The Campaner thal, and other writings/A Dream and the Truth
A DREAM AND THE TRUTH.
WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING THAT OF HER HUSBAND.
LEEP buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too vast for this little earth.
I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed. The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested like mild evening suns in the azure ether.
Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course, and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but not forgotten you."
For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is, that in the spring poor mortals experience such a profound longing, so powerful a presentiment, and so many haunting recollections of their lost beloved.
After the voice, all the Blest stepped forward on the shore of the Supernal Isle, and each one sought on the wan earth the heart which had remembered him. One noble being gazed down, seeking after his spouse and after his children, around whom the glad spring-tide of earth was flowing; but they had no spring.
Alas! the father now saw his wife racked with anguish, and his children dissolved in tears. He discerned, in the strangling hand of Pain, the pallid form whose convulsed heart now reposes, and whose moistened eyes are now shut and cold; and beside it he recognized the loving companion of his former life fatally bleeding on the thorns of earthly martyrdom. And as sorrow, with glowing iron stylus, graved in the crumbling image life's farewell letter, and as she lost hope, but not yet patience, and as her fading eye desired no further happiness save that of her children, and as these could only share, but not remove, the sleepless nights of their mother, the affectionate father sank down, weeping, and prayed: "Eternal One, suffer her to die! Break the agonized bosom, and give me my friend again, and heal the wounded form at last under the earth. Eternal One, suffer her to die!"
And as he prayed, the weary heart here in its martyr-life heard him, and his faithful wife returned forever to his heart. Why weep ye, tender children, that your parents, after the same sufferings, should now have the same joys? that now, after their winter of life, an ever-lasting May has dawned on their souls? Does the painted spring-house under the earth trouble you, or the black boundary-hill on the earth, or the dread hand of decay, which extinguishes earthly scars and wounds and the whole body?
No, let the Spring scatter his flowers on their cold faces, and dry the tears on yours; and when you think painfully of them, comfort yourselves with saying, "We tenderly loved them, and no one has wounded, save He who now heals them."
