in the old place, on the hearth-rug. Very gently she told him what she had to say. She did not look at him; her eyes were fixed on the Japanese crystal resting in its jade bowl on the mantelpiece; once she took it up, and turned it over and over in the palm of her hand, looking at it intently as she spoke. But probably she did not even see it.

"I have thought it all out," she began in a low voice; "and I see I was wrong" He started. "I was wrong. You must save your own soul. I can't do it for you. Oh, I would! but I can't. I shall not ever again insist. Yes, the Kingdom of God must be within you. I never understood that before."

"Amy," he began, but she checked him.

"Please! I am not through yet. I shall pay the money back, somehow, sometime. (Oh, wait wait; don't interrupt me!) Of course, I shall not betray you. My paying it shall not tell the truth, because, unless the truth is from you, it cannot help you. It must be your truth, not mine. But I shall save, and save, and save, and pay it back to clear my own soul. For I - I have lived on that three thousand dollars too," she said with a sick look. She put the crystal back into its bowl. "It will take a long time," she said, faintly.

She stopped, trembling from the effort of so many calm words. Thomas Fleming, looking doggedly at the floor, said: "I suppose you'll get a separation?"

"Get a separation?" she glanced at him for an instant. "Why, we are separated," she said. "We can't be any more separated than we are. I suppose we have never been together. But I won't leave you, if that is what you mean."

"You'll stay with me?" he burst out; "I thought you despised me!" "Why, no," she said slowly; "I don't think I despise you. I don't think I do. But of course She looked away, helplessly. "Of course,

I have no respect for you."
"Well," he said, "I'm sorry.

But there's nothing I can do about it." Amy turned, listlessly, as if to go upstairs again; but he caught her dress. "You really mean you won't leave me?"

"No, I won't leave you."

"Of course," he said, roughly, "you don't love me; but His voice faltered into a sort of question.

She turned sharply from him, hiding her face in her arm, moving blindly, with one hand stretched out to feel her way, toward the door. "Oh," she said; "oh I'm afraid I —”

-

And at that he broke- Poor, weak Love, poor Love that would have denied itself for very shame; Love brought him to his knees; his arms around her waist, his head against her breast, his tears on her hand. "Amy! I will do it. I will give it back. Oh, Amy, Amy —”

LOVERS IN HEAVEN

BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE (1846

I

N earth we had been perplexed and separated.

O we

I do not mean that we had been separated by earthly spaces. We had dwelt together, kissed, and loved yes, assuredly we had loved; yet were there obstacles, and our hands, reaching toward one another, had not fully met. The life of the body often misleads that of the soul, being affected by traditions, distrusts, prejudices, and chiefly by ignorances, and the illusion that we must take care of ourselves. These inveigle the life of the body, and by degrees divorce it from the life of the soul, which becomes secluded, and is seen in occasional glimpses only, which we then call dreams of fancy. For it is the wisdom of divine things thus to put on garments of incredibility.

The chief peril to which man is exposed is that of profanation of what is holy, from which he is shielded by shutting him up in the circle of his senses, and restricting him to the shallows of his reason. Within that circle, and in those shallows, he acquires what he believes is wisdom, pursues what he names ambitions, suffers what he fancies are pain and sorrow, wreaks what he intends for revenges, commits what he calls sins, indulges what he mistakes for love, and, in a word, lives what it is given him to imagine is human life. Yet in all that span of existence there is but a handful of hours when he truly lives the life that is his own and not a pretense, an evasion, or an error; and those few hours appear to him - save at the instant of their revelation as hallucinations. Nevertheless they are the porticos and pillars, halls and gardens, sun and stars of his heaven; which he pragmatically and complacently puts away from him, and turns himself to what seems to him his heaven, but is his hell. Truly, this is a pity and a loss!

