Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 115.djvu/52

'There is no first nor last in Forever. It is Centre there all the time. To believe is enough and the right of supposing.'

'In a life that stopped guessing you and I should not feel at home.'

'Tasting the honey and the sting should have ceased with Eden. Pang is the past of peace.'

My brother Gilbert, idolized by Aunt Emily, died at the age of eight years. After days of stricken silence she sent this message to my mother:—

Dear Sue,

The vision of immortal life has been fulfilled. How simply at the last the fathom comes! The passenger, and not the sea, we find surprises us. Gilbert rejoiced in secrets. His life was panting with them. With what menace of light he cried, 'Don't tell, Aunt Emily!'

My ascended playmate must instruct me now. Show us, prattling preceptor, but the way to thee! He knew no niggard moment. His life was full of boon. The playthings of Dervish were not so wild as his. No crescent was this creature—he traveled free from the Full. Such soar, but never set. I see him in the star and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies.

His life was like a bugle
Which winds itself away,
His elegy and echo,
His requiem ecstasy.

Dawn and meridian in one, wherefore should he wait, wronged only of night which he left for us? Pass to thy rendez-vous of Light, pangless except for us who slowly ford the mystery which thou hast leapt across! Emily.

During the illness which was to prove her last, when unable to see any one, but still with devotion unabated, she wrote, 'How tenderly I thank you, Sue, for every solace! Beneath the Alps the Danube runs.'

And the last line she sent, not long before her death, in response to an entreaty for assurance of her certainty of our love and continuance of her own, was this: 'Remember, dear, that an unmitigated Yes is my only reply to your utmost question.'

After her death my mother wrote of her:—

'A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun, was her wit;—her swift poetic rapture the long glistening note of the bird one hears in June woods at high noon. Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startling picturesqueness to her friends. So intimate and passionate was her love of Nature, she seemed herself a part of the high March sky or the midsummer day. To her, Life was all aglow with God and Immortality. With no creed, no formulated faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old Saints, with the firm step of Martyrs who sing while they suffer.'