taxed in view of the

grandeurs and the mysteries around me. Shall I be believed if I say that

I recalled all the astronomy and geography that my life as a teacher had

left still somewhat freshly imprinted on the memory? that the facts of

physics recurred to me, even in that inroad of feeling? and that I

guided myself to the Massachusetts town as I would have found it upon a

globe at school? Already I learned that no acquisition of one life is

lost in the next. Already I thanked God for everything I knew, only

wishing, with the passion of ignorance newly revealed to itself by the

dawn of wisdom, that my poor human acquirements had ever truly deserved

the high name of study, or stored my thought with its eternal results.