But hark the herald of the sun,the auroral wind,softly trumpeting his approach!The master-minister of the human tabernacle is at hand!Heaping before his prow a huge ripple-fretted wave of crimson and gold,he rushes aloft,as if new launched from the urging hand of his maker into the upper sea--pauses,and looks down on the world.White-raving storm of molten metals,he is but a coal from the altar of the Father's never-ending sacrifice to his children.
See every little flower straighten its stalk,lift up its neck,and with outstretched head stand expectant:something more than the sun,greater than the light,is coming,is coming--none the less surely coming that it is long upon the road!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 desert rejoiced and blossomed as the rose.Wide forests had sprung up,their whole undergrowth flowering shrubs peopled with song-birds.Every thicket gave birth to a rivulet,and every rivulet to its water-song.
The place of the buried hand gave no sign.Beyond and still beyond,the river came in full volume from afar.Up and up we went,now along grassy margin,and now through forest of gracious trees.The grass grew sweeter and its flowers more lovely and various as we went;the trees grew larger,and the wind fuller of messages.
We came at length to a forest whose trees were greater,grander,and more beautiful than any we had yet seen.Their live pillars upheaved a thick embowed roof,betwixt whose leaves and blossoms hardly a sunbeam filtered.Into the rafters of this aerial vault the children climbed,and through them went scrambling and leaping in a land of bloom,shouting to the unseen elephants below,and hearing them trumpet their replies.The conversations between them Lona understood while I but guessed at them blunderingly.The Little Ones chased the squirrels,and the squirrels,frolicking,drew them on--always at length allowing themselves to be caught and petted.
Often would some bird,lovely in plumage and form,light upon one of them,sing a song of what was coming,and fly away.Not one monkey of any sort could they see.