WHEN THE BODY IN LIFE FEELS THE SPIRIT.
She. But have you never forgotten the body, dreamed what it would be to feel God? You have known those moments when your soul, losing the sense of contact with men or women, groped alone, in an enveloping calm, and knew content. I have had it in times of intoxication from music—not the personal, passionate music of to-day, but some one or two notes that sink the mazy present into darkness. I knew that my senses were gone for the time, and in their place I held a comfortable consciousness of power. There have been other times—in Lent, at the close of the drama of Christ—beside the sea—after a long dance—illusory moments when one forgot the body and wondered.
He. I know. One night in the Sierras we camped high up above the summits of the range. The altitude, perhaps, or the long ride through the forest, kept me awake. Our fires died down; a chalky mist rose from the valleys, and, filtering through the ravines, at last capped the granite heads. The smouldering tree-trunks we had lit for fires and the little patch of rock where we lay, made an island in that white sea. Between us and the black spaces among the stars there was nothing. How eternally quiet it was! I can feel that isolation now coming over my soul like the stealthy fog, until I lay there, unconscious of my body, in a wondering placidity, watching the stars burn and fade. I could seem to feel them whirl in their way through the heavens. And then a thought detached itself from me, the conception of an eternity passed in placidity like that without the pains of sense, the obligations of action; I loved it then—that cold residence of thought!
She. You have known it, too. Those moments when the body in life feels the state of spirit come rarely and awe one. Dear heart, perhaps if our spirits were purified and experienced we should welcome that perpetual contemplation. We cannot be Janus-faced, but the truth may lie with the monks, who killed this life in order to obtain a grander one.
TWO SOULS IN HEAVEN REMEMBER THE LIFE LIVED ON EARTH.
He. Can you conceive of any heaven for which you would change this shameful world? Any heaven, I mean, of spirits, not merely an Italian palace of delights?
She. There is the heaven of the Pagans, the heaven of glorified earth, but——
He. Would you like to dine without tasting the fruit and the wine? What attainment would it be to walk in fields of asphodel, when all the colors of all the empyrean were equally dazzling, and perceived by the mind alone? For my part, I should prefer to hold one human violet.
She. The heaven of the Christian to-day?
He. That may be interpreted in two ways: the heaven where we know nothing but God, and the heaven where we remember our former life. Let us pass the first, for the second is the heaven passionately desired by those who have suffered here, who have lost their friends.