Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/389



A DREAM AND THE TRUTH.

WRITTEN ON THE DEATH OF A MOTHER FOLLOWING THAT OF HER HUSBAND.

LEEP buries the first world, its nights and sorrows, and brings to us a second world, with the forms we have loved and lost, and scenes too vast for this little earth.

I was in the Isle of the Blest, in the second world. This I dreamed. The stars were nearer; the heaven-blue lay on the flowers; all the breezes were melodious tones; and repose and ravishment, which with us are sundered, there dwelt conjoined. And the dead, from around whom had fallen that mist of life which veiled the higher heaven before, rested like mild evening suns in the azure ether.

Then, behold, the earth rose out of the deep beneath, on her course, and the Spring had covered her with his blossoms and buds. As she drew nearer to the Isle of the Blest, a voice full of love cried, "Look down, ye dead, on your old home, and see the beloved who have lost, but not forgotten you."

For in the spring the earth always passes by the eternal World of the Blest, whose off-cast husk sinks into its clods; and therefore it is, that in the spring poor mortals