HIS MESSAGE.
He came, my dead love, at the close of the day,
Though the earth had long covered his garments of clay.
His face glowed with light and with love as he smil’d
And spoke in the voice that my heart had beguil’d—
The beautiful voice that my heart had beguil’d.
“You have wondered, my darling, what soul was the one
To first greet me with love when my dying was done—
When I woke from the slumber that stretches between
The flesh-and-blood world and the kingdom unseen—
The world that you see and the kingdom unseen.
“Know then that the spirit, earth’s veil cast away,
Sees only the true in that radiant day.
He who first o’er my spirit, newborn, bent and smiled,
Was the foe who had gone from me unreconciled—
My foe who had gone from me unreconciled.”
So spake my dead love and then vanished away,
Like the mist of the valley when riseth the day.
But I know, since that moment, that hate is a dream
From which the soul wakes when it crosses Death’s stream—
Awakes to love only, across that dark stream.
I know, too, that Death cannot change, cannot kill
E’en the person. My lover, though dead, loves me still;
For he came, as of old, and upon me he smil’d,
And spoke in the voice that my heart had beguil’d—
The beautiful voice that my heart had beguil’d.
The book was begun. The writing of it was not an easy task in spite of the writer’s warm interest in her theme. Little snatches of time, after the daily grind at her editorial desk was over, were all she could devote to it. Often she was too tired to write a line until she had rested hours. Then, perhaps, to make up for such indulgence, she wrote far into the night—wrote as though bayonets were pressing her—wrote with no thought of publisher or public in mind. The truth, to write the truth, as it was revealed to her, this was her inspiration, her strength, her reward.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE BUTTERFLY’S FLIGHT.
“The Knight of the Pale Horse, he laid
His shadowy lance against the spell,
That hid her Self: As if afraid,
The cruel blackness shrank and fell.
Then, lifting slow her pleasant sleep,
He took her with him through the night,
And swam a river cold and deep
And vanished up an awful height.”
—S. M. B. Piatt.
Some time, it may be, before the world is very much older, we shall know well what now we but dimly discern, that thought is the substance and will the operating force of the universe, and that both are electric.
Then shall we understand the irresistible powers of attraction which thought has for kindred thought; and we shall know why we seek eternally our own kind of people, consciously or unconsciously, and never know rest for the spirit until we find them, for only with them is to be had the life-giving, soul-sustaining quality of sympathy, through whose vibrations the universe was formed and is maintained.
In obedience to this law of attraction Cartice Doring continued to search for persons awake to the joyful fact that there is no death, so she might learn more of the laws which govern communion between life here and beyond. She found believers, but because of the various fads and diversified foolishness with which they frequently garnished their belief they were of slight help to her.
Each gave his faith a name that revealed the fence he had built around his mind, though he condemned all other fences. Some preached against the phenomena of the spiritual philosophy and secretly reveled in it.
And there were the theosophists, who, as Mr. Stead says, can always explain everything. From the proud eminence of their omniscience many of them looked down on plain spiritualists, and advised against showing any civility to spirits. Yet they patronized mediums and astrologers on the sly, and frequently produced a little of the phenomena themselves, merely to show their occult power.
Among these and sometimes outside the sacred pale, were reincarnationists who make the plausible and beautiful theory of progression through an eternity of existences distasteful and tiresome by their “memories” of past human experiences. They had been princes of high degree, invariably, never paupers or criminals. Napoleons, Cæsars, Mahomets, Cleopatras and Sapphos were wearisomely plentiful; but humbler types were rare. Many were so busy feeding their vanity with these romantic hallucinations they had no time to learn anything useful.
Hypnotists were numerous, many of them claiming that their particular science accounted for everything under the sun.
Then there were many who declared that in all the universe there is but good; but they fell into factions represented by different leaders, and fought many and many a bitter bout to prove it.
It was enough to make one cry out in anguish, “Where can wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?”
Yet it had its hopeful side. It showed that many were thinking, and, though thought took different trends, all roads eventually lead to the truth.
Letters came often from Chrissalyn, but they contained no messages from friends invisible, for she never gave them an opportunity to say anything, after Cartice went away. She was afraid. Sometimes a picture or vision flashed before her, in spite of her avoidance of everything of the kind. If it pertained to her friend she told her; but that was all.
Six years had passed with never a sight of the Butterfly’s beloved face, and never a word from the dear people of the unseen world. Cartice had felt their presence often, and knew that they were faithful; but she was hungry for a word from them.
Now came a letter from Chrissalyn begging her to spend some weeks with her. It was a particularly girlish and extravagant letter, almost a photograph of the mind of the unregenerate Butterfly of old. She knew a delightful little summer resort where they could go and be out of the sight and sound of work and care of every hue. She had set her heart upon it.
Arranging for a leave of absence Mrs. Doring soon was on her way. She found her friend in extraordinarily good spirits, and their reunion was of a school-girlish order of delight.
After a few hours the years of their separation seemed never to have been. We have all had this experience and wondered at it. After long absence we come back to a familiar spot, and in a little while find it difficult to persuade ourselves that we have ever been away. Perhaps this is a proof that to the true self there is neither separation nor distance, nor past nor future. All is near and all is now.
The Butterfly had a new assortment of radiant wings—otherwise garments—ready to spread gaily at the springs. One by one she displayed them with childish pleasure, for personal adornment had ever been her fetich.
“As we get on a little in years,” she said, “all we can do to head off the enemy, Age, is to make believe we ignore him. Extra paint and feathers are necessary. I’ve had it flung in my face that I’m not so young as I was, but I won’t admit it. Anyhow I’m still young enough to excite envy and jealousy.”
Here she laughed with diabolical pleasure.
“I intend to make the best of this world and stay in it as long as I can, notwithstanding it’s no paradise. But I have lost some illusions in regard to it. For instance, that of my own irresistible attractiveness. I can draw moths yet, but formerly I thought I could attract men, providing I ever encountered such beings.”
Again, night after night, Chrissalyn sat as of old, calling up for her friend’s delight the unseen people who were always ready to respond.
When Cartice spoke of the long time that had passed with never a word from one of them, Moreau said:
“No time has passed. There is no time. To the spirit a thousand years are as one day.”
The last evening in the city came. They were to start for the springs early next day. The luggage was carefully packed and so their minds were easy on that score. When they went upstairs the house was perfectly still, all save themselves being asleep.
They sat down in Chrissalyn’s room to chat. Cartice thought she never had seen the Butterfly look so young, so beautiful, so hopeful, so happy.
