“Tell me what a soul desires, and I will tell you what it is.” So runs
the phrase.
“Tell me what a man dreams, and I will tell you what he loves.” That
also has its truth.
For, ever from the earliest childhood to the latest age, day by day, and
step by step, the busy waking life is followed and reflected by the life
of dreams--waking dreams, sleeping dreams. Weird, misty, and distorted
as the inverted image of a mirage, or a figure seen through the mountain
mist, they are still the reflections of a reality.
On the night when Gregory told his story Waldo sat alone before the
fire, his untasted supper before him. He was weary after his day’s
work--too weary to eat. He put the plate down on the floor for Doss,
who licked it clean, and then went back to his corner. After a time the
master threw himself across the foot of the bed without undressing, and
fell asleep there. He slept so long that the candle burnt itself out,
and the room was in darkness. But he dreamed a lovely dream as he lay
there.
In his dream, to his right rose high mountains, their tops crowned with
snow, their sides clothed with bush and bathed in the sunshine. At their
feet was the sea, blue and breezy, bluer than any earthly sea, like
the sea he had dreamed of in his boyhood. In the narrow forest that ran
between the mountains and the sea the air was rich that the scent of the
honey-creeper that hung from dark green bushes, and through the velvety
grass little streams ran purling down into the sea.
He sat on a high square rock among the bushes, and Lyndall sat by him
and sang to him. She was only a small child, with a blue pinafore, and
a grave, grave, little face. He was looking up at the mountains, then
suddenly when he looked round she was gone. He slipped down from his
rock, and went to look for her, but he found only her little footmarks;
he found them on the bright green grass, and in the moist sand, and
there where the little streams ran purling down into the sea. In and
out, in and out, and among the bushes where the honey-creeper hung,
he went looking for her. At last, far off, in the sunshine, he saw her
gathering shells upon the sand. She was not a child now, but a woman,
and the sun shone on her soft brown hair, and in her white dress she put
the shells she gathered. She was stooping, but when she heard his step
she stood up, holding her skirt close about her, and waited for his
coming. One hand she put in his, and together they walked on over the
glittering sand and pink sea-shells; and they heard the leaves talking,
and they heard the waters babbling on their way to the sea, and they
heard the sea singing to itself, singing, singing.
At last they came to a place where was a long reach of pure white sand;
there she stood still, and dropped on to the sand one by one the
shells that she had gathered. Then she looked up into his face with her
beautiful eyes. She said nothing; but she lifted one hand and laid it
softly on his forehead; the other she laid on his heart.
With a cry of suppressed agony Waldo sprung from the bed, flung open the
upper half of the door, and leaned out, breathing heavily.
Great God! it might be only a dream, but the pain was very real,
as though a knife ran through his heart, as though some treacherous
murderer crept on him in the dark! The strong man drew his breath like a
frightened woman.
“Only a dream, but the pain was very real,” he muttered, as he pressed
his right hand upon his breast. Then he folded his arms on the door, and
stood looking out into the starlight.
The dream was with him still; the woman who was his friend was not
separated from him by years--only that very night he had seen her. He
looked up into the night sky that all his life long had mingled itself
with his existence. There were a thousand faces that he loved looking
down at him, a thousand stars in their glory, in crowns, and circles,
and solitary grandeur. To the man they were not less dear than to the
boy they had been not less mysterious; yet he looked up at them and
shuddered; at last turned away from them with horror. Such countless
multitudes stretching out far into space, and yet not in one of them all
was she! Though he searched through them all, to the furthest, faintest
point of light, nowhere should he ever say, “She is here!” Tomorrow’s
sun would rise and gild the world’s mountains, and shine into its
thousand valleys; it would set and the stars creep out again. Year after
year, century after century, the old changes of nature would go on, day
and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest; but in none of them
all would she have part!
He shut the door to keep out their hideous shining, and because the
dark was intolerable lit a candle, and paced the little room, faster and
faster yet. He saw before him the long ages of eternity that would roll
on, on, on, and never bring her. She would exist no more. A dark mist
filled the little room.
