When I waked, I was still alone. There seemed to have been showers, for the leaves and grass about me were wet; yet I felt no chill or dampness, or any kind of injury from this fact. Rather I had a certain refreshment, as if my sleeping senses had drunk of the peace and power of the dew that flashed far and near about me. The intense excitement under which I had labored since coming to this place was calmed. All the fevers of feeling were laid. I could not have said whether there had been what below we called night, or how the passage of time had marked itself; I only knew that I had experienced the recuperation of night, and that I sprang to the next duty or delight of existence with the vigor of recurring day.

As I rose from the grass, I noticed a four-leaved clover, and remembering the pretty little superstition we used to have about it, I plucked it, and held it to my face, and so learned that the rain-drop in this new land had perfume; an exquisite scent; as if into the essence of brown earth and spicy roots, and aromatic green things, such as summer rain distills with us from out a fresh-washed world, there were mingled an inconceivable odor drawn out of the heart of the sky. Metaphysicians used to tell us that no man ever imagined a new perfume, even in his dreams. I could see that they were right, for anything like the perfume of clover after a rain in Heaven, had never entered into my sense or soul before. I saved the clover “for good luck,” as I used to do.

Overhead there was a marvel. There seemed to have been clouds—their passing and breaking, and flitting—and now, behold the heavens themselves, bared of all their storm-drapery, had drawn across their dazzling forms a veil of glory. From what, for want of better knowledge, I still called East to West, and North to South, one supernal prism swept. The whole canopy of the sky was a rainbow.

It is impossible to describe this sight in any earthly tongue, to any dwellers of the earth. I stood beneath it, as a drop stands beneath the ocean. For a time I could only feel the surge of beauty—mere beauty—roll above me. Then, I think, as the dew had fallen from the leaf, so I sunk upon my knees. I prayed because it was natural to pray, and felt God in my soul as the prism feels the primary color, while I thanked Him that I was immortally alive. It had never been like this before, to pray; nay, prayer itself was now one of the discoveries of Heaven. It throbbed through me like the beat of a new heart. It seemed to me that He must be very near me. Almost it was, as if He and I were alone together in the Universe. For the first time, the passionate wish to be taken into His very visible presence,—that intense desire which I had heard of, as overpowering so many of the newly dead,—began to take possession of me. But I put it aside, since it was not permitted, and a consciousness of my unfitness came to me, that made the wish itself seem a kind of mistake. I think this feeling was not unlike what we called below a sense of sin. I did not give it that name at that time. It had come to me so naturally and gradually, that there was no strain or pain about it. Yet when I had it, I could no longer conceive of being without it. It seemed to me that I was a stronger and wiser woman for it. A certain gentleness and humility different from what I had been used to, in my life of activity, wherein so many depended on me, and on the decided faculties of my nature, accompanied the growing sense of personal unworthiness with which I entered on the blessedness of everlasting life.

I watched the rainbow of the sky till it had begun to fade—an event in itself an exquisite wonder, for each tint of the prism flashed out and ran in lightning across the heavens before falling to its place in the primary color, till at last the whole spectacle was resolved into the three elements, the red, the yellow, and the blue; which themselves moved on and away, like a conqueror dismissing a pageant.

When this gorgeous scene had ended, I was surprised to find that though dead and in Heaven, I was hungry. I gathered fruits which grew near, of strange form and flavor, but delicious to the taste past anything I had ever eaten, and I drank of the brook where the shells were, feeling greatly invigorated thereby. I was beginning to wonder where my father was, when I saw him coming towards me. He greeted me with his old good-morning kiss, laying his hand upon my head in a benediction that filled my soul.

As we moved on together, I asked him if he remembered how we used to say below:

“What a heavenly day!”

Many people seemed to be passing on the road which we had chosen, but as we walked on they grew fewer.

“There are those who wish to speak with you,” he said with a slight hesitation, “but all things can wait here; we learn to wait ourselves. You are to go to your mother now.”