Preparing the table for Planchette they eagerly awaited the messages that would surely come over that inexplicable telephone.
Now something passing strange occurred. From the empty air beside them music burst forth—music the like of which they had never heard—music made by instruments unknown to them, but of unearthly sweetness, with power to thrill to the depths of their being.
Awed and amazed the two friends looked at each other, in silence. Then, as its heavenly sweet vibrations shook their souls, the tears ran from their eyes, they knew not why.
Again and again the unseen musicians made marvelous melody for the two enchanted listeners. Sometimes the chords were plaintively sad, sometimes joyous, but always penetrating the deepest recesses of being, the inner sanctuary where poetry and dreams have their high and heavenly dwelling-place.
The two entranced listeners sat facing each other, lost in the delicious spell of the melody.
Suddenly an electric breeze enveloped Cartice, sending over her that creepy thrill we are all familiar with, which resembles fear, but is not fear. There, before her eyes, just back of Chrissalyn, stood Prescott, looking exactly the same as when with them in material form. Somehow she was made to understand that she must not cry out—nor tell Chriss that he was there. Spellbound and silent she watched him. He laid his hand on the Butterfly’s shining head, smiled and spoke. She saw his lips move, and the glitter of his teeth, but heard no sound, understood no word. Then, while her eyes were still upon him, he vanished.
“You look very pale, Cartice. Are you frightened?” Chrissalyn asked, as the music ceased.
Mrs. Doring shook her head, for her tongue, dry and powerless, was no longer a willing servant.
The music came back no more. After talking of the wonderful phenomenon awhile, they bade each other good-night and parted.
Cartice could not sleep. The strange events of the evening drove away repose. Again and again she recalled the expression on Prescott’s face, trying to translate it into words, but in vain. Only one thing was plain. It was something pertaining to the Butterfly, and he didn’t want her to know it.
After hours of wakefulness she slept and dreamed. She and Chrissalyn were dancing in a great and fantastic company. Everybody else wore masks, but their faces were uncovered. Chrissalyn was the partner of a graceful knight in black velvet who whirled her on and on, endlessly. At last they rose into the air together, and Chriss became a veritable butterfly, with beautiful silvery wings. The knight also developed wings, but they were black, like his garments.
Cartice called to her friend to come down, but she only laughed and rose higher, and finally flew out of sight. With a wildly beating heart Cartice awoke.
Rising, she dressed for the journey. Knocking on Chrissalyn’s door, she received no answer. Then she called her, and with light and jesting words bade her make haste.
Still no answer. Opening the door she entered, but started back with a cry whose thrill of horror went to the heart like a knife.
The Butterfly had, indeed, spread silvery wings and flown, for there lay her chrysalis, cold, white and pulseless. The black knight of death had taken her out of sight. The delicate, long-ailing lungs had given way, and the inevitable end had come. She who loved the world and its foolish, fleeting pleasures had gone suddenly out of it. Whither?
It was a sad heart that Mrs. Doring carried back to New York, in spite of her knowledge that the Butterfly had but spread her wings.
Sometimes in the darkness and silence of night she talked aloud to her vanished, yet ever-present, friend.
“Where are you, Butterfly? Can you hear me and see me? Do you know how heavy is my heart sometimes? And are you happy in your new world? Is life more beautiful, more perfect there? And do you love me still?”
No voice replied, but the light, caressing, electric touches came sometimes, and the stricken heart was comforted.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE PROP THAT FAILED.
“Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought,” he said, and the tale is still to run.
“By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer—what have ye done?”—Rudyard Kipling.
Two years passed, and Mrs. Doring still sat at her editorial desk. Farnsworth had been the kindest and most considerate of employers. The envious said no woman ever had an easier situation. They raised their eyebrows, when they said this, implying the usual sentimental insinuations; but they were mistaken. Farnsworth’s regard for Cartice had no sentimental coloring whatever. He admired her ability and delighted in giving her a chance, and making that chance as pleasant as possible, having views on the unfair, industrial, political and social rulings from which women suffer.
He had come to New York, a talented struggler. Now he was a millionaire, chief proprietor of a great publishing house, which had become great under his management, and he loved to make the road a little smoother for those less able and less fortunate.
Cartice loved him, it is true; but not as the common mind understands the term. Sometimes her eyes grew moist, while she looked at him and wished she might have a chance to prove her gratitude. He was to her like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. In the weakness of spirit ages have bred in her sex, she regarded him as a wall that stood between her and possible calamity.
“I need fear no financial disaster, while he lives,” she thought. “His hand will be ever friendly; his heart ever kind.”
Farnsworth was far above the average of men, but he had a serious weakness of character that made curious comradeship with his better attributes. Anybody, the least trustworthy, the most malicious, could sow in him seeds of suspicion against his best friend, and in ten hours they would be full-grown trees, loaded with bitter and baneful fruit. When this happened his kindness vanished and he could be as cruel as hate. His conscience fled the field, whenever his vanity was ruffled.
Knowing this a woman poisoned his mind against Cartice Doring, by a few lying words—a woman who believed it would be to her interest to get Cartice out of her way. The seed sown sprouted, grew, blossomed and bore fruit within twenty-four hours.
The next day Cartice found a note of dismissal on her desk, the curtness of which was incompatible with the pretensions of a gentleman, if addressed to one merely in the capacity of employee. But when the employee was a social equal, a faithful friend of years and a lady, it showed a lack of self-control on the part of the writer seldom surpassed.
The tenor of it was that, as she was “not doing justice” to the work entrusted to her care, her services were dispensed with. A check for the whole of the unfinished week was enclosed.
Cartice read the letter and sat like one frozen, and the heart-breaking, unbearable look of long ago came again into her eyes.
Every one who has received an unexpected, felling blow from the hand of a friend can understand the blended astonishment and anguish of that moment.
She knew who had turned Farnsworth against her and why it had been done, but that could not help the irremediableness of the situation. She could not go to Farnsworth and mortify him by telling him this; and she knew his implacable spirit too well to hope that he would so much as allow her an audience. Serious as was the blow to her finances, its worst effect was on her heart. Black and deep are the bruises made by the hands we love.
“I must not forget what I owe him for past kindness,” she said,—“must not let this cruelty put hatred into my heart. I must forgive him, for he knows not what he does. Being a man, he cannot know how difficult is life for a woman, under the existing order of things. Neither does he know how often heretofore my heart has bled from cruelty; nor how I have loved him; nor how weary and feeble I am much of the time.