Yet, compared with the ruin which profanation would work on him, it is salvation; and in no other way may he escape profanation. Profanation is grievous because it is committed with the connivance of the soul; and, inasmuch as the immortal soul holds seeds of infinity, that which it does cannot be changed or brought within the mercy of time's oblivion. But profanation is rare; for, in the moment when man contemplates it, the gates between him and his soul are closed, and neither can he penetrate them from without, nor can the soul from within pass them, till all be fulfilled. Moreover, the deeds of man are valid only when in harmony with

From The Century Magazine, December, 1905; copyright, 1905, by the Century Co. Republished as a volume by the New Church Board of Publication (1906). Republished by the author's permission.

the destiny of man, which deeds of evil can never be. For evil separates and is in discord, and good and truth only unite and are in tune.

Now, most of us have been prone to profanations; therefore are we betimes expelled from the Eden of our souls, and the way thereto is guarded thenceforth by the flaming sword; whence arise the perplexities and aberrations from which I, and she also in her degree, had suffered. But by dint of these thorns, darknesses, and insanities does the body do its office for man, till he be reconciled; it is offered up a sacrifice for the soul's security, as was the body of Him whose name is hallowed. But in time to come it shall be, as was His, transfigured, and there shall be no more death; death being not that symbol which is physical dissolution, but the divergence of the body from the path of the soul.

II

But my beloved and I were now in heaven, and in our place there. The desire of true love is not fulfilled on earth, no man or woman being strong enough to endure it. Yet, since love only is incompatible with the limitations of earth, love only has kept alive there the longing for heaven. The inmost delights of love on earth do but render more sensible the barriers which earth interposes between love and its goal. The lips of his beloved rob the lover of her kiss; her warm bosom and ardent arms withhold him from her embrace; the light that he drinks from her eyes does but tantalize his immortal thirst; the words she speaks are but stammering parodies of the poignancy she means. All true lovers say they are in love with death meaning with that life from which death is removed. Love on earth is gagged, blindfolded, fettered, and misdoubted; yet is he our sole redeemer to the heights that are our home. By the chains that bind him our flesh is galled; we are suffocated in the strangling of his breath; and by his struggles to be free are we scourged to our own deliverance.

Why do we supremely desire that which we have never known, and can never, even in heaven, fully know? Other things we overtake or pass; but Love leads us forever, and Love therefore alone is life. He gives us the power and the motive wherewith we pursue him, and the more our power and will to pursue him increase, the more divine become his unconquerable summits. The clearer our eyes to recognize his perfection, the more does that perfection outstrip our following of him.

The difference between love on earth and love in heaven is not to be conveyed in words; but in tranquil and pure moods it may, even on earth, be apprehended by the sight of the spirit. Love in heaven has realized all that earthly love aspires to; and from that goal its progress begins, never to cease. The sky toward which it yearned in the world has become the ground on which it stands here; but now another sky is above it. We forecast heaven as repose and peace, the fulfilling of the heart's desire, the immortal presence with us of beauty and happiness. But man is not so poorly content. We leave behind us on earth the obstacles of the body, and in heaven we labor not for bread, raiment, and shelter; hearts are not parted by space and time; we deceive not, strive not one against the

other, scheme not to outdo others for the gain of our own name and fame. Yet in heaven are labor, emulation, ambition, love's holy fear, and humility deeper than hell is deep below the heavens. Tears we have also, and awe of that want which only the divine fulness can supply. There are moods in which our sun sinks and twilight broods over the hills and vales of paradise. Nor is there ever an hour when the lover feels himself worthy his beloved, or, gazing in her eyes, dares say, "Thou art mine!" For she is love's, and love is God, and from God is the life that gives being to the love wherewith the beloved is loved by her lover, and he by her.

No: in heaven are no gardens of idleness or beds of ease. In the divine forges the silver and golden hammers of the smiths ring from eternity to eternity, shaping the secret axles on which spin stars and planets, laying the shining track of the zodiac, forming the rafters of the temple of the Most High and not the less spinning the invisible threads that fasten the heart of mother to infant, which cannot be broken; or broadening forth the adamantine shield of charity, whose lovely splendor bridges the abyss between the dead and the quick. Here are wrought causes, and are sowed in your deserts, to make them blossom as the rose; and here are lit and kept aflame the uses which kindle men into angels, and brighten on angels' brows as the signet of the finger of the Lord.

