and
"How firm a foundation;"
and that she grew more cheerful; though I did not feel sure that my singing cheered her so much as some happier thought that had come to her out of her own heart. Nobody but my mother, indeed, would have called my chirping singing. But as she did not seem displeased, I went on, a little more confidently, with some hymns that I loved for their starry suggestions,—
"When marshaled on the nightly plain,"
and
"Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,"
and
"Watchman, tell us of the night?"
The most beautiful picture in the Bible to me, certainly the loveliest in the Old Testament, had always been that one painted by prophecy, of the time when wild and tame creatures should live together in peace, and children should be their fearless playmates. Even the savage wolf Poverty would be pleasant and neighborly then, no doubt! A Little Child among them, leading them, stood looking wistfully down through the soft sunrise of that approaching day, into the cold and darkness of the world. Oh, it would be so much better than the garden of Eden!
Yes, and it would be a great deal better, I thought, to live in the millennium, than even to die and go to heaven, although so many people around me talked as if that were the most desirable thing of all. But I could never understand why, if God sent us here, we should be in haste to get away, even to go to a pleasanter place.