"Change is death," he cried, "change is death! Who dares to say the body never dies, because it turns again to grass and flowers? And yet they dare to say the spirit never dies, because in space some strange unearthly being may have sprung up upon its ruins. Leave me! Leave me!" he cried in frantic bitterness. "Give me back what I have lost, or give me nothing."
For the soul's fierce cry for immortality is this--only this: Return to me after death the thing as it was before. Leave me in the Hereafter the being that I am today. Rob me of the thoughts, the feelings, the desires that are my life, and you have left nothing to take. Your immortality is annihilation, your Hereafter is a lie.
Waldo flung open the door, and walked out into the starlight, his pain- stricken thoughts ever driving him on as he paced there.
"There must be a Hereafter because man longs for it!" he whispered. "Is not all life from the cradle to the grave one long yearning for that which we never touch? There must be a Hereafter because we cannot think of any end to life. Can we think of a beginning? Is it easier to say 'I was not' than to say 'I shall not be'? And yet, where were we ninety years ago?
Dreams, dreams! Ah, all dreams and lies! No ground anywhere."
He went back into the cabin and walked there. Hour after hour passed, and he was dreaming.
For, mark you, men will dream; the most that can be asked of them is but that the dream be not in too glaring discord with the thing they know. He walked with bent head.
All dies, all dies! the roses are red with the matter that once reddened the cheek of the child; the flowers bloom the fairest on the last year's battleground; the work of death's finger cunningly wreathed over is at the heart of all things, even of the living.
Death's finger is everywhere. The rocks are built up of a life that was.
Bodies, thoughts, and loves die: from where springs that whisper to the tiny soul of man, "You shall not die"? Ah, is there no truth of which this dream is shadow?
He fell into perfect silence. And, at last, as he walked there with his bent head, his soul passed down the steps of contemplation into that vast land where there is always peace; that land where the soul, gazing long, loses all consciousness of its little self, and almost feels its hand on the old mystery of Universal unity that surrounds it.
"No death, no death," he muttered; "there is that which never dies--which abides. It is but the individual that perishes, the whole remains. It is the organism that vanishes, the atoms are there. It is but the man that dies, the Universal Whole of which he is part reworks him into its inmost self. Ah, what matter that man's day be short!--that the sunrise sees him, and the sunset sees his grave; that of which he is but the breath has breathed him forth and drawn him back again. That abides--we abide."
For the little soul that cries aloud for continued personal existence for itself and its beloved, there is no help. For the soul which knows itself no more as a unit, but as a part of the Universal Unity of which the Beloved also is a part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is no death.
"Let us die, beloved, you and I, that we may pass on forever through the Universal Life! In that deep world of contemplation all fierce desires die out, and peace comes down. He, Waldo, as he walked there, saw no more the world that was about him; cried out no more for the thing that he had lost.
His soul rested. Was it only John, think you, who saw the heavens open?
The dreamers see it every day.
Long years before the father had walked in the little cabin, and seen choirs of angels, and a prince like unto men, but clothed in immortality.
The son's knowledge was not as the father's, therefore the dream was new- tinted, but the sweetness was all there, the infinite peace that men find not in the little cankered kingdom of the tangible. The bars of the real are set close about us; we cannot open our wings but they are struck against them, and drop bleeding. But, when we glide between the bars into the great unknown beyond, we may sail forever in the glorious blue, seeing nothing but our own shadows.
So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth.
Our fathers had their dream; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