“No; he doesn’t know. Would any of us ever hurt another if we knew all that other has to bear? Besides, it is better to be the victim of injustice than the perpetrator of it. Ugly as is poverty, it is better to endure it than to have the power which the possession of millions confers and misuse it.
“Poor Farnsworth,” she said. “Success has spoiled your naturally beautiful soul.
“The great destroyer of human conscience that goes by the name of business permits you to put me out of your service in a summary and humiliating manner, which puts me out of your life and friendship at the same time, though moral right to treat another human being in this way you have none. But the law of causality is ever operative, and you cannot escape the consequences of your deeds. You will get back your meed as you measure.
“I accept your dismissal as part and parcel of the destiny I am working out. Sooner or later every earthly prop on which I lean is taken from me. Everything has a meaning and purpose. The lesson I have been slow to learn is now plain to me. It is that I must stand alone, and so must every soul, somewhere, some time. Props are destroyers of strength and character. In all the universe there is but one on which we may lean without inviting weakness, and that is Eternal Being, the background of all life.”
Gathering up her little possessions from the place that had been her official home for eight years, Mrs. Doring walked out of it heavy-hearted and solitary. The rock from which she had expected shelter had vanished from her horizon forever. More! It had never been there, save in her imagination. It was an illusion from which now she was free.
Curiously enough we regret the loss of our illusions, yet we ought to thank God fervently every time we get rid of one, for it means that we are emerging from ignorance and darkness into light and knowledge,—approaching nearer to the truth that shall make us free.
On reaching home Mrs. Doring sat down to take a practical view of the situation. For nearly twenty years had she worked faithfully, having begun at seventeen. She had lived in modest comfort, and by dint of self-denial had saved one thousand dollars. What man above mediocrity would think that a fair recompense for half a lifetime’s work?
A sudden cutting off like that is what any one may expect who has given his or her time and talents to the building up of another’s business. It is the soul’s vengeance for not trusting it entirely, and confidently following whithersoever it may lead.
But there is something shamefully immoral in our business methods, when an employee after years of faithful service can be flung out without a chance for a word of defence. It is as though our father should unexpectedly open the door of his home and bid us begone forever. And is not our employer our business father, from whom we have a right to expect consideration? Does he owe us nothing more than our weekly wage? Must his relation to us be always measured only by dollars and cents?
Among the letters Mrs. Doring took with her from the office unopened was one from Bardell, now in Paris, famous and prosperous beyond his dreams. Strange irony of fate that brought to her his glad story of fresh successes on the day that carried defeat to her.
With the superstition common to Bohemia Bardell considered Cartice his mascot. His letters were always frank, friendly and charming. His last words were: “Follow your ideals. They will lead you into freedom.”
This reminded her of her book. It was finished long since; but the writing was scarcely half the battle. It languished for want of a publisher. Those to whom it had been submitted, had returned it, one and all, with the contempt, but thinly veiled with regrets, it had excited in their infallible minds.
One plainer spoken and less heavily veneered with the world’s polish than the rest, said to her face:
“Come now, Mrs. Doring, you mustn’t expect anybody to publish stuff of that kind—digging into the meaning of life, higher methods of evolution, ‘shall we live after we die?,’ ‘ultimate destiny of the human race,’ and all such heavy timber. People take no interest in these questions. What we want is a rattling good love-story, with plenty of hugging and kissing in it. I like that in or out of a novel myself. There must be some iron-clad obstructionists in it, too, cruel parents or other able marplots, and the hero must get her in the last chapter or sooner. Anything but a story that doesn’t end all right. The public abhors it. Now, your book is loaded with high-up, mountain-peak thought, and wouldn’t sell at all.”
Another, with whom also, she had a personal interview, a young man with extraordinary faith in his own wisdom, smiled as he returned her manuscript, and made his smile so vocative it needed few accompanying words. “It is, ah—you know, Mrs. Doring, so wide a departure from the standard of art in fiction, that it might make even a publisher ridiculous, to say nothing of the author. One must keep somewhere within sight of the existing canons. This, if you will pardon me, flies in the face of every one of them.”
“I dare say,” answered Cartice. “I never troubled myself about the existing canons. It is life as I know it that I have tried to portray; not life as somebody else says it should be painted in books.”
After a number of equally disheartening experiences, the book was carefully laid aside to await the judgment day.
Meantime these same publishing houses were exuding cart-loads of marketable abominations, which were scattered in all directions, doing their share in weakening the minds of their unfortunate readers. Life, as depicted by them, was a mere sex-chase, more or less interrupted by the usual difficulties, all of which was quite in accordance with the “existing canons,” so much respected by the young man with the smile.
Perhaps nothing gives us a lonelier feeling than to be cut off from our field of daily activity, whatever it may have been. Cartice found herself set back to the dreadful days of her beginning in New York. It was as though she had gone steadily up a steep slope, to a respectable height, only to be knocked violently to the bottom by the hand that was helping her upward.
“Had I developed the best that was in me—followed my ideals”—she said, “this could not have happened. In that case I should have stood alone long since, leaning on no prop, depending on no person’s caprice. Set-backs and knock-downs are our schoolmasters, and they are ever busy with us until we learn our lessons.”
A loneliness assailed her heart, poignant, sharp, deep. All her life its resistless waves had at times rolled over her spirit,—a flood that would not be stayed. It was that kind of loneliness that creates a solitude which is not placed in a densely peopled universe.
Then came the comforting reflection that we are never alone, never solitary, however much we may seem to be, and never absolutely on our own hands, in spite of appearances. About us are ever the spiritual hosts, and back of us, within us and about us, the Supreme Self, to which each is both inlet and outlet.
On the evening of Mrs. Doring’s first day of idleness, Gabriel Norris called to see her. For several years he had been a resident of New York. In the worst of the thick mass of the miserables he had set up his cobbler’s bench, and opened an adjoining reading-room; and there he fished for the souls of men, in the great ocean of wretchedness whose huge waves beat about his door.
Cartice told him the story of her summary ejectment from the place that she had so long occupied, and the various shifts that she had been making in her mind for the future.
“It’s a good thing,” he said, “when you don’t know just what to do, not to do anything—to wait,—wait without worry or anxiety—wait and trust. Unseen influences are ever at work on our destiny. We can hurry nothing, change nothing. Rest for a time. You have been so busy most of your life that you have had but little chance to get acquainted with yourself. You have a little capital ahead; rest on that. New ideas come in seasons of repose, for then the mind is receptive.”
