--Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard
in a French hospital. Between two and three years old. Fell out
of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient,
gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking
fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still. I
spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a
voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it
which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at
this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards.
--C'est tout comme un serin, said the French student at my side.
These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as
to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall
enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl. There must be
other things besides aerolites that wander from their own spheres
to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may
be nearer the literal truth than we dream. If mankind generally
are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set
adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more
trial to reach the shore,--as some grave theologians have
maintained,--if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead
devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from
Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts
three or four score summers,--why, there must have been a few good
spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak
of must belong to them.
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