I liked to say over the "Blesseds,"--the shortest ones best,--about the meek and the pure in heart;and the two "In the beginnings,"both in Genesis and John.Every child's earliest and proudest Scriptural conquest in school was,almost as a matter of course,the first verse in the Bible.
But the passage which I learned first,and most delighted to repeat after Aunt Hannah,--I think it must have been her favorite too,--was,"Let not your heart be troubled.In my Father's house are many mansions."The Voice in the Book seemed so tender!Somebody was speaking who had a heart,and who knew that even a little child's heart was sometimes troubled.And it was a Voice that called us somewhere;to the Father's house,with its many mansions,so sunshiny and so large.
It was a beautiful vision that came to me with the words,--Icould see it best with my eyes shut,-a great,dim Door standing ajar,opening out of rosy morning mists,overhung with swaying vines and arching boughs that were full of birds;and from beyond the Door,the ripple of running waters,and the sound of many happy voices,and above them all the One Voice that was saying,"I go to prepare a place for you."The vision gave me a sens of freedom,fearless and infinite.What was there to be afraid of anywhere?Even we little children could see the open door of our Father's house.We were playing around its threshold now,and we need never wander out of sight of it.The feeling was a vague one,but it was like a remembrance.The spacious mansions were not far away.They were my home.I had known them,and should return to them again.
This dim half-memory,which perhaps comes to all children,I had felt when younger still,almost before I could walk.Sitting on the floor in a square of sunshine made by an open window,the leaf-shadows from great boughs outside dancing and wavering around me,I seemed to be talking to them and they to me in unknown tongues,that left within me an ecstasy yet unforgotten.
These shadows had brought a message to me from an unseen Somewhere,which my baby heart was to keep forever.The wonder of that moment often returns.Shadow-traceries of bough and leaf still seem to me like the hieroglyphics of a lost language.
The stars brought me the same feeling.I remember the surprise they were to me,seen for the first time.One evening,just before I was put to bed,I was taken in somebody's arms--my sister's,I think--outside the door,and lifted up under the dark,still,clear sky,splendid with stars,thicker and nearer earth than they have ever seemed since.All my little being shaped itself into a subdued delighted "Oh!"And then the exultant thought flitted through the mind of the reluctant child,as she was carried in,"Why,that is the roof of the house I live in."After that I always went to sleep happier for the feeling that the stars were outside there in the dark,though I could not see them.
I did firmly believe that I came from some other country to this;I had a vague notion that we were all here on a journey,--that this was not the place where we really belonged.Some of the family have told me that before I could talk plainly,I used to run about humming the sentence--"My father and mother Shall come unto the land,"sometimes varying it with,"My brothers and sisters Shall come unto the land;"Nobody knew where I had caught the words,but I chanted them so constantly that my brother wrote them down,with chalk,on the under side of a table,where they remained for years.My thought about that other land may have been only a baby's dream;but the dream was very real to me.I used to talk,in sober earnest,about what happened "before I was a little girl,and came here to live";and it did seem to me as if I remembered.
But I was hearty and robust,full of frolicsome health,and very fond of the matter-of-fact world I lived in.My sturdy little feet felt the solid earth beneath them.I grew with the sprouting grass,and enjoyed my life as the buds and birds seemed to enjoy theirs.It was only as if the bud and the bird and the dear warm earth knew,in the same dumb way that I did,that all their joy and sweetness came to them out of the sky.
These recollections,that so distinctly belong the baby Myself,before she could speak her thoughts,though clear and vivid,are difficult to put into shape.But other grown-up children,in looking back,will doubtless see many a trailing cloud of glory,that lighted their unconscious infancy from within and from beyond.
I was quite as literal as I was visionary in my mental renderings of the New Testament,read at Aunt Hannah's knee.I was much taken with the sound of words,without any thought of their meaning--a habit not always outgrown with childhood.The "sounding brass and tinkling cymbals,"for instance,in the Epistle to the Corinthians,seemed to me things to be greatly desired."Charity"was an abstract idea.I did not know what it meant.But "tinkling cymbals"one could make music with.I wished I could get hold of them.It never occurred to me that the Apostle meant to speak of their melody slightingly.
At meeting,where I began to go also at two years of age,I made my own private interpretations of the Bible readings.They were absurd enough,but after getting laughed at a few times at home for making them public,I escaped mortification by forming a habit of great reserve as to my Sabbath-day thoughts.
When the minister read,"Cut it down:why cumbereth it the ground?"?I thought he meant to say "cu-cumbereth."These vegetables grew on the ground,and I had heard that they were not very good for people to eat.I honestly supposed that the New Testament forbade the cultivation of cucumbers.
