Doth offer it to me save this:
Mother! Mother! Mother of the Him;
The flesh that died for me.
THE IDEAS ON IMMORTALITY
“Earth! Earth, the mother of us all! Aye, the mother of us all! How loth, how loth, like to a child we be, to leave and seek ’mid dark!”—Patience Worth.
If the personality of Patience Worth and the nature and quality of her literary productions are worthy of consideration as evidences of the truth of her claim to a spiritual existence, then in the sufficiency of the proof may be found an answer to the world-old question: Is there a life after death? To what extent the facts that have been presented in this narrative may be accepted as proof, is for the reader to determine. But Patience has not been content to reveal a strange personality and a unique literature; she has had much to say upon this question of immortality. There is more or less spiritual significance in nearly all of her poetry and in some of her prose, and while her references to the after life are usually veiled under figures of speech, they nevertheless give assurances of its existence. She makes it clear, however, that she is not permitted to reveal the nature of that life beyond the veil, but she goes as far apparently as she dares, in the repeated assertion, through metaphor and illustration, of its reality.
“My days,” she cries, “I have scattered like autumn leaves, whirled by raging winds, and they have fallen in various crannies ’long the way. Blown to rest are the sunny spring-kissed mornings of my youth, and with many a sigh did I blow the sobbing eves that melted into tear-washed night. Blow on, thou zephyr of this life, and let me throw the value of each day to thee. Blow, and spend thyself, till, tired, thou wilt croon thyself to sleep. Perchance this casting of my day may cease, and thou wilt turn anew unto thy blowing and reap the casting of the world.
“What then is a sigh? Ah, man may breathe a sorrow. Doth then the dumbness of his brother bar his sighing? Nay—and hark! The sea doth sigh, and yonder starry jasmine stirreth with a tremorous sigh; and morning’s birth is greeted with the sighing of the world. For what? Ah, for that coming that shall fulfill the promise, and change the sighing to a singing, and loose the tongue of him whom God doth know and, fearful lest he tell His hidden mysteries, hath locked his lips.”
And again she asks: “Needest thou see what God himself sealeth thine eyes to make thee know?” Meaning, undoubtedly, that only through the process of death can the soul be brought to an understanding of that other life; and she declares that even if we were shown, we could not comprehend. “If thou should’st see His face on morrow’s break,” she says, “’twould but start a wagging,” a discussion. And she continues: “Ah, ope the tabernacle, but look thou not on high, for when the filmy veil shall fade away—ah, could’st thou but know that He who waits hath looked, aye looked, on thee, and thou hast looked on Him since time began!” This enigmatical utterance is in itself sufficient to start a “wagging,” but Patience evidently feels that the solution is beyond our powers: for she repeatedly asserts that the key to the mystery is within our reach if we could but grasp it. “Fleet as down blown from its moorings, seeking the linnet who dropped her seed, so drift ye,” she says, “ever seeking, when at the root still rests the seed pod.” And again: “Knowest thou that fair land to which the traveler is loath to go, but loath, so loath, to leave? Ah, the mystery of the snail’s shell is far deeper than this.”
Yet she tells us again and again that Nature itself is the proof of another life. “Why live,” she asks, “the paltry span of years allotted thee, in desolation, while all about thee are His promises? Thou art, indeed, like a withered hand that holds a new-blown rose.” The truth, she says, is not to be found in “books of wordy filling,” but in the infant’s smile and in the myriad creations and resurrections that are ever within our cognizance. “I pipe of learning,” she cries, “and fall silent before the fool who singeth his folly lay.”