To country I deem peopled, but know not?
It is the cry of him who believes and yet doubts, and Patience points to the swallow winging across the blue “to lands he deemeth peopled with his brothers” who have gone on before. In imagination he can hear their song in the home lands of the South, and though he cannot see them, and cannot have had word from them, he knows they are there, and he does not skim uncertainly about the lake, but with unfaltering faith “wings him on and on” until—
Dim against the feathery cloud
He fades into the blue.
But Patience does not content herself with appeals to faith, eloquent as they may be. While her communications are always clothed in figures of speech, they are sometimes more definite in statement than in the lines which have been thus far presented. In the prose poem which follows, she asks and answers the question in a way that can leave no doubt of her meaning:
“Shall I arise and know thee, brother, when like a bubble I am blown into Eternity from this pipe of clay? Or shall I burst and float my atoms in a joyous spray at the first beholding of this home prepared for thee and me, and shall we together mingle our joys in one supreme joy in Him? It matters not, beloved, so comfort thee. For should the blowing be the end, what then? Hath not thy pack been full, and mine? We are o’erweary with the work of living, and sinking to oblivion would be rest. Yet sure as sun shall rise, my dust shall be unloosed, and blow into new fields of new days. I see full fields yet to be harvested, and I am weary. I see fresh business of living, work yet to be done, and I am weary. Oh, let me fold these tired hands and sleep. Beloved, I trust, and expect my trust, for ne’er yet did He fail.”
She puts this into the mouth of one who lives, but it is not merely an expression of faith; it is a positive assertion. “Yet sure as sun shall rise, my dust shall be unloosed, and blow into new fields of new days.”
And again she sings:
What carest, dear, should sorrow trace