“That is what I had half-decided to do,” she answered, “though I am still so much a slave to the old, erroneous belief that I carry myself on my own shoulders, I scarcely could get my consent to it.”
“And when you feel so disposed,” continued Gabriel, “come to my reading-room and read a story or a poem to my sheep—‘my po’ los sheep o’ de sheepfol,’ whom I try so hard to gather in. You may not know it—you know yourself so little—but you have the most beautiful voice I ever heard. Your reading, as well as your speech, is exquisite music. ‘The soul of man is audible, not visible,’ says Longfellow. ‘It reveals itself in the voice. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain.’”
Anxiety and worry fell away from Cartice Doring soon as she determined to rest and trust. A profound philosophic truth is here revealed. When we trust, God Himself carries our burdens, and we are set free from care. Trust is the essence, the vital principle of religion, which is at heart a recognition of the divine intelligence within us, about us, and is reflected by us,—the reality we call God.
It was a joy to be the mistress of her own time, to know when she began the day that she could do with it what she pleased. It was luxury to sit at an open window and feel the air blow over her, and not be goaded by any thought of duty undone. She went about the city and enjoyed its treasures of art and beauty. She formed new friendships and cultivated old ones. She read and, through sympathy, entered into, the lives and feelings of authors and the people of their creation, as never before. She became better acquainted with herself, and by that means with all others. She went to Gabriel Norris’s unsectarian temple and helped him feed his sheep. There the music of her beautiful voice called in many a lost one. The bitter loneliness that shadowed her at times fled away and troubled her no more. Her spirit came in sympathetic and loving touch with others, with all that is, with the universal mind itself, for this is the purpose of life, the union of the entire being with its original. This is the true freedom which is the destiny of the human race. The individual self becomes one with the universal, and is henceforth free from limitations, from restrictions, from bondage of every kind. It exchanges its little circle of personal desires for the great world-consciousness. Whosoever does this even in the most limited degree puts care and trouble behind him.
Thus it was that this truth which Cartice Doring had long theoretically accepted, became a part of her being. She began to live it and be it, for we only really accept truth when we are it. Her eyes lost the look of suffering that lighted them at times with a moving and resistless fire, and became trustful, hopeful, peaceful, like those of a happy child.
Difficulties and disappointments vanished and fear vexed her no more. She was like those who have won all battles, put all troubles behind them. She had the knowledge that within herself was power over all temporal dragons; that her welfare depended on no man’s whim; that there are no accidents; that He who slumbers not nor sleeps, is “guiding each of His creatures in the current of an eternal purpose”; that she was as indestructible as the universe, and as old, as young and as deathless as its builder. She thought no more of happiness, because blessedness had come into her life,—the blessedness which “consists in progress toward perfection.” In an undefined way she felt herself approaching high summits, understanding that there is neither high nor low, near nor far in the universe save in thought.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE BOOK AND ITS CRITICS.
The tale is as old as the Eden Tree—and new as the new-cut tooth—
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: “You did it, but was it Art?”—Rudyard Kipling.
One day Mrs. Doring received a letter from a lawyer announcing Kendall’s death, and advising her that by his will she was sole heir to his property, which was valued at about twenty-five thousand dollars—a fortune in Bohemia. A few lines from the testator were enclosed, the last his hand penned. He had but one request to make in regard to the disposition of it, and that was that she use part of it in bringing out her book.
“See,” she said to Lilla Joy, who had long lived with her in the little flat, “how my trust is rewarded. Influences unseen were working for me while I rested. Had I been a little wiser, I might have saved myself much torment all my life. Worry hinders instead of helps, I believe it is one of the forty deadly sins the Egyptians tried to avoid.”
With money to work with it was not difficult to find a publisher for the book. It was a true tale, told in a simple, straightforward manner, of life and its meaning, as its author understood them. The theme of it was that life goes on after the change we call death, and is inconceivably enlarged and ennobled for all who aspire.
Such of the critics as worship plots and believe that the chief aim of life in stories and out is to marry and be given in marriage, made it the subject of very rough surgery.
“It is a most unwholesome book,” said one. “Love and marriage are scarcely mentioned in it. Some twaddle that pretends to come from across the river of death is the only bait it has with which to angle for the reader’s interest, a theme in which healthy minds will find no attraction.”
Death waits for every one that breathes, yet any light thereon is “unwholesome and not attractive to healthy minds,” according to those who tell us what we ought to read. Strange doctrine, but prevalent!
Another said: “One more of those deplorable books that deal in the supernatural and aim to make readers take a morbid interest in death. Its author has no eyes for the thousand fresh themes of life, but must needs delve into the darksome hereafter for material with which to burden her absurd pages. Why should any one turn from the sweet theme of love to wander in paths so remote from taste and wholesome imagery as this?”
Some sneered at it, some ignored it and many abused it. Few had so much as a tolerant word for it. Yet verily a mystery guideth the fate of a book as well as the growing of a daisy, for “The Last Enemy” sold astonishingly fast, and was read and talked about far and wide. In a few months it was the best known book of the year, in spite of the critics, and brought fame and money to its author, though too late, her friends said.
Is anything too late? Come not all things at their appointed time, neither sooner nor later than they are due? In the divine drama of the universe the curtain never falls until the play is finished. In our short-sightedness we say our friend died too soon, or his good fortune came too late; but we are in error. Everything is part of the eternal plan, and to be out of time or place an impossibility.
Never to Cartice Doring had life appeared so well worth living, nor work so well worth doing. To Lilla Joy she said:
“I am just beginning to live. I am learning what life means, what we can make of it, and what I am. We are love.
“We love because we cannot help it. It is our expression, and the greater, wider and more all-inclusive our love, the fuller, larger, more perfect and more abundant is our life. How beautiful it all is! How orderly and harmonious! How glorious!
“Most of my life I have written down to the majority of readers. Now I shall bring them up to me. I shall follow my ideals, as I did in ‘The Last Enemy.’ Our ideals! What are they but our souls, trying to reveal themselves to other souls. Here in this noble poem by Katherine Lee Bates, the ideal speaks:
“At the innermost core of thy being, I am a burning fire
From thine own altar-flame kindled, in the hour when souls aspire:
For know that men’s prayers shall be answered, and guard thy spirit’s desire.
“That which thou wouldst be, thou must be; that which thou shalt be thou art;
As the oak, astir in the acorn, the dull earth rendeth apart,
Lo, thou, the seed of thy longing, that breaketh, and waketh, the heart.