“And not with you?” I asked, having a certain fear of the mystery of my undertaking. He shook his head with a look more nearly like disappointment than anything I had seen upon his face in this new life; explaining to me, however, with cheerful acquiescence, that it was not Willed that he should join me on my journey.

“Tell her that I come shortly,” he added, “and that I come alone. She will understand. And have no fear; you have much to learn, but it will come syllable by syllable.”

Now swiftly, at the instant while he spoke with me, I found myself alone and in a mountainous region, from which a great outlook was before me. I saw the kingdoms of heaven and the glory of them, spread out before me like a map. A mist of the colors of amethyst and emerald interfused, enwrapped the outlines of the landscape. All details grew blurred and beautiful like a dream at which one snatches vainly in the morning. Off, and beyond, the infinite ether throbbed. Yonder, like a speck upon a sunbeam, swam the tiny globe which we called earth. Stars and suns flashed and faded, revolving and waiting in their places. Surely it was growing dark, for they sprang out like mighty light-houses upon the grayness of the void.

The splendors of the Southern cross streamed far into the strange light, neither of night nor day, not of twilight or dawn, which surrounded me.

Colored suns, of which astronomers had indeed taught us, poured undreamed-of light upon unknown planets. I passed worlds whose luminaries gave them scarlet, green, and purple days. “These too,” I thought, “I shall one day visit.” I flashed through currents of awful color, and measures of awful night. I felt more than I perceived, and wondered more than I feared. It was some moments before I realized, by these few astronomical details, that I was adrift, alone upon the mystery and mightiness of Space.

Of this strange and solitary journey, I can speak so imperfectly, that it were better almost to leave it out of my narrative. Yet, when I remember how I have sometimes heard those still upon earth conceive, with the great fear and ignorance inseparable from earth-trained imagination, of such transits of the soul from point to point in ether, I should be glad to express at least the incomplete impressions which I received from this experience.

The strongest of these, and the sweetest, was the sense of safety—and still the sense of safety; unassailable, everlasting; blessed beyond the thought of an insecure life to compass. To be dead was to be dead to danger, dead to fear. To be dead was to be alive to a sense of assured good chance that nothing in the universe could shake.

So I felt no dread, believe me, though much awe and amazement, as I took my first journey from Heaven to earth. I have elsewhere said that the distance, by astronomical calculation, was in itself perhaps not enormous. I had an impression that I was crossing a great sphere or penumbra, belonging to the earth itself, and having a certain relation to it, like the soul to the body of a man.

Was Heaven located within or upon this world-soul? The question occurred to me, but up to this time, I am still unable to answer it. The transit itself was swift and subtle as a thought. Indeed, it seemed to me that thought itself might have been my vehicle of conveyance; or perhaps I should say, feeling. My love and longing took me up like pollen taken by the wind. As I approached the spot where my dear ones dwelt and sorrowed for me, desire and speed both increased by a mighty momentum.

Now I did not find this journey as difficult as that other, when I had departed, a freshly-freed soul, from earth to Heaven. I learned that I was now subject to other natural laws. A celestial gravitation controlled the celestial body, as that of the earth had compelled the other. I was upborne in space by this new and mysterious influence. Yet there was no dispute between it and the other law, the eternal law of love, which drew me down. Between soul and body, in the heavenly existence, there could be no more conflict than between light and an ether wave.

I do not say that I performed this journey without effort or intelligence. The little knowledge I ever had was taxed in view of the grandeurs and the mysteries around me. Shall I be believed if I say that I recalled all the astronomy and geography that my life as a teacher had left still somewhat freshly imprinted on the memory? that the facts of physics recurred to me, even in that inroad of feeling? and that I guided myself to the Massachusetts town as I would have found it upon a globe at school? Already I learned that no acquisition of one life is lost in the next. Already I thanked God for everything I knew, only wishing, with the passion of ignorance newly revealed to itself by the dawn of wisdom, that my poor human acquirements had ever truly deserved the high name of study, or stored my thought with its eternal results.