“Earth! Earth, the mother of us all! Aye, the mother of us all! How loth, how loth, like to a child we be, to leave and seek ’mid dark!”—Patience Worth.

If the personality of Patience Worth and the nature and quality of her literary productions are worthy of consideration as evidences of the truth of her claim to a spiritual existence, then in the sufficiency of the proof may be found an answer to the world-old question: Is there a life after death? To what extent the facts that have been presented in this narrative may be accepted as proof, is for the reader to determine. But Patience has not been content to reveal a strange personality and a unique literature; she has had much to say upon this question of immortality. There is more or less spiritual significance in nearly all of her poetry and in some of her prose, and while her references to the after life are usually veiled under figures of speech, they nevertheless give assurances of its existence. She makes it clear, however, that she is not permitted to reveal the nature of that life beyond the veil, but she goes as far apparently as she dares, in the repeated assertion, through metaphor and illustration, of its reality.

“My days,” she cries, “I have scattered like autumn leaves, whirled by raging winds, and they have fallen in various crannies ’long the way. Blown to rest are the sunny spring-kissed mornings of my youth, and with many a sigh did I blow the sobbing eves that melted into tear-washed night. Blow on, thou zephyr of this life, and let me throw the value of each day to thee. Blow, and spend thyself, till, tired, thou wilt croon thyself to sleep. Perchance this casting of my day may cease, and thou wilt turn anew unto thy blowing and reap the casting of the world.

“What then is a sigh? Ah, man may breathe a sorrow. Doth then the dumbness of his brother bar his sighing? Nay—and hark! The sea doth sigh, and yonder starry jasmine stirreth with a tremorous sigh; and morning’s birth is greeted with the sighing of the world. For what? Ah, for that coming that shall fulfill the promise, and change the sighing to a singing, and loose the tongue of him whom God doth know and, fearful lest he tell His hidden mysteries, hath locked his lips.”

And again she asks: “Needest thou see what God himself sealeth thine eyes to make thee know?” Meaning, undoubtedly, that only through the process of death can the soul be brought to an understanding of that other life; and she declares that even if we were shown, we could not comprehend. “If thou should’st see His face on morrow’s break,” she says, “’twould but start a wagging,” a discussion. And she continues: “Ah, ope the tabernacle, but look thou not on high, for when the filmy veil shall fade away—ah, could’st thou but know that He who waits hath looked, aye looked, on thee, and thou hast looked on Him since time began!” This enigmatical utterance is in itself sufficient to start a “wagging,” but Patience evidently feels that the solution is beyond our powers: for she repeatedly asserts that the key to the mystery is within our reach if we could but grasp it. “Fleet as down blown from its moorings, seeking the linnet who dropped her seed, so drift ye,” she says, “ever seeking, when at the root still rests the seed pod.” And again: “Knowest thou that fair land to which the traveler is loath to go, but loath, so loath, to leave? Ah, the mystery of the snail’s shell is far deeper than this.”

Yet she tells us again and again that Nature itself is the proof of another life. “Why live,” she asks, “the paltry span of years allotted thee, in desolation, while all about thee are His promises? Thou art, indeed, like a withered hand that holds a new-blown rose.” The truth, she says, is not to be found in “books of wordy filling,” but in the infant’s smile and in the myriad creations and resurrections that are ever within our cognizance. “I pipe of learning,” she cries, “and fall silent before the fool who singeth his folly lay.”

The natural evidences she points out are visible to all and within the comprehension of the feeblest intelligence, but he whose vision is obscured by book knowledge “is like unto the monk who prays within his cell, unheedful of the timid sunbeam who would light the page his wisdom so befogs.” “Ah!” she exclaims, “the labor set thee to unlearn thine inborn fancies!” meaning, apparently, the suppression of the intuitions of immortality; and in the same line of thought she cries: “Am I then drunkened on the chaff of knowledge supped by mine elderborn? Nay, my forefolk drank not truth, but sent through my veins acoursing, chaff, chaff, naught by chaff.” Plainly, then, Patience has no great respect for learning, and it is the book of Nature rather than the book of words that she would have us read.

So it is she sings, presenting the symbolisms of nature to illustrate the renewal or the continuance of life; or again, she likens life to the seasons (as did Shakespeare and Keats, and many another poet) in this manner:

Faith is the keynote of many of her songs, the faith that grows out of that profound love which is the essential principle of the religion she presents. The triumph of faith she expresses in the poem which follows:

This triumph of faith is also the theme of the weird allegory which follows. It is, perhaps, the most mystical of Patience’s productions.

“And faith doth spring from seedlings of thy doubt!” plainly meaning an active doubt that searches for the truth and finds it. But she personifies Doubt in another and more forbidding form in this:

I have said that the message of Patience Worth contained a revelation, a religion and a promise. The revelation is too obvious to need a pointer. In the preceding chapter were presented the elements of the religion that she reveals, with which should be included the unfaltering faith expressed in these poems. Love and Faith—these are the two Graces upon whom, to personify them, all her work is rested, and from them spring the promise she conveys. That promise has to do with the hereafter, and Patience knows the human attitude in relation to that universal problem, and she gives courage to the shrinking heart in this poem on the fear of death:

This is Patience’s answer to the eternal question:

It is the cry of him who believes and yet doubts, and Patience points to the swallow winging across the blue “to lands he deemeth peopled with his brothers” who have gone on before. In imagination he can hear their song in the home lands of the South, and though he cannot see them, and cannot have had word from them, he knows they are there, and he does not skim uncertainly about the lake, but with unfaltering faith “wings him on and on” until—