“Call me thy foe in thy passion; claim me in peace for thy friend:
Yet bethink thee by lowland or upland, wherever thou willest to wend,
I am thine Angel of Judgment, mine eyes thou must meet in the end.”
“I know that well, Lilla. Woe be to those who have outraged their ideal on that day, when their souls shall meet it face to face. I have sinned against mine, and have met its accusing eyes already. But now I have begun my atonement, and am eager to go on with it. There is joy in creating what we wish to create—that means giving form to our ideals.”
But Lilla was silent, wondering what ideals her friend would follow in that country into which flesh and blood can never enter. In her eyes Lilla saw the strange light that flames up only when the end of the journey is near; and on her face, and in all that she said and did was a hint of imminent change, plain to others, unseen by herself.
In the Sanscrit is a story of one who asked what is the most wonderful thing in the world. The answer is that every man should believe that all shall die but himself. The reason of this is that he shall not die, and his soul knows it.
Remember this, you who see your beloved going down into what we call Death’s Valley, serene, hopeful, unconscious of their doom. They are wiser than you. They know they shall not die.
CHAPTER XXIV.
WHO ARE THEY?
“Who are they that are compelled to recommence the same existence?”
“They who fail in the fulfilment of their mission, or in the endurance of the trial appointed to them.”
—Allan Kardec.
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain;
They little know the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Personally I must confess to one small weakness. I cannot help thinking that the souls toward whom we feel drawn in this life are the very souls whom we knew and loved in a former life, and that the souls who repel us here, we do not know why, are the souls that earned our disapproval, the souls from whom we kept aloof in a former life.
—F. Max Müller.
Months on swift wing slipped away. Cartice’s pen was busy every day, and every day she delighted more and more in her work, because she was saying what she wished to say, was expressing herself fearlessly and freely. New plans of action fairly rioted in her brain. Plans! When had they ever worked for her?
There are persons who mark out everything ahead, and Fate lets them live their arrangements to the letter, but Cartice was not one of them.
The lamp of the spirit, which tells unutterable things, now burned in her eyes, with an unearthly brightness, throwing its touching radiance over all her words and deeds; but she did not understand. She alone saw not the heavenly illumination.
But one day the imminent change was made plain to her, though how she never told. Coming to Lilla, with whitened face, and the old-time, all-compelling appeal in her eyes, which neither man nor woman could see without a bursting heart, she said:
“I must soon leave you. It has been shown me and I understand.”
Under the spell of the wordless pain in the glorious eyes, her heroic friend flung her arms about her, crying, “Cartice! Cartice! My dear one! I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it!” And together they wept tears of such anguish as only the strong ever weep.
For a few days the heart-breaking look continued in Cartice’s eyes; but in the silence of the night help came from the great source, and she got up one morning with peace shining in her face.
“Often in the past,” she said to Lilla, “I have wished I could die and be out of trouble. But now I want to live: now I know that dying doesn’t put us out of trouble. We must grow out of it by evolving above it, learning to master it.
“Most of my life, as I look back upon it, seems to have been mere blind groping. Now, when I think I have learned how to live, the business of life is done. And I have learned how to work in a way that never would meet failure; but that, too, is done.
“And yet, in spite of the mystery and the grimness of it, something tells me all is well; that nothing can be lost; that what I have learned will be useful somewhere. Perhaps we are here for the purpose of learning how to live and work. When that is accomplished, we must go on and learn other things, and we can take no other road than the one we have named Death, and painted black. But you and I know that it leads into light, and, though we die, we shall continue to live, and shall evolve, unfold and expand, even ‘it doth not yet appear what we shall be.’
“Yet knowing this—for we have knowledge, not simply belief—there are moments when a childish terror seizes me. But why should I fear? Millions have traveled the same road, the timid and faint-hearted as well as the bold and brave, and all went forth alone. We say alone, because we see no visible companions go with them; yet we know that no one is ever alone, either here or on that inscrutable journey, or at its end.
“But notwithstanding all I have learned of the life to follow this, I cannot picture it—cannot form any clear idea of it. Nor can I realize that life as I know it now must end. I try to think of the days to come when I shall not be here, nor be anywhere as I am now, and when the form through which I act will have vanished utterly from the face of the earth, but I cannot! I cannot!
“I am always I in consciousness, always existing, never dead, never different. Is it not the mystery of mysteries?
“I try to imagine a time when I may come here to our little home and be unseen by you, unable to lift a book, flutter a curtain or speak one word that you can hear; but I cannot. How inconceivable it is that in a short time I shall be in a condition so different from this that imagination itself cannot paint it!”
Cartice awoke from sleep one day with a loud cry, a wail of terror that went to the heart.
“What is it, dear?” asked Lilla, bending over her.
Her eyes wandered wildly around the room, and at last, reassured by a sight of familiar objects, lost their look of affright.
“It must have been a dream,” she said, “but so very real. I was lying under the elm tree at home, as I so often did when a child; yet I was as I am now. Close about me came a little company of people shining like the sun. When they were very near, I knew them to be people from my planet—my own people, whom I remember well, and whom I saw in a dream years ago. One, a woman, the most beautiful of all, had a face so familiar I almost spoke her name; but I could not quite grasp it, though she seemed very near and dear to me.
“‘Your work is done,’ she said; and there was sadness in her voice, and pity in her eyes.
“‘Well done?’ I questioned, though with a sinking of the heart, for I began to be afraid, I knew not why.
“‘Did you always do your best?’ she asked.
“‘No;’ I answered, conscience-smitten.
“‘Then’—
“I interrupted, for I could not bear to hear what I feared she would say.
“‘Who art thou, who look so pitiful and seem so dear, and whom I yet fear?’ I asked.
“‘I am thine Ideal—thine Angel of Judgment—who hath so often come to thee and from whom thou hast almost as often turned away.’
“‘But I serve you now,’ I cried. ‘I do my best. I have learned my lesson.’
“‘Yes, you have learned the lesson, and will do better next time,’ she said, compassionately.
“‘Next time?’ I echoed, trembling with fear.
“‘Yes; next time, for you must come again and do it over and do it right,’ she said, sternly.
“Then I shrieked and awoke. O Lilla, now I see, I know, I understand. I must live my life again and live it better—must do my best all the way through. I don’t want to—no; I don’t want to; but I must, and so must all who fail to give their best—not as penalty, but because it is the only way to learn, and to grow.
