The Child of the Dawn | Page 5

knew quite well what had happened to me; that I had passed through
what mortals call Death: and two thoughts came to me; one was this.
There had been times on earth when one had felt sure with a sort of
deep instinct that one could not really ever die; yet there had been hours
of weariness and despair when one had wondered whether death would
not mean a silent blankness. That thought had troubled me most, when
I had followed to the grave some friend or some beloved. The
mouldering form, shut into the narrow box, was thrust with a sense of
shame and disgrace into the clay, and no word or sign returned to show
that the spirit lived on, or that one would ever find that dear proximity
again. How foolish it seemed now ever to have doubted, ever to have
been troubled! Of course it was all eternal and everlasting. And then,
too, came a second thought. One had learned in life, alas, so often to
separate what was holy and sacred from daily life; there were prayers,

liturgies, religious exercises, solemnities, Sabbaths--an oppressive
strain, too often, and a banishing of active life. Brought up as one had
been, there had been a mournful overshadowing of thought, that after
death, and with God, it would be all grave and constrained and serious,
a perpetual liturgy, an unending Sabbath. But now all was deliciously
merged together. All of beautiful and gracious that there had been in
religion, all of joyful and animated and eager that there had been in
secular life, everything that amused, interested, excited, all fine pictures,
great poems, lovely scenes, intrepid thoughts, exercise, work, jests,
laughter, perceptions, fancies--they were all one now; only sorrow and
weariness and dulness and ugliness and greediness were gone. The
thought was fresh, pure, delicate, full of a great and mirthful content.
There were no divisions of time in my great peace; past, present, and
future were alike all merged. How can I explain that? It seems so
impossible, having once seen it, that it should be otherwise. The day
did not broaden to the noon, nor fade to evening. There was no night
there. More than that. In the other life, the dark low-hung days, one
seemed to have lived so little, and always to have been making
arrangements to live; so much time spent in plans and schemes, in
alterations and regrets. There was this to be done and that to be
completed; one thing to be begun, another to be cleared away; always
in search of the peace which one never found; and if one did achieve it,
then it was surrounded, like some cast carrion, by a cloud of poisonous
thoughts, like buzzing blue-flies. Now at last one lived indeed; but
there grew up in the soul, very gradually and sweetly, the sense that one
was resting, growing accustomed to something, learning the ways of
the new place. I became more and more aware that I was not alone; it
was not that I met, or encountered, or was definitely conscious of any
thought that was not my own; but there were motions as of great winds
in the untroubled calm in which I lay, of vast deeps drawing past me.
There were hoverings and poisings of unseen creatures, which gave me
neither awe nor surprise, because they were not in the range of my
thought as yet; but it was enough to show me that I was not alone, that
there was life about me, purposes going forward, high activities.
The first time I experienced anything more definite was when suddenly

I became aware of a great crystalline globe that rose like a bubble out
of the sea. It was of an incredible vastness; but I was conscious that I
did not perceive it as I had perceived things upon the earth, but that I
apprehended it all together, within and without. It rose softly and
swiftly out of the expanse. The surface of it was all alive. It had seas
and continents, hills and valleys, woods and fields, like our own earth.
There were cities and houses thronged with living beings; it was a
world like our own, and yet there was hardly a form upon it that
resembled any earthly form, though all were articulate and definite,
ranging from growths which I knew to be vegetable, with a dumb and
sightless life of their own, up to beings of intelligence and purpose. It
was a world, in fact, on which a history like that of our own world was
working itself out; but the whole was of a crystalline texture, if texture
it can be called; there was no colour or solidity, nothing but form and
silence, and I realised that I saw, if