"I'll go to Jesus, though my sin
Hath like a mountain rose."
I did not know that this last line was bad grammar, but thought that
the sin in question was something pretty, that looked "like a mountain
rose." Mountains I had never seen; they were a glorious dream to me.
And a rose that grew on a mountain must surely be prettier than any of
our red wild roses on the hill, sweet as they were. I would pluck that
rose, and carry it up the mountain-side into the temple where the King
sat, and would give it to Him; and then He would touch me with his
sceptre, and let me through into a garden full of flowers. There was no
garden in the hymn; I suppose the "rose" made me invent one. But it did
read--
"I know his courts; I'll enter in,
Whatever may oppose;"
and so I fancied there would be lions in the way, as there were in the
Pilgrim's, at the "House Beautiful"; but I should not be afraid of
them; they would no doubt be chained. The last verse began with the
lines,--
"I can but perish if I go:
I am resolved to try:"
and my heart beat a brave echo to the words, as I started off in fancy
on a "Pilgrim's Progress" of my own, a happy little dreamer, telling
nobody the secret of my imaginary journey, taken in sermon-time.
Usually, the hymns for which I cared most suggested Nature in some
way,--flowers, trees, skies, and stars. When I repeated,--
"There everlasting spring abides,
And never-withering flowers,"--
I thought of the faintly flushed anemones and white and blue violets,
the dear little short-lived children of our shivering spring. They also
would surely be found in that heavenly land, blooming on through the
cloudless, endless year. And I seemed to smell the spiciness of bay
berry and sweet-fern and wild roses and meadow-sweet that grew in
fragrant jungles up and down the hillside back of the meeting-house, in
another verse which I dearly loved:--
"The hill of Zion yields
A thousand sacred sweet,
Before we reach the heavenly fields,
Or walk the golden streets."
We were allowed to take a little nosegay to meeting sometimes: a pink
or two (pinks were pink then, not red, nor white, nor even double) and
a sprig of camomile; and their blended perfume still seems to be a part
of the June Sabbath mornings long passed away.
When the choir sang of
"Seas of heavenly rest,"
a breath of salt wind came in with the words through the open door,
from the sheltered waters of the bay, so softly blue and so lovely, I
always wondered how a world could be beautiful where "there was no more
sea." I concluded that the hymn and the text could not really
contradict other; that there must be something like the sea in heaven,
after all. One stanza that I used to croon over, gave me the feeling of
being rocked in a boat on a strange and beautiful ocean, from whose
far-off shores the sunrise beckoned:--
"At anchor laid, remote from home,
Toiling I cry, Sweet Spirit, come!
Celestial breeze, no longer stay!
But spread my sails, and speed my way!"
Some of the chosen hymns of my infancy the world recognizes among its
noblest treasures of sacred song. That one of Doddridge's, beginning
with
"Ye golden lamps of heaven, farewell!"
made me feel as if I had just been gazing in at some window of the
"many mansions" above:--
"Ye stars are but the shining dust
Of my divine abode-"
Had I not known that, ever since I was a baby? But the light does not
stream down even into a baby's soul with equal brightness all the time.
Earth draws her dark curtains too soon over the windows of heaven, and
the little children fall asleep in her dim rooms, and forget their
visions.