“We have lived always; we shall live always. This is the foundation rock upon which we build the indestructible temple, character. Victor Hugo spoke of life as a fairy tale a thousand times written, and said there was not an age in which he could not find his spirit. He believed he would exist forever, inasmuch as he felt in his soul thousands of songs, and dramas that never had found expression: He was sure he should come again and give them life. I, too, feel within me numberless tales untold which must be born somewhere. A great soul, like Hugo, may voluntarily come again and again to help others; but a recreant dreamer like me MUST come.
“Years ago I had a dream that now I understand. It is my belief, as you know, that every mortal has a soul-guardian—a being higher than a spirit, a dweller in the land of souls, beyond the middle kingdom, far away from the earth and its ties. This guardian gives us all the experiences we have, because he sees their uses in our development. The bitter cups we would fain have pass from us he resolutely holds to our lips, because he knows it is good for us to drink of them. Blessings disguised as calamities and sorrows come from his hand, and all the fires of anguish that scorch us are fanned by his breath.
“I dreamed of this guardian angel. He was going with me through life, or rather through a series of scenes or situations representing different lives. I could talk to him, and hear him, but could not see him. Of the many pictures that were shown to me I remembered only two when morning came.
“In the one which represented a life before this I was resting on a rude couch, outdoors, near a blazing fire, in the midst of a nauseating swamp. It was after night, and the light from the fire played fantastically on dank little pools, rank tufts of grass, curious plants, watery mosses and slimy roots.
“Looking off into the swamp I saw a great mottled snake curled up in a hollow, looking directly at me, malignity darting from his eyes. I pointed him out to the people who were about me, and told them I would kill him. But one and all urged me to let him alone, and predicted serious trouble, if I disturbed him.
“I answered that it was trouble to have him there, throwing hate upon me with his eyes, and that, at least, I would give him a hint that his presence was not desirable. So I got up and threw a stone at him. It struck him straight on his back, but rebounded as though it had met a wall, without so much as bruising him, save in spirit. It enraged him fearfully. He raised himself in the air perpendicularly till he stood on his tail, and hatred flashed from his eyes in bright electric rays.
“He did not stop at this, but hurled invective after invective at me in plain English, and threatened me as a snake never threatened before. He hissed, raved, cursed and glared at me, and swore that he would take it out of me in slices scattered along a thousand years. In short, he made me understand clearly enough that his principal business forever after would be to make me wretched. So direful were his threats that I lay down on my small bed quaking with terror, fearing either to sleep or stay awake, and ‘none had power to protect me from mine enemy.’
“To make it worse, the people about me said, ‘I told you so,’ and sermonized on the matter. They said, ‘You can’t destroy hate with hate. That increases it. That mottled fellow in the swamp is not the enemy you have to dread. The cruelty you put out, when you threw a stone at him, is your real enemy. It will come back to you through him, because it is the law. He will trouble you far down the line. Your heart shall bleed again and again, because of blows from hands you never injured; but it will be but your own deed returning to you, and something of your mottled foe shall mark you, for many and many a day.’”
(Lilla looked at the mottled eyes of her friend with a new interest, wondering if the curious splashes of tawn had been flung there by her ancient enemy.)
“Now I understand why I have been treated cruelly often by the very persons I loved and believed in. Somewhere I have earned it. Somewhere I gave it forth, and it has come back a hundredfold, for good and bad both multiply themselves on their return trips. Even Farnsworth’s cruelty to me, which hurt me so much, was no doubt in accord with the law of causality I had set in motion. But he, too, shall reap as he has sown.
“The other picture represented this life, I think. I was climbing a hillside, accompanied by a little party of friends and attended by the guardian of my soul, who beguiled the way by pleasant speech and cheery good-will. At last we reached the top and found there an old-fashioned inn, clean and comfortable, with bare white floors, big rooms, and broad wooden sofas, that looked inviting to our tired bodies. Before I entered, I looked to the west, and saw a scene of beauty never to be forgotten. Sunlight, soft as moonlight, fell on fields of swaying grain, on trees gay with blossoms and heavy with fruit at the same time, on flowers whose perfume sweetened all the air, on birds whose bright plumage dazzled the eye. I gazed spellbound. The very sky above was new and strangely beautiful. Looking down, I saw what before I had not noticed, that the hill was cut off close by my feet, and between me and this lovely landscape yawned a bottomless ravine. Stretching forth his hand and pointing to it, my guardian said, ‘Behold the promised land! But you shall not enter in—not yet! No; you shall not enter in until you come with the great seal in your hand.’ With one longing, hungry glance at the paradise I was not yet ready to know, I turned and went into the inn, longing for rest.
“I have almost reached the inn. I have seen the promised land but have not yet the great seal. After a rest in the inn—who knows,—perhaps I can bridge the ravine.”
Those last days—those precious last days, how beautiful they were!
Northern forests put on a glory of gold and red after the frost has touched them with its destroying hand, and the winter is near. Dying suns diffuse a strange brightness, and the spirit of man, when passing out of sight, often radiates a heavenly splendor.
So it was that the soul of Cartice Doring never gave forth so much of sweetness as in the last days of her stay here.
“It is much to have learned one’s lesson,” she said. “Next time I can begin in a higher class. So you see, after all, this life wasn’t wasted. Yes, I have learned a little, and shall not find the road so rough next time.
“Would I could give others what I have learned.
“I smile at my early idea of happiness, though it wasn’t unique at all, but quite common—the ideal of all the undeveloped.
“Now I know that happiness is a spiritual condition—spiritual healthfulness—spiritual unfolding the heaven within one which comes when self is forgotten and we see our oneness with all that is. It is our unfolding, our growth or evolution into knowledge, truth and light.
“It comes when we learn how to love,—when we see ourselves in every other self, and the supreme self in everybody and everything.
“What matter whether we call the great ocean in which we move and live and have our being, God, soul, energy, force or thought, we are its offspring or manifestation, and can never for one instant be separated from it. We are because it is. And see how this divine principle ever strives for our highest health and happiness. If I but cut my finger, it miraculously heals the wound. Out of its boundless resources it forms a new cuticle to cover the abrasion. If my spirit becomes sore the same power brings to me from every side, the sympathy and love, the spiritual sunshine and air which heal that too.
“The hunt for happiness is a true instinct of the soul, a prophecy of its divine destiny. We were intended for happiness, but a happiness far beyond our usual ideals.
“A great seer has said that ‘love is life, and love in us is the life of God in the soul of man.’
