The Wedding Guest | Page 8

it be when I see you in the beautiful heavenly light?"
Paul smiled.
"Your fancy is dreaming of what I will be; and can you not dream for me of how bright and beautiful my Rosa will be in that heavenly light?"
"Ah, yes," said Rosa, "that too is pleasant, for I love to be beautiful, dear Paul, for your sake; and today I was thinking of how happy I should make you--not I, but the Lord will make you happy, dear Paul, through me; and is not that a beautiful thought--that it is God loving us through each other?"
How holy love grew at once to Paul! though at first he did not see this beautiful truth as clearly as did Rosa. But she went on, in her loving way, and very soon she raised him into that inner sunshine in which she dwelt, and then he saw it all clearly, for she said--
"You know, dear Paul, that we read in the Bible that 'God is a sun, and that He is the fountain of life,' and thus all life flows from Him into us, just as in the tiny flowers upon the earth comes the warm living ray of the material sun, developing in them beautiful colours and odours--so the life-ray from God fills us with warm affections. We are but dead forms--the power and the life is in Him, and if we were cut off from Him, how could we love each other?"
Paul was convinced, and did not fail to make Rosa realize the Heaven-derived life and power that was in him. And as they kneeled together in their evening devotions, and Paul clasped his wife in his arms, how clearly he felt the influence of that Divine sun upon his soul, filling it with a gushing, yearning tenderness for his beloved and beautiful one; and how fervently he prayed that the light might grow in her, and through her descend to him! Beautiful are the prayers of such loving hearts, for the inner door of their existence then opens, and the great King of Glory enters in, and they are in the Lord, and the Lord is in them.
Yes, Paul had found a wife--not an external type or shadow of one to mock and vex his soul with an unsatisfactory pretence, but a most blessed and eternal reality. He was married not only in the sight of men, but before God and the angels. And the heart of Rosa responded to his mind as truly and unfailingly as his heart beat to the breath of his lungs. She was as his inner life, and he felt himself strong to guard and protect her as he would his own existence. She had become one with him, and henceforth there was no separate existence for these two.
So serenely and lovingly flowed their life in its interior light and beauty, that cares and anxieties seemed scarce to touch their states. True, these came to them in the guise of those calamities and disappointments, that so often sweep as the destructive tornado over the lower lives of the earth-loving children of men. But as their affections were spiritual, they were not wounded by the earth-sorrows. Their treasures were laid up above, where "moth and rust doth not corrupt." Paul realized this when he saw Rosa hold her dead baby in her arms and smile through her tears. And yet this was her "little Paul" that she loved with such an intense delight and devotion; because in him, all the day long, she saw that wonderful life of God manifested in such a heavenly innocence and purity, as in a tiny image of her own Paul. Yet, when the spirit of the child was gone, she adorned the clay form in which it had dwelt, with such loving care, and laid it in its little coffin, that her hand might serve it to the very last, and then turned and rested her head in the bosom of her husband as a wounded bird in its downy nest.
Paul's love seemed to lift her to the Heaven to which her baby had gone; and when, after a few days, she urged him to leave her and go to his office where his duties called him, Paul feared that she would feel lonely, and would fain have stayed beside her. But she said--
"No, dear Paul; I shall never be alone again; the spirit of the child will be with me: it is so beautiful to have loved him on earth, for now I can love him in Heaven." And so Paul left her, not as one in a dark land of sorrow, but floating in a world of light and love. And how eagerly he hastened back to his gentle, stricken dove, and folded her to his heart,