‘Thy gardens and thy gallant walks
Continually are green;
There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen.
‘There cinnamon, there sugar grows,
There nard and balm abound,
What tongue can tell, or heart conceive
The joys that there are found?
‘Quite through the streets, with silver sound,
The flood of life doth flow,
Upon whose banks, on every side,
The wood of life doth grow.’
I tell you we may learn something from that grand old Catholic singer.
He is far nearer to the Bible than the innovators on his MSS. Do you not
notice how like his images are to the inspired ones, and yet how
pleasant and natural is the effect of the entire poem?
“There is nobody like Bonar, though, to sing about heaven. There is one
of his, ‘We shall meet and rest,’--do you know it?”
I shook my head, and knelt down beside her and watched her face,--it was
quite unconscious of me, the musing face,--while she repeated
dreamily:--
“Where the faded flower shall freshen,--
Freshen nevermore to fade;
Where the shaded sky shall brighten,--
Brighten nevermore to shade;
Where the sun-blaze never scorches;
Where the star-beams cease to chill;
Where no tempest stirs the echoes
Of the wood, or wave, or hill;....
Where no shadow shall bewilder;
Where life’s vain parade is o’er;
Where the sleep of sin is broken,
And the dreamer dreams no more;
Where the bond is never severed,--
Partings, claspings, sob and moan,
Midnight waking, twilight weeping,
Heavy noontide,--all are done;
Where the child has found its mother;
Where the mother finds the child;
Where dear families are gathered,
That were scattered on the wild;....
Where the hidden wound is healed;
Where the blighted life reblooms;
Where the smitten heart the freshness
Of its buoyant youth resumes;....
Where we find the joy of loving,
As we never loved before,--
Loving on, unchilled, unhindered,
Loving once, forevermore.” ...
30th.
Aunt Winifred was weeding her day-lilies this morning, when the gate
creaked timidly, and then swung noisily, and in walked Abinadab Quirk,
with a bouquet of China pinks in the button-hole of his green-gray linen
coat. He had taken evident pains to smarten himself up a little, for his
hair was combed into two horizontal _dabs_ over his ears, and the
green-gray coat and blue-checked shirt-sleeves were quite clean; but he
certainly is the most uncouth specimen of six feet five that it has ever
been my privilege to behold. I feel sorry for him, though. I heard Meta
Tripp laughing at him in Sunday school the other day,--“Quadrangular
Quirk,” she called him, a little too loud, and the poor fellow heard
her. He half turned, blushing fiercely; then slunk down in his corner
with as pitiable a look as is often seen upon a man’s face.
He came up to Auntie awkwardly,--a part of the scene I saw from the
window, and the rest she told me,--head hanging, and the tiny bouquet
held out.
“Clo sent these to you,” he stammered out,--“my cousin Clo. I was coming
’long, and she thought, you know,--she’d get me, you see, to--to--that
is, to--bring them. She sent her--that is--let me see. She sent her
respect--ful--respectful--no, her love; that was it. She sent her love
’long with ’em.”
Mrs. Forceythe dropped her weeds, and held out her white, shapely hands,
wet with the heavy dew, to take the flowers.
“O, thank you! Clo knows my fancy for pinks. How kind in you to bring
them! Won’t you sit down a few moments? I was just going to rest a
little. Do you like flowers?”
Abinadab eyed the white hands, as his huge fingers just touched them,
with a sort of awe; and, sighing, sat down on the very edge of the
garden bench beside her. After a singular variety of efforts to take the
most uncomfortable position of which he was capable, he succeeded to his
satisfaction, and, growing then somewhat more at his ease, answered her
question.
“Flowers are sech _gassy_ things. They just blow out and that’s the end
of ’em. _I_ like machine-shops best.”
“Ah! well, that is a very useful liking. Do you ever invent machinery
yourself?”
“Sometimes,” said Abinadab, with a bashful smile. “There’s a little
improvement of mine for carpet-sweepers up before the patent-office now.
Don’t know whether they’ll run it through. Some of the chaps I saw in
Boston told me they thought they would do’t in time; it takes an awful
sight of time. I’m alwers fussing over something of the kind; alwers
did, sence I was a baby; had my little windmills and carts and things;
used to sell ’em to the other young uns. Father don’t like it. He wants
me to stick to the farm. I don’t like farming. I feel like a fish out of
water.--Mrs. Forceythe, marm!”