“My soul has always been homesick for its native land and its own people—which are but other names for love and sympathy—infinite love, changeless sympathy. Others, too, are familiar with this kind of hunger. All feel it and give expression to it in the chase of one phantom after another, and to each phantom they give the name of Happiness.
“Does it not prove that all souls are irresistibly drawn toward the great source of love from which they sprang, but know not the way thither? The bosom of infinite love is the happiness they long for, but in their ignorance of their true being and destiny, they pursue every will o’ the wisp that dances before their eyes.
“It is the soul’s quest for its home, which is not place, but state. We need not wait for death to let us in, for it is no more beyond the grave than here. The pure in heart have reached it.
“We can experience resurrection before death, if we will. When our spiritual nature is awakened, and we are set free from thraldom to material gods, we have been raised from the dead. We can take hold on eternal life now, for it, too, is a state of the soul. It is to know and live and be the good.
“The long, long sleep of ignorance must end. The soul shall awaken to a knowledge of itself and be consciously one with Eternal Being from which it was projected, and be free, full-grown and happy.
“How shall this union be brought about? By our growth, our unfolding. We are our own redeemers. The individual is the reflection or manifestation of God. The higher man grows intellectually and spiritually, the more of God does he reflect. When he becomes pure in heart, high in mind, noble and unselfish in all his instincts and desires, he is in union with God, working His Will.
“A modern philosopher expresses it thus: ‘An individual is a subject which unfolds itself as an object.’
“‘Man, the progressively unfolding thinker, has descended from the eternally perfect creative Thinker.’
“‘Eternity for every man is but the unceasingly clear consciousness of his own identity in nature with the primal Thinker, of whose thought the whole universe is but the outer, organic form!’
“‘An individual is an indivisible, immortal, self-completing, ideal totality.’
“Now I think I know why at any cost we should give expression to our ideals. They are streams from the central fountain of thought. To ignore them is to put ourselves out of harmony with the truth and essence of the universe. To give them expression is to vibrate in harmony with the great heart of all that is. What is a genius but one who is in touch with the central source of truth and transmits it to others?
“Now we begin to understand what the love of God is—a great ocean in which we perpetually swim, the ‘infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed,’ an energy that science admits but cannot explain.
“It is written, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye free!’ We shall know! WE SHALL KNOW.
“Already you and I, Lilla, know a part of the truth. We know that death is not the extinction of memory, conscience, love and all their attendant emotions. These are manifestations of the soul and cannot be destroyed. The body, a clay image projected by the soul to make itself visible, shall pass, but ‘the soul lives on, and all space, all time, all beatitude are its heritage and its domain.’
“The great secret of what, whence and whither shall yet be known. The dream of man’s perfection shall come true. You and I have read a few pages in the sealed book. For us the last enemy has been destroyed, the dark river bridged. We know there is no separation; that the dead are neither dead nor gone. This is the great secret of the universe.
“I think I understand what it means to see God. The more we see of Him, or It—the great principle of intelligence and love—in the atom, the insect, the human being or the angel, the nobler and sweeter will be our lives. All possible forms and modes of existence are expressions of himself. As Whitman says, ‘A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.’
“My lifelong dream of finding my own people shall be realized.
“My people, my own people—they who aspired, struggled and suffered—who came to their own, and whom their own so often refused to receive. They who first announced the truth in all ages, and were stoned and crucified. They who brought their divine gifts of poesy and prophecy, of art and science, of light in its thousand forms and laid them on the world’s ungrateful altar. My dear people, I see you in the far dim aisles of the past, and I see you toiling up the shining heights of the future, and know you for my own, my spiritual kindred, with whom I dwelt in pleasant and also difficult places ‘huge times ago,’ and with whom I shall yet mount and mount great steeps now unseen.
“Are not all, all our own people, each a manifestation of the great soul or self that is imaged in all other selves? But they who know how to love are more truly our own. They are farther on their upward journey. ‘For as many as are led by the spirit of love, these are the sons of God.’
“All philosophies, all religions, all literature that fail to lead us back to love, our central source—love, the essence and substance of life, the energy of the world, the potential, moving force of all that is or ever shall be, are vain and foolish.
“Only to love one another. This is the whole law. This is what we are always longing and hunting for, though we give it many names and see it through many veils and in many shapes. But it is love, only love, the greatest and simplest thing in the world.
“Once I read a story of an Oriental magician who performed miraculous cures. When one whom he had healed asked his name that he might mention it in his prayers, he answered: ‘I have many names, but they all mean the same—Love.’
“Love is all there is. Everything else is only an appearance or phantom. My search for my own people was but the search for love, yet how many mirages I saw, into how many pits I stumbled before I came in sight of its temple!
“But the love that opens the kingdom of Heaven, like the love of God, is ‘broader than the measure of man’s mind.’ It is the love of God—for it is the love of all that is. We know not love until we see ourselves one with the whole, without division and without difference, until we see every man as our brother and every woman as our sister and every child as our own, or better, as ourselves.
“Since I know that the law of sowing and reaping is inevitable in its operation, I begin to believe I have not found love in satisfying measure, because I have not given it out. My conception of it was the usual narrow one, and that fills one with self and selfishness. Love knows no self.
“Am I about to leave this world? No; because the world is part of the great Everywhere, which is the soul’s home. Yet it is a solemn time with me. But I shall float out on trust. I know that all is well, and never can be anything else.
“The Hereafter, so much wondered about.—What is it? Just a continuation of being—an eternal now, an endless is, an everlasting present moment.
“Shall our dead be as they were here, when we find them again? This is the cry of the bereft. They forget that nothing is the same from day to day. The child becomes a man. As a child the mother loses it whether it live or die. Change, incessant change, is the law of external nature. But the soul of the man is the soul of the child awakened and enlightened. Shall it be less, when it puts off its eternal form and becomes clothed in finer matter?
“‘Give us our dead, as they were, when they left us,’ wail the mourners at the tomb. Does any one here go away for a year or years and come back the same? Never.
“Is the future beyond death a mystery? Yes; but not more so than the future here. Does any man know what the next hour will bring upon him? Every moment ahead of us is as completely wrapped in mystery as is all that lies on the other side of the grave. In both cases we can only do our best, trusting in the love that created us, and that shapes our course.
“But the loneliness of life! Who can fathom it or explain it? and what can mitigate it? Mediocrity feels it not, for its sympathizers swarm. But in the hearts of the highest it is densest and deepest. As the soul grows upward, it feels itself isolated, and the isolation has in it a poignant anguish.
