The thought crossed my mind, Can this be a spirit? As sudden as the question came forth the response, "I am." But, inquired my mind, for my lips did not move, you have never passed the portals of the grave? Again I read in his features the answer, "For ages this earth existed as a natural body, and all its inhabitants partook of its characteristics; gradually it approached the spiritual state, and by a law like that which transforms the egg into the songster, or the worm into the butterfly, it has just accomplished one of its mighty cycles, and now gleams forth with the refulgence of the stars. I did not die, but passed as naturally into the spiritual world as the huge earth itself. Prophets and apostles predicted this change many hundred years ago; but the blind infatuation of our race did not permit them to realize its truth. Your own mind, in common with the sages of all time, long brooded over the idea, and oftentimes have you exclaimed, in agony and dismay—Whitherward! Whitherward!
"The question is now solved. The revolution may not come in the year allotted you, but so surely as St. Paul spoke inspiration, so surely as science elicits truth, so surely as the past prognosticates the future, the natural world must pass into the spiritual, and everything be changed in the twinkling of an eye. Watch well! your own ears may hear the clarion note, your own eyes witness the transfiguration."
Slowly the vision faded away, and left me straining my gaze into the dark midnight which now shrouded the world, and endeavoring to calm my heart, which throbbed as audibly as the hollow echoes of a drum. When the morning sun peeped over the Contra Costa range, I still sat silent and abstracted in my chair, revolving over the incidents of the night, but thankful that, though the reason is powerless to brush away the clouds which obscure the future, yet the imagination may spread its wings, and, soaring into the heavens beyond them, answer the soul when in terror she inquires—Whitherward!
XVI.
OUR WEDDING-DAY.
I.
A dozen springs, and more, dear Sue,
Have bloomed, and passed away,
Since hand in hand, and heart to heart,
We spent our wedding-day.
Youth blossomed on our cheeks, dear Sue,
Joy chased each tear of woe,
When first we promised to be true,
That morning long ago.