He turned on her with an abrupt change of tone, so funny that she could
with difficulty retain her gravity.
“I heard you saying a sight of queer things the other day about heaven.
Clo, she’s been telling me a sight more. Now, _I_ never believed in
heaven!”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe,” said the poor fellow, with sullen decision,
“that a benevolent God ever would ha’ made sech a derned awkward chap as
I am!”
Aunt Winifred replied by stepping into the house, and bringing out a
fine photograph of one of the best of the St. Georges,--a rapt, yet very
manly face, in which the saint and the hero are wonderfully blended.
“I suppose,” she said, putting it into his hands, “that if you should go
to heaven, you would be as much fairer than that picture as that picture
is fairer than you are now.”
“No! Why, would I, though? Jim-miny! Why, it would be worth going for,
wouldn’t it?”
The words were no less reverently spoken than the vague rhapsodies of
his father; for the sullenness left his face, and his eyes--which are
pleasant, and not unmanly, when one fairly sees them--sparkled softly,
like a child’s.
“Make it all up there, maybe?” musing,--“the girls laughing at you all
your life, and all? That would be the bigger heft of the two then,
wouldn’t it? for they say there ain’t any end to things up there. Why,
so it might be fair in Him after all; more’n fair, perhaps. See here,
Mrs. Forceythe, I’m not a church-member, you know, and father, he’s
dreadful troubled about me; prays over me like a span of ministers, the
old gentleman does, every Sunday night. Now, I don’t want to go to the
other place any more than the next man, and I’ve had my times, too, of
thinking I’d keep steady and say my prayers reg’lar,--it makes a chap
feel on a sight better terms with himself,--but I don’t see how _I_’m
going to wear white frocks and stand up in a choir,--never could sing no
more’n a frog with a cold in his head,--it tires me more now, honest, to
think of it, than it does to do a week’s mowing. Look at me! Do you
s’pose I’m fit for it? Father, he’s always talking about the thrones,
and the wings, and the praises, and the palms, and having new names in
your foreheads, (shouldn’t object to that, though, by any means), till
he drives me into the tool-house, or off on a spree. I tell him if God
hain’t got a place where chaps like me can do something He’s fitted ’em
to do in this world, there’s no use thinking about it anyhow.”
So Auntie took the honest fellow into her most earnest thought for half
an hour, and argued, and suggested, and reproved, and helped him, as
only she could do; and at the end of it seemed to have worked into his
mind some distinct and not unwelcome ideas of what a Christ-like life
must mean to him, and of the coming heaven which is so much more real to
her than any life outside of it.
“And then,” she told him, “I imagine that your fancy for machinery will
be employed in some way. Perhaps you will do a great deal more
successful inventing there than you ever will here.”
“You don’t say so!” said radiant Abinadab.
“God will give you something to do, certainly, and something that you
will like.”
“I might turn it to some religious purpose, you know!” said Abinadab,
looking bright. “Perhaps I could help ’em build a church, or hist some
of their pearl gates, or something like!”
Upon that he said that it was time to be at home and see to the oxen,
and shambled awkwardly away.
Clo told us this afternoon that he begged the errand and the flowers
from her. She says: “‘Bin thinks there never was anybody like you, Mrs.
Forceythe, and ’Bin isn’t the only one, either.” At which Mrs. Forceythe
smiles absently, thinking--I wonder of what.
Monday night.
I saw as funny and as pretty a bit of a drama this afternoon as I have
seen for a long time.
Faith had been rolling out in the hot hay ever since three o’clock, with
one of the little Blands, and when the shadows grew long they came in
with flushed cheeks and tumbled hair, to rest and cool upon the
door-steps. I was sitting in the parlor, sewing energetically on some
sun-bonnets for some of Aunt Winifred’s people down town,--I found the
heat to be more bearable if I kept busy,--and could see, unseen, all the
little _tableaux_ into which the two children grouped themselves; a new
one every instant; in the shadow now,--now in a quiver of golden glow;
the wind tossing their hair about, and their chatter chiming down the
hall like bells.
