FullReads

“Swedenborg,” said the Elder, “was an insane man, or worse.”

“Perhaps so,” said the Doctor; “but there is a great deal of ‘method in his madness,’ and plain common sense too. There is one grand and beautiful idea underlying all his revelations or speculations about the future life. It is this: that each spirit chooses its own society, and naturally finds its fitting place and sphere of action,–following in the new life, as in the present, the leading of its prevailing loves and desires,–and that hence none are arbitrarily compelled to be good or evil, happy or miserable. A great law of attraction and gravitation governs the spiritual as well as the material universe; but, in obeying it, the spirit retains in the new life whatever freedom of will it possessed in its first stage of being. But I see the Elder shakes his head, as much as to say, I am ‘wise above what is written,’ or, at any rate, meddling with matters beyond my comprehension. Our young friend here,” he continued, turning to me, “has the appearance of a listener; but I suspect he is busy with his own reveries, or enjoying the fresh sights and sounds of this fine morning. I doubt whether our discourse has edified him.”

“Pardon me,” said I; “I was, indeed, listening to another and older oracle.”

“Well, tell us what you hear,” said the Doctor.

“A faint, low murmur, rising and falling on the wind. Now it comes rolling in upon me, wave after wave of sweet, solemn music. There was a grand organ swell; and now it dies away as into the infinite distance; but I still hear it,–whether with ear or spirit I know not,–the very ghost of sound.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Doctor; “I understand it is the voice of the pines yonder,–a sort of morning song of praise to the Giver of life and Maker of beauty. My ear is dull now, and I cannot hear it; but I know it is sounding on as it did when I first climbed up here in the bright June mornings of boyhood, and it will sound on just the same when the deafness of the grave shall settle upon my failing senses. Did it never occur to you that this deafness and blindness to accustomed beauty and harmony is one of the saddest thoughts connected with the great change which awaits us? Have you not felt at times that our ordinary conceptions of heaven itself, derived from the vague hints and Oriental imagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and hopes? How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of pearl, the thrones, temples, and harps, for the sunset lights of our native valleys; the woodpaths, whose moss carpets are woven with violets and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossom,–the sweet, familiar voices of human life and nature! In the place of strange splendors and unknown music, should we not welcome rather whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds of our old home?”

“You touch a sad chord, Doctor,” said I. “Would that we could feel assured of the eternity of all we love!”

“And have I not an assurance of it at this very moment?” returned the Doctor. “My outward ear fails me; yet I seem to hear as formerly the sound of the wind in the pines. I close my eyes; and the picture of my home is still before me. I see the green hill slope and meadows; the white shaft of the village steeple springing up from the midst of maples and elms; the river all afire with sunshine; the broad, dark belt of woodland; and, away beyond, all the blue level of the ocean. And now, by a single effort of will, I can call before me a winter picture of the same scene. It is morning as now; but how different! All night has the white meteor fallen, in broad flake or minutest crystal, the sport and plaything of winds that have wrought it into a thousand shapes of wild beauty. Hill and valley, tree and fence, woodshed and well-sweep, barn and pigsty, fishing-smacks frozen tip at the wharf, ribbed monsters of dismantled hulks scattered along the river-side,–all lie transfigured in the white glory and sunshine. The eye, wherever it turns, aches with the cold brilliance, unrelieved save where. The blue smoke of morning fires curls lazily up from the Parian roofs, or where the main channel of the river, as yet unfrozen, shows its long winding line of dark water glistening like a snake in the sun. Thus you perceive that the spirit sees and hears without the aid of bodily organs; and why may it not be so hereafter? Grant but memory to us, and we can lose nothing by death. The scenes now passing before us will live in eternal reproduction, created anew at will. We assuredly shall not love heaven the less that it is separated by no impassable gulf from this fair and goodly earth, and that the pleasant pictures of time linger like sunset clouds along the horizon of eternity. When I was younger, I used to be greatly troubled by the insecure tenure by which my senses held the beauty and harmony of the outward world. When I looked at the moonlight on the water, or the cloud-shadows on the hills, or the sunset sky, with the tall, black tree-boles and waving foliage relieved against it, or when I heard a mellow gush of music from the brown-breasted fife-bird in the summer woods, or the merry quaver of the bobolink in the corn land, the thought of an eternal loss of these familiar sights and sounds would sometimes thrill through me with a sharp and bitter pain. I have reason to thank God that this fear no longer troubles me. Nothing that is really valuable and necessary for us can ever be lost. The present will live hereafter; memory will bridge over the gulf between the two worlds; for only on the condition of their intimate union can we preserve our identity and personal consciousness. Blot out the memory of this world, and what would heaven or hell be to us? Nothing whatever. Death would be simple annihilation of our actual selves, and the substitution therefor of a new creation, in which we should have no more interest than in an inhabitant of Jupiter or the fixed stars.”