"How did you like the convent, Eva?" I said to her that night when we were alone.
"It seemed very still and peaceful," she said. "I think one could be very happy there. There would be so much time for prayer. One could perhaps more easily lose self there, and become nearer to God."
"But what do you think of Aunt Agnes?"
"I felt drawn to her. I think she has suffered."
"She seems to be dead alike to joy or suffering," I said.
"But people do not thus die without pain," said Eva very gravely.
Our house at Wittemberg is small. From the upper windows we look over the city walls, across the heath, to the Elbe, which gleams and sparkles between its willows and dwarf oaks. Behind the house is a plot of neglected ground, which Christopher is busy at his leisure hours trenching and spading into an herb-garden. We are to have a few flowers on the borders of the straight walk which intersects it,—daffodils, pansies, roses, and sweet violets and gilliflowers, and wallflowers. At the end of the garden are two apple trees and a pear tree, which had shed their blossoms just before we arrived, in a carpet of pink and white petals. Under the shade of these I carry my embroidery frame, when the house work is finished; and sometimes little Thekla comes and prattles to me, and sometimes Eva reads and sings to me. I cannot help regretting that lately Eva is so absorbed with that "Theologia Germanica." I cannot understand it as well as I do the Latin hymns when once she has translated them to me; for these speak of Jesus the Saviour, who left the heavenly home and sat weary by the way seeking for us; or of Mary his dear mother; and although sometimes they tell of wrath and judgment, at all events I know what it means. But this other book is all to me one dazzling haze, without sun, or moon, or stars, or heaven, or earth, or seas, or anything distinct,—but all a blaze of indistinguishable glory, which is God; the One who is all—a kind of ocean of goodness, in which, in some mysterious way, we ought to be absorbed. But I am not an ocean, or any part of one; and I cannot love an ocean, because it is infinite, or unfathomable, or all-sufficient, or anything else.
My mother's thought of God, as watching lest we should be too happy and love any one more than himself, remembering the mistakes and sins of youth, and delaying to punish them until just the moment when the punishment would be most keenly felt, is dreadful enough. But even that is not to me so bewildering and dreary as this all-absorbing Being in Eva's book. The God my mother dreads has indeed eyes of severest justice, and a frown of wrath against the sinner; but if once one could learn how to please him, the eyes might smile, the frown might pass. It is a countenance; and a heart which might meet ours! But when Eva reads her book to me, I seem to look up into heaven and see nothing but heaven—light, space, infinity, and still on and on, infinity and light; a moral light, indeed—perfection, purity, goodness; but no eyes I can look into, no heart to meet mine—none whom I could speak to, or touch, or see!
This evening we opened our window and looked out across the heath to the Elbe.
The town was quite hushed. The space of sky above us over the plain looked so large and deep. We seemed to see range after range of stars beyond each other in the clear air. The only sound was the distant, steady rush of the broad river, which gleamed here and there in the starlight.