“O what a funny little sunset there’s going to be behind the
maple-tree,” said the blond-haired Bland, in a pause.
“Funny enough,” observed Faith, with her superior smile, “but it’s going
to be a great deal funnier up in heaven, I tell you, Molly Bland.”
“Funny in heaven? Why, Faith!” Molly drew herself up with a religious
air, and looked the image of her father.
“Yes, to be sure. I’m going to have some little pink blocks made out of
it when I go; pink and yellow and green and purple and--O, so many
blocks! I’m going to have a little red cloud to sail round in, like that
one up over the house, too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Molly opened her eyes.
“O, I don’t believe it!”
“_You_ don’t know much!” said Miss Faith, superbly. “I shouldn’t s’pose
you would believe it. P’r’aps I’ll have some strawberries too, and some
ginger-snaps,--I’m not going to have any old bread and butter up
there,--O, and some little gold apples, and a lot of playthings; nicer
playthings--why, nicer than they have in the shops in Boston, Molly
Bland! God’s keeping ’em up there a purpose.”
“Dear me!” said incredulous Molly, “I should just like to know who told
you that much. My mother never told it at me. Did your mother tell it at
you?”
“O, she told me some of it, and the rest I thinked out myself.”
“Let’s go and play One Old Cat,” said Molly, with an uncomfortable jump;
“I wish I hadn’t got to go to heaven!”
“Why, Molly Bland! why, I think heaven’s splendid! I’ve got my papa up
there, you know. ‘Here’s my little girl!’ That’s what he’s going to say.
Mamma, she’ll be there, too, and we’re all going to live in the
prettiest house. I have dreadful hurries to go this afternoon sometimes
when Phœbe’s cross and won’t give me sugar. They don’t let you in,
though, ’nless you’re a good girl.”
“Who gets it all up?” asked puzzled Molly.
“Jesus Christ will give me all these beautiful fings,” said Faith,
evidently repeating her mother’s words,--the only catechism that she has
been taught.
“And what will he do when he sees you?” asked her mother, coming down
the stairs and stepping up behind her.
“Take me up in His arms and kiss me.”
“And what will Faith say?”
“_Fank--you!_” said the child, softly.
In another minute she was absorbed, body and soul, in the mysteries of
One Old Cat.
“But I don’t think she will feel much like being naughty for half an
hour to come,” her mother said; “hear how pleasantly her words drop!
Such a talk quiets her, like a hand laid on her head. Mary, sometimes I
think it is His very hand, as much as when He touched those other little
children. I wish Faith to feel at home with Him and His home. Little
thing! I really do not think that she is conscious of any fear of dying;
I do not think it means anything to her but Christ, and her father, and
pink blocks, and a nice time, and never disobeying me, or being cross.
Many a time she wakes me up in the morning talking away to herself, and
when I turn and look at her, she says: ‘O mamma, won’t we go to heaven
to-day, you fink? _When_ will we go, mamma?’”
“If there had been any pink blocks and ginger-snaps for me when I was at
her age, I should not have prayed every night to ‘die out.’ I think the
horrors of death that children live through, unguessed and unrelieved,
are awful. Faith may thank you all her life that she has escaped them.”
“I should feel answerable to God for the child’s soul, if I had not
prevented that. I always wanted to know what sort of mother that poor
little thing had, who asked, if she were _very_ good up in heaven,
whether they wouldn’t let her go down to hell Saturday afternoons, and
play a little while!”
“I know. But think of it,--blocks and ginger-snaps!”
“I treat Faith just as the Bible treats us, by dealing in _pictures_ of
truth that she can understand. I can make Clo and Abinadab Quirk
comprehend that their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal
rosewood and steel, but will be some synonyme of the thing, which will
answer just such wants of their changed natures as rosewood and steel
must answer now. There will be machinery and pianos in the same sense in
which there will be pearl gates and harps. Whatever enjoyment any or all
of them represent now, something will represent then.
