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.

I was perplexed by a good many matters besides. I had learned to keep
most of my thoughts to myself, but I did venture to ask about the
Ressurrection--how it was that those who had died and gone straight to
heaven, and had been singing there for thousands of years, could have
any use for the dust to which their bodies had returned. Were they not
already as alive as they could be? I found that there were different
ideas of the resurrection among "orthodox" people, even then. I was
told however, that this was too deep a matter for me, and so I ceased
asking questions. But I pondered the matter of death; what did it mean?
The Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than any of the
ministers did. And, as usual, a poem helped me. It was Pope's Ode,
beginning with,--

"Vital spark of heavenly flame,"--

which I learned out of a reading-book. To die was to "languish into
life." That was the meaning of it! and I loved to repeat to myself the
words,--

"Hark! they whisper: angels say,
'Sister spirit, come away!'"

"The world recedes; it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring."

A hymn that I learned a little later expressed to me the same
satisfying thought:

"For strangers into life we come,
And dying is but going home."

The Apostle's words, with which the song of "The Dying Christian to his