E-text prepared by David Garcia, Josephine Paolucci,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
In Memoriam
A LITTLE PILGRIM IN THE UNSEEN
THE LITTLE PILGRIM GOES UP HIGHER
COMPLETE EDITIONS OF THE POETS.
The sympathetic reader will easily understandthat the following pages were nevermeant to be connected with any author'sname. They sprang out of those thoughtsthat arise in the heart, when the door ofthe Unseen has been suddenly opened closeby us; and are little more than a wistfulattempt to follow a gentle soul which neverknew doubt into the New World, and tocatch a glimpse of something of its glorythrough her simple and child-like eyes.
E.C.
25TH FEBRUARY 1882
She had been talking of dying only theevening before, with a friend, and haddescribed her own sensations after a longillness when she had been at the point ofdeath. "I suppose," she said, "that I wasas nearly gone as any one ever was tocome back again. There was no pain init, only a sense of sinking down, down—throughthe bed as if nothing could holdme or give me support enough—but nopain." And then they had spoken ofanother friend in the same circumstances,who also had come back from the veryverge, and who described her sensationsas those of one floating upon a summersea without pain or suffering, in a lovelynook of the Mediterranean, blue as thesky. These soft and soothing images ofthe passage which all men dread had beentalked over with low voices, yet with smilesand a grateful sense that "the warm precinctsof the cheerful day" were once morefamiliar to both. And very cheerfully shewent to rest that night, talking of whatwas to be done on the morrow, and fellasleep sweetly in her little room, with itsshaded light and curtained window, andlittle pictures on the dim walls. All wasquiet in the house: soft breathing of thesleepers, soft murmuring of the spring windoutside, a wintry moon very clear and fullin the skies, a little town all hushed andquiet, everything lying defenceless, unconscious,in the safe keeping of God.
How soon she woke no one can tell.She woke and lay quite still, half roused,half hushed, in that soft languor thatattends a happy waking. She was happyalways in the peace of a heart that washumble and faithful and pure, but yet hadbeen used to wake to a consciousness oflittle pains and troubles, such as even toher meekness were sometimes hard tobear. But on this morning there werenone of these. She lay in a kind of hushof happiness and ease, not caring to makeany further movement, lingering over thesweet sensation of that waking. She hadno desire to move nor to break the spellof the silence and peace. It was still veryearly, she supposed, and probably it mightbe hours yet before any one came to callher. It might even be that she shouldsleep again. She had no wish to move,she lay in