“But Faith, if I told her that her heavenly ginger-snaps would not be
made of molasses and flour, would have a cry, for fear that she was not
going to have any ginger-snaps at all; so, until she is older, I give
her unqualified ginger-snaps. The principal joy of a child’s life
consists in eating. Faith begins, as soon as the light wanes, to dream
of that gum-drop which she is to have at bedtime. I don’t suppose she
can outgrow that at once by passing out of her little round body. She
must begin where she left off,--nothing but a baby, though it will be as
holy and happy a baby as Christ can make it. When she says: “Mamma, I
shall be hungery and want my dinner, up there,” I never hesitate to tell
her that she shall have her dinner. She would never, in her secret
heart, though she might not have the honesty to say so, expect to be
otherwise than miserable in a dinnerless eternity.”
“You are not afraid of misleading the child’s fancy?”
“Not so long as I can keep the two ideas--that Christ is her best
friend, and that heaven is not meant for naughty girls--pre-eminent in
her mind. And I sincerely believe that He would give her the very pink
blocks which she anticipates, no less than He would give back a poet his
lost dreams, or you your brother. He has been a child; perhaps,
incidentally to the unsolved mysteries of atonement, for this very
reason,--that He may know how to ‘prepare their places’ for them, whose
angels do always behold His Father. Ah, you may be sure that, if of such
is the happy Kingdom, He will not scorn to stoop and fit it to their
little needs.
“There was that poor little fellow whose guinea-pig died,--do you
remember?”
“Only half; what was it?”
“‘O mamma,’ he sobbed out, behind his handkerchief, ‘don’t great big
elephants have souls?’
“‘No, my son.’
“‘Nor camels, mamma?’
“‘No.’
“‘Nor bears, nor alligators, nor chickens?’
“‘O no, dear.’
“‘O mamma, mamma! Don’t little CLEAN--_white_--_guinea-pigs_ have
souls?’
“I never should have had the heart to say no to that; especially as we
have no positive proof to the contrary.
“Then that scrap of a boy who lost his little red balloon the morning he
bought it, and, broken-hearted, wanted to know whether it had gone to
heaven. Don’t I suppose if he had been taken there himself that very
minute, that he would have found a little balloon in waiting for him?
How can I help it?”
“It has a pretty sound. If people would not think it so material and
shocking--”
“Let people read Martin Luther’s letter to his little boy. There is the
testimony of a pillar in good and regular standing! I don’t think you
need be afraid of my balloon, after that.”
I remembered that there was a letter of his on heaven, but, not
recalling it distinctly, I hunted for it to-night, and read it over. I
shall copy it, the better to retain it in mind.
“Grace and peace in Christ, my dear little son. I see with pleasure that
thou learnest well, and prayed diligently. Do so, my son, and continue.
When I come home I will bring thee a pretty fairing.
“I know a pretty, merry garden wherein are many children. They have
little golden coats, and they gather beautiful apples under the trees,
and pears, cherries, plums, and wheat-plums;--they sing, and jump, and
are merry. They have beautiful little horses, too, with gold bits and
silver saddles. And I asked the man to whom the garden belongs, whose
children they were. And he said: ‘They are the children that love to
pray and to learn, and are good.’ Then said I: ‘Dear man, I have a son,
too; his name is Johnny Luther. May he not also come into this garden
and eat these beautiful apples and pears, and ride these fine horses?’
Then the man said: ‘If he loves to pray and to learn, and is good, he
shall come into this garden, and Lippus and Jost too; and when they all
come together, they shall have fifes and trumpets, lutes and all sorts
of music, and they shall dance, and shoot with little cross-bows.’
“And he showed me a fine meadow there in the garden, made for dancing.
There hung nothing but golden fifes, trumpets, and fine silver
cross-bows. But it was early, and the children had not yet eaten;
therefore I could not wait the dance, and I said to the man: ‘Ah, dear
sir! I will immediately go and write all this to my little son Johnny,
and tell him to pray diligently, and to learn well, and to be good, so
that he also may come to this garden. But he has an Aunt Lehne, he must
bring her with him.’ Then the man said: ‘It shall be so; go, and write
him so.’
“Therefore, my dear little son Johnny, learn and pray away! and tell
Lippus and Jost, too that they must learn and pray. And then you shall
come to the garden together. Herewith I commend thee to Almighty God.
And greet Aunt Lehne, and give her a kiss for my sake.
“Thy dear Father,
“MARTINUS LUTHER.
“ANNO 1530.”