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 expressedto 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 Soul" ends, left the whole cloudy question lit up with
sunshine, to my childish thoughts:--
"O grave, where is thy 'victory?
O death, where is thy sting?"
My father was dead; but that only meant that be bad gone to a
better home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we
should go home, too.
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