oad! What matters to-day, or to-morrow, or ten thousand years to Life
himself, to Love himself! He is coming, is coming, and the necks of all
humanity are stretched out to see him come! Every morning will they thus
outstretch themselves, every evening will they droop and wait--until he
comes.--Is this but an air-drawn vision? When he comes, will he indeed
find them watching thus?
It was a glorious resurrection-morning. The night had been spent in
preparing it!
The children went gamboling before, and the beasts came after us.
Fluttering butterflies, darting dragon-flies hovered or shot hither and
thither about our heads, a cloud of colours and flashes, now descending
upon us like a snow-storm of rainbow flakes, now rising into the humid
air like a rolling vapour of embodied odours. It was a summer-day more
like itself, that is, more ideal, than ever man that had not died
found summer-day in any world. I walked on the new earth, under the new
heaven, and found them the same as the old, save that now they opened
their minds to me, and I saw into them. Now, the soul of everything I
met came out to greet me and make friends with me, telling me we came
from the same, and meant the same. I was going to him, they said, with
whom they always were, and whom they always meant; they were, they said,
lightnings that took shape as they flashed from him to his. The dark
rocks drank like sponges the rays that showered upon them; the great
world soaked up the light, and sent out the living. Two joy-fires were
Lona and I. Earth breathed heavenward her sweet-savoured smoke; we
breathed homeward our longing desires. For thanksgiving, our very
consciousness was that.
We came to the channels, once so dry and wearyful: they ran and flashed
and foamed with living water that shouted in its gladness! Far as the
eye could see, all was a rushing, roaring, dashing river of water made
vocal by its rocks.
We did not cross it, but "walked in glory and in joy" up its right bank,
until we reached the great cataract at the foot of the sandy desert,
where, roaring and swirling and dropping sheer, the river divided into
its two branches. There we climbed the height--and found no desert:
through grassy plains, between grassy banks, flowed the deep, wide,
silent river full to the brim. Then first to the Little Ones was
revealed the glory of God in the limpid flow of water. Instinctively
they plunged and swam, and the beasts followed them.
The dese
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