It is a heavenly song, this of the nineteenth-century Christian. A man might dry his tears to listen to it, but for this one thing, — Waldo muttered to himself confusedly: —

“The thing I loved was a woman proud and young; it had a mother once, who, dying, kissed her little baby, and prayed God that she might see it again. If it had lived the loved thing would itself have had a son, who, when he closed the weary eyes and smoothed the wrinkled forehead of his mother, would have prayed God to see that old face smile again in the Hereafter. To the son heaven will be no heaven if the sweet worn face is not in one of the choirs; he will look for it through the phalanx of God’s glorified angels; and the youth will look for the maid, and the mother for the baby. ‘And whose then shall she be at the resurrection of the dead?’”

“Ah God! ah God! a beautiful dream,” he cried; “but can any one dream it not sleeping?”

Waldo paced on, moaning in agony and longing.

He heard the Trancendentalist’s high answer.

“What have you to do with flesh, the gross and miserable garment in which spirit hides itself? You shall see her again. But the hand, the foot, the forehead you loved, you shall see no more. The loves, the fears, the frailties that are born with the flesh, with the flesh they shall die. Let them die! There is that in man that cannot die, — a seed, a germ, an embryo, a spiritual essence. Higher than she was on earth, as the tree is higher than the seed, the man than the embryo, so shall you behold her; changed, glorified!”

High words, ringing well; they are the offering of jewels to the hungry, of gold to the man who dies for bread. Bread is corruptible, gold is incorruptible; bread is light, gold is heavy; bread is common, gold is rare; but the hungry man will barter all your mines for one morsel of bread. Around God’s throne there may be choirs and companies of angels, cherubim and seraphim, rising tier above tier, but not for one of them all does the soul cry aloud. Only perhaps for a little human woman full of sin that it once loved.

“Change is death, change is death,” he cried. “I want no angel, only she; no holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me or give me nothing!”

And, truly, does not the heart love its own with the strongest passion for their very frailties? Heaven might keep its angels if men were but left to men.

“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.”