It had ceased to be dark; we walked in a dim twilight, breathing through
the dimness the breath of the spring. A wondrous change had passed upon
the world--or was it not rather that a change more marvellous had
taken place in us? Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal
anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass
was perfectly visible--either by light that went out from it, as fire
from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out of our
eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light.
Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and colour, its indwelling
idea--the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it
out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world
and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and macrocosm
were at length atoned, at length in harmony! I lived in everything;
everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing, was to know
its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at
home--was to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what
he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me--sense after
sense indescribable, because no correspondent words, no likenesses or
imaginations exist, wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed--yet ever
expanding, ever making room to receive--was the conscious being where
things kept entering by so many open doors! When a little breeze
brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself
in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which
responded their sweet TIN-TINNING**, myself in the joy of the sense, and
of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I
lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean
upon which the ground-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new
waves; yet was the joy ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of
thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.
Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is
in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but
life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it
listed, went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and
nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on
our way home to the Father!
So much was ours ere ever the first sun rose upon our freedom: what must
not the eternal day bring with it!
We came to the fearful hollow where once had wallowed the monsters of
the earth: it was indeed, as I had beheld it in my dream, a lovely lake.
I gazed into its pellucid depths. A whirlpool had swept out the soil in
which the abortions burrowed, and at the bottom lay visible the whole
horrid brood: a dim greenish light pervaded the crystalline water, and
revealed every hideous form beneath it. Coiled in spires, folded in
layers, knotted on themselves, or “extended long and large,” they
weltered in motionless heaps--shapes more fantastic in ghoulish,
blasting dismay, than ever wine-sodden brain of exhausted poet fevered
into misbeing. He who dived in the swirling Maelstrom saw none to
compare with them in horror: tentacular convolutions, tumid bulges,
glaring orbs of sepian deformity, would have looked to him innocence
beside such incarnations of hatefulness--every head the wicked
flower that, bursting from an abominable stalk, perfected its evil
significance.
Not one of them moved as we passed. But they were not dead. So long as
exist men and women of unwholesome mind, that lake will still be peopled
with loathsomenesses.
But hark the herald of the sun, the auroral wind, softly trumpeting
his approach! The master-minister of the human tabernacle is at hand!
Heaping before his prow a huge ripple-fretted wave of crimson and gold,
he rushes aloft, as if new launched from the urging hand of his maker
into the upper sea--pauses, and looks down on the world. White-raving
storm of molten metals, he is but a coal from the altar of the Father’s
never-ending sacrifice to his children. See every little flower
straighten its stalk, lift up its neck, and with outstretched head
stand expectant: something more than the sun, greater than the light, is
coming, is coming--none the less surely coming that it is long upon the
road! What matters to-day, or to-morrow, or ten thousand years to Life
himself, to Love himself! He is coming, is coming, and the necks of all
humanity are stretched out to see him come! Every morning will they thus
outstretch themselves, every evening will they droop and wait--until he
comes.--Is this but an air-drawn vision? When he comes, will he indeed
find them watching thus?
It was a glorious resurrection-morning. The night had been spent in
preparing it!
The children went gamboling before, and the beasts came after us.
Fluttering butterflies, darting dragon-flies hovered or shot hither and
thither about our heads, a cloud of colours and flashes, now descending
upon us like a snow-storm of rainbow flakes, now rising into the humid
air like a rolling vapour of embodied odours. It was a summer-day more
like itself, that is, more ideal, than ever man that had not died
found summer-day in any world. I walked on the new earth, under the new
heaven, and found them the same as the old, save that now they opened
their minds to me, and I saw into them. Now, the soul of everything I
met came out to greet me and make friends with me, telling me we came
from the same, and meant the same. I was going to him, they said, with
whom they always were, and whom they always meant; they were, they said,
lightnings that took shape as they flashed from him to his. The dark
rocks drank like sponges the rays that showered upon them; the great
world soaked up the light, and sent out the living. Two joy-fires were
Lona and I. Earth breathed heavenward her sweet-savoured smoke; we
breathed homeward our longing desires. For thanksgiving, our very
consciousness was that.
We came to the channels, once so dry and wearyful: they ran and flashed
and foamed with living water that shouted in its gladness! Far as the
eye could see, all was a rushing, roaring, dashing river of water made
vocal by its rocks.
We did not cross it, but “walked in glory and in joy” up its right bank,
until we reached the great cataract at the foot of the sandy desert,
where, roaring and swirling and dropping sheer, the river divided into
its two branches. There we climbed the height--and found no desert:
through grassy plains, between grassy banks, flowed the deep, wide,
silent river full to the brim. Then first to the Little Ones was
revealed the glory of God in the limpid flow of water. Instinctively
they plunged and swam, and the beasts followed them.
The desert rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. Wide forests had sprung
up, their whole undergrowth flowering shrubs peopled with song-birds.
Every thicket gave birth to a rivulet, and every rivulet to its
water-song.
The place of the buried hand gave no sign. Beyond and still beyond, the
river came in full volume from afar. Up and up we went, now along grassy
margin, and now through forest of gracious trees. The grass grew sweeter
and its flowers more lovely and various as we went; the trees grew
larger, and the wind fuller of messages.
We came at length to a forest whose trees were greater, grander, and
more beautiful than any we had yet seen. Their live pillars upheaved a
thick embowed roof, betwixt whose leaves and blossoms hardly a sunbeam
filtered. Into the rafters of this aerial vault the children climbed,
and through them went scrambling and leaping in a land of bloom,
shouting to the unseen elephants below, and hearing them trumpet their
replies. The conversations between them Lona understood while I but
guessed at them blunderingly. The Little Ones chased the squirrels,
and the squirrels, frolicking, drew them on--always at length allowing
themselves to be caught and petted. Often would some bird, lovely
in plumage and form, light upon one of them, sing a song of what was
coming, and fly away. Not one monkey of any sort could they see.