III

When I found my beloved in heaven I laughed for joy.

In the face of a beloved woman on earth, in the moment when her lips meet the lips of her lover, there is revealed but to his eyes only — a beauty which is of heaven.

Such a divine moment, but made immortal, and beyond measure exalted and increasing, is heaven, and such are the basis and constancy of the heavenly life. This is our daily breath; but beyond this are things which (lest he perish of too much light and fire) the tongue of man may not utter, nor his ears receive.

Therefore, when in paradise I found my beloved, I laughed for joy. Often while still on earth had we affirmed to each other our faith that we would meet and know each other in heaven. Yet, from its hither side the grave seems deep and wide; and when my beloved had gone down thither before me, I had trembled with the terror of loneliness. Though the death of the body be but death's counterfeit, yet has that counterfeit power to freeze the marrow of the bones of the soul; and, gazing into the grave of my beloved, I had said, "Did we but dream?"-against which saying there is no other protection than the Lord. But he was nearer to me than my fear; and he put forth his hand and healed me.

IV

I will relate how I found my beloved in heaven.

The journey from this to the heavenly world is made in darkness, silence, and peace.

On his way the traveler is guided and guarded by the Lord alone, and the divine life fills and upholds him from zenith to nadir. Therefore has death a sacredness that can belong to the conscious life of neither man nor angel; then only may the Creator enter unveiled into the creature; because only in that hour are the senses of the creature holden, so that he cannot think, "I am I!"

The silence, the peace, and the darkness are not as are those things on earth.

Darkness on earth is when the waves of the ocean of light cease to break upon the shores of sight; but the darkness of death is because those shores have been removed, and the waves of the light which is not of earth flow on unimpeded.

Nor is the silence of death the extinction of sound; but the very symphony of the Lord unrolls its music in a temple chastened of echoes.

And the peace of death is not a pause from strife and effort; but it is the peace of him who from the beginning sees the end, and reconciles perfect action with perfect rest.

These things, which, during death, are accomplished in him, the creature knows not; and nevertheless he knows them. For the glory of their sojourn in him is inscribed on the secret places of his soul, and are remembered as the unimaginable pageant of a holy dream.

My hour passed; and then through my closed eyelids came, first, a sense of dawn. Dim was it, subdued, and sweet; a pearly obscurity, slowly blooming onward to spiritual intelligence. In it appeared no form or motion, but only the promise of life to come. Fain was I (could I then have chosen) that it continue forever, for never had I known such content; yet was this but the earliest glimmering of heaven's delight. This dawn is caused, not by the nearer approach of the Lord, but by his withdrawal to the inmost shrine of that mystery which, in the conscious life of man and angel, is his abiding-place and the veil of his splendor.

As I lay quiescent, but pregnant of immortal energies, golden melodies were distilled into my ears, warbling like the notes of secluded birds, ard chiming like bells that welcome to the home of his childhood one who has tarried long in exile. But I knew them for voices of friends that loved me, in whose love dwelt innocence such as to soften the heart to tears, yet exalted with fragrance of angelic wisdom. It was the utterance, not of thought, but of that wherefrom thought is born the language which describes not, but creates.

The heavenly senses, each in its perfection, flow one into the other, giving to each the completeness of all, which is perception. So, my eyes, now opened, beheld the angels' speech. I saw as it were a wilderness, in which walked divine children, bearers of good tidings; and as they traversed the wilderness from end to end, it became a garden, wholesome with trees and fair with flowers; which garden was myself, and the angels' words. the children.

So I arose, being now a spirit; and that which I was made the place in which I stood; though save for the Lord-I and my place were