“Hours come upon us, when we feel that we touch no other soul. Even the companions we take to our hearts never enter the most solemn recesses of our nature. There the soul sits alone—always alone. And this invisible place, this awful solitude is the soul’s real world, its most fateful portion of existence. Yet into this secret place, this hidden and lonely life, we take the ideas and feelings we cherish in relation to our fellow-beings, so that though we seem to live alone in the depths of ourselves, yet we are never severed from our kind, never really solitary. The oneness of humanity asserts itself and its claims upon us, and in spite of the soul’s solitude we understand that no man liveth to himself.
“But the ache that nothing cures is always with us. We turn to the arms of human affection, it is there. We sit down to the feast of the intellect; it is there, likewise. We wander in search of new scenes; but, in the face of all that can delight the eye, it cries out from within for the satisfaction it never finds.
“Satisfied! Satisfied! Shall the yearning soul ever be satisfied? In the hope that it would, mankind constructed its far-off heaven, and said to the weary and the disappointed: ‘There ye shall be satisfied.’
“But it is not true. Never, never shall we be satisfied. Though we explore all the mysteries of all worlds and taste all the joys and pleasures therein, we shall not be satisfied. ‘We but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.’
“When I walk in graveyards and see the childish twaddle about ‘Rest,’ ‘Heavenly Mansions,’ and ‘New Jerusalems,’ there carved upon the stones, I am pained at the mental infancy they denote. Dying does not mean rest, nor does it open heavenly mansions or golden cities to us. The striving and the climbing go on and never end.
“It is the ache in the heart, the void in the soul that cries out to be filled which lift us upward. Were we content, we should rise no higher. Were we satisfied, we should be in a condition which would insure our destruction. But the soul’s hunger for finer and better food is the principle of eternal life which makes us indestructible and eternally expansive. By means of it we grow. Thank God that neither here nor elsewhere can we attain content!
“And as we go higher we can reveal to lower souls their sorrows, and show them how to overcome them—how to grow. This is the greatest service one soul can render another.
“But we must not be content with mouthing theories—we must live our love, must give from the heart and look only to the heart, for ‘out of the heart are the issues of life.’ ‘The sign of the mastery of the divine life in us is the readiness to serve.’
“And we must not dream of rest. There is none anywhere, neither here nor on all the endless road that stretches before us. Life is action, ceaseless action.
“Nor is there any heavenly shore where we can wander free from perplexities and obstacles. Always, always will there be something to overcome. We are building, building, ever building, we know not clearly what. Every unfolding of the divine life within us opens the way to still more unfolding. The heaven, the happiness, the joy we dream of and search for, is in the unfolding, not in any fixed state at which we shall arrive, for we pause nowhere.
“‘This is not Death’s world: it is Life’s. Death has no empire anywhere.’ In time to come its very signs shall pass away. There shall be no more graves, nor marks to graves to say that the dust of any lie there. All dust is the same and all places the same; and life everlasting is the eternal heritage of all souls.”
A few days later Cartice said she saw the Butterfly near her, and that she now had most beautiful wings. Others thought her mind wandered, but Lilla understood.
Clasping the hand of her friend, she smiled and slept; but her waking was on the other side of death, with her own people.
CHAPTER XXV.
LAST WORDS.
Come, lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
—Walt Whitman.
Gabriel Norris uttered the few reverent words that consigned the dust of Cartice Doring to the purifying flames. This was his conclusion:
“‘No man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.’ We all understand that better, when in the presence of the voiceless dead, than at any other time. Then it is that we feel our oneness most; then do we come into more solemn touch with the great heart of all; then, even when our hearts are breaking, we better understand the infinite love that manifests in every event of our lives, even the last mysterious one which takes us out of the sight of our fellow-men.
“Then it is that the problem of life confronts us with importunate appeal, and demands from our bleeding hearts an answer.
“She whose still white form lies here, lived, aspired, suffered, joyed a little perhaps, and learned a part of the great lesson whose book has no end, worked side by side with us, and then passed out of our sight, leaving only this perishable temple to return to its elements.
“Has she but passed through a door to array herself in new garments on the other side, in a larger chamber, or has the unit of her individuality melted back into the Universal ocean, as a drop of water falls again into the sea from which it has been dipped?
“Does the heart that has groaned in anguish and throbbed with love find the end of everything in dreamless oblivion? Or does it still throb on somewhere out of our sight, but not out of the care of the divine love that thought it into being?
“For her this great question was answered long before the illusion we call death transferred her to a larger chamber. She knew that she should never die; that, as a unit, an individual, a soul, she was indestructible, the heir of all the ages through all the ages.
“Communion of spirit? Do you sneer at it as an unsatisfactory, even if a possible thing? What else have we here? We are spirit now as much as we shall ever be, and all our communion with each other is spiritual, for every act of our lives has a spiritual quality, and is but the expression of spirit.
“The things we see are but fractions of that which we see not. We never saw the soul to whose visible form we bid farewell for a time to-day. We saw but its mask, its clay image. That which made its impress upon us was the spirit. By means of what it said and did, by the flash of kindness in the eye, by the pressure of the hand in sympathy, by all the means great and small by which it expressed its good will and love to others, it revealed itself. These are what we shall remember and cherish.
“Life is not all ‘a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.’ It is an endless becoming.
“Let us work by every means in our power to educate the individual, to develop the unit, the imperishable, never-dying unit, for this is the secret of all improvement, all growth, all happiness. Only by growth out of ignorance into knowledge can we come into our inheritance of eternal good.
“Nothing is great in this world and nothing is small. I cannot say of the soul whose transition we celebrate to-day that it was either, for there is no distinction. It aspired, and that means much. It strove to go up higher; and that striving will lift it into the fulness of light.
“That living, loving, truthful, beautiful spirit, has not gone back to the sea of universal Being to lose its identity. There is no going back. In that sea we live and move and have our being now, as well as in the future, yet we remain individuals. The union with the one mind toward which we are all moving is an harmonious ever-upward-tending life, not an extinction of the individual. The school, the club, the state are its prototypes here,—a blending of the many units in one body, but the extinction of none.
“We sorrow, but not without hope. Our friend still lives. We shall find her again.”
“I loved her,” said Gabriel Norris, as he sat with Lilla in the little flat after all was over. “To be near her I came to New York. She never knew; but now she knows. My love did not crave possession. I was happy in loving. I am still happy in it. She lives and I love her. It is enough.”
THE END.