Beyond the Gates

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

When I had uttered these words I felt a recoil from myself, and sense of discord. I was making excuses for myself. That used to be a fault of the past life. One did not do it here. It was as if I had committed some grave social indecorum. I felt myself blushing. My father noticed my embarrassment, and called my attention to a brook by which we were walking, beginning to talk of its peculiar translucence and rhythm, and other little novelties, thus kindly diverting me from my distress, and teaching me how we were spared everything we could be in heaven, even in trifles like this. I was not so much as permitted to bear the edge of my regret, without the velvet of tenderness interposing to blunt the smart. It used to be thought among us below that one must be allowed to suffer from error, to learn. It seemed to be found here, that one learned by being saved from suffering. I wondered how it would be in the case of a really grave wrong which I might be so miserable as to commit; and if I should ever be so unfortunate as to discover by personal experience.

This train of thought went on while I was examining the brook. It had brilliant colors in the shallows, where certain strange agates formed pebbles of great beauty. There were also shells. A brook with shells enchanted me. I gathered some of them; they had opaline tints, and some were transparent as spun glass; they glittered in the hand, and did not dull when out of the water, like the shells we were used to. The shadows of strange trees hung across the tiny brown current, and unfamiliar birds flashed like tossed jewels overhead, through the branches and against the wonderful color of the sky. The birds were singing. One among them had a marvelous note. I listened to it for some time before I discovered that this bird was singing a Te Deum. How I knew that it was a Te Deum I cannot say. The others were more like earthly birds, except for the thrilling sweetness of their notes—and I could not see this one, for she seemed to be hidden from sight upon her nest. I observed that the bird upon the nest sang here as well as that upon the bough; and that I understood her: “Te Deum laudamus—laudamus” as distinctly as if I had been listening to a human voice.

When I had comprehended this, and stood entranced to listen, I began to catch the same melody in the murmur of the water, and perceived, to my astonishment, that the two, the brook and the bird, carried parts of the harmony of a solemn and majestic mass. Apparently these were but portions of the whole, but all which it was permitted me to hear. My father explained to me that it was not every natural beauty which had the power to join in such surpassing chorals; these were selected, for reasons which he did not attempt to specify. I surmised that they were some of the simplest of the wonders of this mythical world, which were entrusted to new-comers, as being first within the range of their capacities. I was enraptured with what I heard. The light throbbed about me. The sweet harmony rang on. I bathed my face in the musical water—it was as if I absorbed the sound at the pores of my skin. Dimly I received a hint of the possible existence of a sense or senses of which I had never heard.

What wonders were to come! What knowledge, what marvel, what stimulation and satisfaction! And I had but just begun! I was overwhelmed with this thought, and looked about; I knew not which way to turn; I had not what to say. Where was the first step? What was the next delight? The fire of discovery kindled in my veins. Let us hasten, that we may investigate Heaven!

“Shall we go on?” asked Father, regarding me earnestly.

“Yes, yes!” I cried, “let us go on. Let us see more—learn all. What a world have I come to! Let us begin at the beginning, and go to the end of it! Come quickly!”

I caught his hand, and we started on my eager mood. I felt almost a superabundance of vitality, and sprang along; there was everlasting health within my bounding arteries; there was eternal vigor in my firm muscle and sinews. How shall I express, to one who has never experienced it, the consciousness of life that can never die?

I could have leaped, flown, or danced like a child. I knew not how to walk sedately, like others whom I saw about us, who looked at me smiling, as older people look at the young on earth. “I, too, have felt thus—and thus.” I wanted to exercise the power of my arms and limbs. I longed to test the triumphant poise of my nerve. My brain grew clearer and clearer, while for the gladness in my heart there is not any earthly word. As I bounded on, I looked more curiously at the construction of the body in which I found myself. It was, and yet it was not, like that which I had worn on earth. I seemed to have slipped out of one garment into another. Perhaps it was nearer the truth to say that it was like casting off an outer for an inner dress. There were nervous and arterial and other systems, it seemed, to which I had been accustomed. I cannot explain wherein they differed, as they surely did, and did enormously, from their representatives below. If I say that I felt as if I had got into the soul of a body, shall I be understood? It was as if I had been encased, one body within the other, to use a small earthly comparison, like the ivory figures which curious Chinese carvers cut within temple windows. I was constantly surprised at this. I do not know what I had expected, but assuredly nothing like the fact. Vague visions of gaseous or meteoric angelic forms have their place in the imaginations of most of us below; we picture our future selves as a kind of nebulosity. When I felt the spiritual flesh, when I used the strange muscle, when I heard the new heart-beat of my heavenly identity, I remembered certain words, with a sting of mortification that I had known them all my life, and paid so cool a heed to them: “There is a terrestrial body, and there is a celestial body.” The glory of the terrestrial was one. Behold, the glory of the celestial was another. St. Paul had set this tremendous assertion revolving in the sky of the human mind, like a star which we had not brought into our astronomy.

It was not a hint or a hope that he gave; it was the affirmation of a man who presumed to know. In common with most of his readers, I had received his statement with a poor incredulity or cold disregard. Nothing in the whole range of what we used to call the Bible, had been more explicit than those words; neither metaphor, nor allegory, nor parable befogged them; they were as clear cut as the dictum of Descartes. I recalled them with confusion, as I bounded over the elastic and wondrously-tinted grass.

Never before, at least, had I known what the color of green should be; resembling, while differing from that called by the name on earth—a development of a color, a blossom from a bud, a marvel from a commonplace. Thus the sweet and common clothing which God had given to our familiar earth, transfigured, wrapped again the hills and fields of Heaven. And oh, what else? what next? I turned to my father to ask him in which direction we were going; at this moment an arrest of the whole current of feeling checked me like a great dam.