“Oh, little hand! oh, little voice! oh, little form!” he cried; “oh,
little soul that walked with mine! oh, little soul, that looked so
fearlessly down into the depths, do you exist no more for ever--for
all time?” He cried more bitterly: “It is for this hour--this--that men
blind reason, and crush out thought! For this hour--this, this--they
barter truth and knowledge, take any lie, any creed, so it does
not whisper to them of the dead that they are dead! Oh, God! for a
Hereafter!”
Pain made his soul weak; it cried for the old faith. They are the tears
that fall into the new-made grave that cement the power of the priest.
For the cry of the soul that loves and loses is this, only this: “Bridge
over Death; blend the Here with the Hereafter; cause the mortal to robe
himself in immortality; let me not say of my Dead that it is dead! I
will believe all else, bear all else, endure all else!”
Muttering to himself, Waldo walked with bent head, the mist in his eyes.
To the soul’s wild cry for its own there are many answers. He began to
think of them. Was not there one of them all from which he might suck
one drop of comfort?
“You shall see her again,” says the Christian, the true Bible Christian.
“Yes, you shall see her again. ‘And I saw the dead, great and small,
stand before God. And the books were opened, and the dead were judged
from those things which were written in the books. And whosoever was not
found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire, which
is the second death.’ Yes; you shall see her again. She died so--with
her knee unbent, with her hand unraised, with a prayer unuttered, in the
pride of her intellect and the strength of her youth. She loved and she
was loved; but she said no prayer to God; she cried for no mercy; she
repented of no sin! Yes; you shall see her again.”
In his bitterness Waldo laughed low:
Ah, he had long ceased to hearken to the hellish voice.
But yet another speaks.
“You shall see her again,” said the nineteenth-century Christian, deep
into whose soul modern unbelief and thought have crept, though he knows
it not. He it is who uses his Bible as the pearl-fishers use their
shells, sorting out gems from refuse; he sets his pearls after his
own fashion, and he sets them well. “Do not fear,” he says; “hell and
judgment are not. God is love. I know that beyond this blue sky above
us is a love as wide-spreading over all. The All-Father will show her to
you again; not spirit only--the little hands, the little feet you loved,
you shall lie down and kiss them if you will. Christ arose, and did
eat and drink, so shall she arise. The dead, all the dead, raised
incorruptible! God is love. You shall see her again.”
It is a heavenly song, this of the nineteenth-century Christian. A
man might dry his tears to listen to it, but for this one thing--Waldo
muttered to himself confusedly:
“The thing I loved was a woman proud and young; it had a mother once,
who, dying, kissed her little baby, and prayed God that she might see it
again. If it had lived the loved thing would itself have had a son, who,
when he closed the weary eyes and smoothed the wrinkled forehead of his
mother, would have prayed God to see that old face smile again in the
Hereafter. To the son heaven will be no heaven if the sweet worn face
is not in one of the choirs; he will look for it through the phalanx of
God’s glorified angels; and the youth will look for the maid, and the
mother for the baby. ‘And whose then shall she be at the resurrection of
the dead?’”
“Ah, God! ah, God! a beautiful dream,” he cried; “but can any one dream
it not sleeping?”
Waldo paced on, moaning in agony and longing.
He heard the Transcendentalist’s high answer.
“What have you to do with flesh, the gross and miserable garment in
which spirit hides itself? You shall see her again. But the hand, the
foot, the forehead you loved, you shall see no more. The loves, the
fears, the frailties that are born with the flesh, with the flesh they
shall die. Let them die! There is that in man that cannot die--a seed,
a germ an embryo, a spiritual essence. Higher than she was on earth, as
the tree is higher than the seed, the man than the embryo, so shall you
behold her; changed, glorified!”
High words, ringing well; they are the offering of jewels to the hungry,
of gold to the man who dies for bread. Bread is corruptible, gold is
incorruptible; bread is light, gold is heavy; bread is common, gold is
rare; but the hungry man will barter all your mines for one morsel of
bread. Around God’s throne there may be choirs and companies of angels,
cherubim and seraphim, rising tier above tier, but not for one of them
all does the soul cry aloud. Only perhaps for a little human woman full
of sin, that it once loved.