But Patience does not content herself with appeals to faith, eloquent as they may be. While her communications are always clothed in figures of speech, they are sometimes more definite in statement than in the lines which have been thus far presented. In the prose poem which follows, she asks and answers the question in a way that can leave no doubt of her meaning:

“Shall I arise and know thee, brother, when like a bubble I am blown into Eternity from this pipe of clay? Or shall I burst and float my atoms in a joyous spray at the first beholding of this home prepared for thee and me, and shall we together mingle our joys in one supreme joy in Him? It matters not, beloved, so comfort thee. For should the blowing be the end, what then? Hath not thy pack been full, and mine? We are o’erweary with the work of living, and sinking to oblivion would be rest. Yet sure as sun shall rise, my dust shall be unloosed, and blow into new fields of new days. I see full fields yet to be harvested, and I am weary. I see fresh business of living, work yet to be done, and I am weary. Oh, let me fold these tired hands and sleep. Beloved, I trust, and expect my trust, for ne’er yet did He fail.”

She puts this into the mouth of one who lives, but it is not merely an expression of faith; it is a positive assertion. “Yet sure as sun shall rise, my dust shall be unloosed, and blow into new fields of new days.”

And again she sings:

Or she puts the thought in another form in this assurance:

All these, however, are but preparatory to the communication in which she asserts not only the actuality of the future life but something of the nature of it. One might say that the preceding poems and prose-poems, taken alone and without regard to the mystery of their source, were merely expressions of belief, but in this communication she seems to speak with knowledge, seems even to have overstepped the bounds within which, she has often asserted, she is held. “My lips be astopped,” she has said in answer to a request for information of this forbidden character, but here she appears to have been permitted to give a glimpse of the unknown, and to present a promise of universal application. This poem, from the spiritual standpoint, is the most remarkable of all her productions.

What is it that affrights, she asks, when we think of death? It is the emptiness, she answers, the utter lack of knowledge of what lies beyond. And if we waken to “joys we ne’er have supped”—using the word sup in the sense of to taste or to know—what is there to attract us in the prospect? It is an illustration she presents of our attitude toward promises of joys with which we are unfamiliar; and which therefore do not greatly interest us—the child who casts aside a well beloved toy “for bauble that but caught the eye and left the heart ahungered.” Shall the joys, she makes us exclaim, which we have known here but barely tasted in this fleeting life, “be lost amid this promised bliss!” and shall we “search in vain to find a sorrow that had fleeted hence before our coming?”—meaning, apparently, shall we look there in vain for a loved one who has gone before? She answers these questions of the heart. Personality persists beyond the grave, she gives us plainly to understand. We take with us all of ourselves but the material elements. “Thou art ye,” she has said, “and I be me and ye be ye, aye, ever so.” The transition is but a change from the material to the spiritual. We “wake in yesteryear,” she says,—amid the friends and associations of the past; and the joys of that life, one must infer, are the spiritual joys of this one, the joy that comes from love, from good deeds, from work accomplished. For it is quite evident that she would have us believe that there is a continuous advancement in that other life.

This can mean nothing else than that the hardened sinner, amid supernal influences, shall develop into something higher, and as no one can be supposed to be perfect when leaving earth, it follows that progress is common to all. Progress implies effort, and this indicates that there will be something for everyone to do—a view quite different from the monotony of eternal idleness.

To those who would peer into the other land these are perhaps the most important lines she has given. But what does she mean by “sorrows ripened to a mellow heart?” She was asked to make that plainer and she said:

“That that hath flitted hence be sorrows of earth, and ahere be ripened and thine. Love alost be sorrow of earth and dwell ahere.”

She thus makes these lines an answer to the question put before:

These are the sorrows that are “ripened to a mellow heart,” and she was asked if there were new sorrows to be borne in that other life. She replied:

“Nay. Earth be a home of sorrow’s dream. For sorrow be but dream of the soul asleep. ’Tis wake (death) that setteth free.”

And after such assurance comes the cry of faith and content and peace:

With this comforting assurance in mind one may cheerfully approach her solemn address to Death:

She finds Death terrible from the human point of view, and reveals him at the end as “the gift of Him, the Key to There!”

One of her constant objects seems to be to rob death of its terrors, and to bring the “There” into closer and more intimate connection with us. Here is another effort:

All that is worth while on earth is but the echoes of Heaven, and there would be nothing to life but for the joys that have been “coaxed” from there. How closely that thought unites the here and the there. Earth sounds but the echoes of the other land adjoining! She makes it something tangible, something almost material, something we may nearly comprehend; and then, having opened the door a little way, as far, no doubt, as it is possible for her to do, she presents this response to human desires, this promise of joys to come:

With this promise, this covenant, we bring the narrative of Patience to an end. There will be many and widely varied views of the nature of this intelligence, but surely there can be but one opinion of the beauty of her words and the purity of her purpose. She has brought a message of love at a time when the world is sadly deficient in that attribute, wisely believed to be the best thing in earth or heaven; and an inspiration to faith that was never so greatly in need of strength as now. An inevitable consequence of the world-war will be a universal introspection. There will be a great turning of thought to serious things. That tendency is already discernible. May it not be possible that it is the mission of Patience Worth to answer the question that is above all questions at a time when humanity is filled with interrogation?