“Change is death, change is death!” he cried. “I want no angel, only
she; no holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me
or give me nothing!”
And, truly, does not the heart love its own with the strongest passion
for their very frailties? Heaven might keep its angels if men were but
left to men.
“Change is death,” he cried, “change is death! Who dares to say the body
never dies, because it turns again to grass and flowers? And yet
they dare to say the spirit never dies, because in space some strange
unearthly being may have sprung up upon its ruins. Leave me! Leave me!”
he cried in frantic bitterness. “Give me back what I have lost, or give
me nothing.”
For the soul’s fierce cry for immortality is this--only this: Return to
me after death the thing as it was before. Leave me in the Hereafter the
being that I am today. Rob me of the thoughts, the feelings, the desires
that are my life, and you have left nothing to take. Your immortality is
annihilation, your Hereafter is a lie.
Waldo flung open the door, and walked out into the starlight, his
pain-stricken thoughts ever driving him on as he paced there.
“There must be a Hereafter because man longs for it!” he whispered. “Is
not all life from the cradle to the grave one long yearning for that
which we never touch? There must be a Hereafter because we cannot think
of any end to life. Can we think of a beginning? Is it easier to say
‘I was not’ than to say ‘I shall not be’? And yet, where were we ninety
years ago? Dreams, dreams! Ah, all dreams and lies! No ground anywhere.”
He went back into the cabin and walked there. Hour after hour passed,
and he was dreaming.
For, mark you, men will dream; the most that can be asked of them is but
that the dream be not in too glaring discord with the thing they know.
He walked with bent head.
All dies, all dies! the roses are red with the matter that once reddened
the cheek of the child; the flowers bloom the fairest on the last year’s
battleground; the work of death’s finger cunningly wreathed over is at
the heart of all things, even of the living.
Death’s finger is everywhere. The rocks are built up of a life that was.
Bodies, thoughts, and loves die: from where springs that whisper to the
tiny soul of man, “You shall not die.” Ah, is there no truth of which
this dream is shadow?
He fell into perfect silence. And, at last, as he walked there with his
bent head, his soul passed down the steps of contemplation into that
vast land where there is always peace; that land where the soul, gazing
long, loses all consciousness of its little self, and almost feels its
hand on the old mystery of Universal unity that surrounds it.
“No death, no death,” he muttered; “there is that which never
dies--which abides. It is but the individual that perishes, the whole
remains. It is the organism that vanishes, the atoms are there. It is
but the man that dies, the Universal Whole of which he is part reworks
him into its inmost self. Ah, what matter that man’s day be short!--that
the sunrise sees him, and the sunset sees his grave; that of which he
is but the breath has breathed him forth and drawn him back again. That
abides--we abide.”
For the little soul that cries aloud for continued personal existence
for itself and its beloved, there is no help. For the soul which knows
itself no more as a unit, but as a part of the Universal Unity of which
the Beloved also is a part; which feels within itself the throb of the
Universal Life; for that soul there is no death.
“Let us die, beloved, you and I, that we may pass on forever through the
Universal Life! In that deep world of contemplation all fierce desires
die out, and peace comes down.” He, Waldo, as he walked there, saw no
more the world that was about him; cried out no more for the thing that
he had lost. His soul rested. Was it only John, think you, who saw the
heavens open? The dreamers see it every day.
Long years before the father had walked in the little cabin, and
seen choirs of angels, and a prince like unto men, but clothed in
immortality.
The son’s knowledge was not as the father’s, therefore the dream was
new-tinted, but the sweetness was all there, the infinite peace that men
find not in the little cankered kingdom of the tangible. The bars of
the real are set close about us; we cannot open our wings but they are
struck against them, and drop bleeding. But, when we glide between the
bars into the great unknown beyond, we may sail forever in the glorious
blue, seeing nothing but our own shadows.
So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the
dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth.
Our fathers had their dream; we have ours; the generation that follows
will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.