Whether that angel we have seen shall, for my need and comfort, and for your own longing, hold back his greatest gift, and leave you mine in the earthly ways we know and love, or shall hasten to make the heavenly surprise, the issue in either event will be a home-coming; if here, yet already the deeper secret will have been in part disclosed; and if beyond, that secret, fully known, will not betray the fondest hope of loving hearts.  Love never denied Death, and Death will not deny Love.

From ‘A Study of Death,’ copyright 1895, by Harper and Brothers

THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT

The Dove flies, and the Serpent creeps.  Yet is the Dove fond, while the Serpent is the emblem of wisdom.  Both were in Eden:  the cooing, fluttering, winged spirit, loving to descend, companion-like, brooding, following; and the creeping thing which had glided into the sunshine of Paradise from the cold bosoms of those nurses of an older world—­Pain, and Darkness, and Death—­himself forgetting these in the warmth and green life of the Garden.  And our first parents knew naught of these as yet unutterable mysteries, any more than they knew that their roses bloomed over a tomb:  so that when all animate creatures came to Adam to be named, the meaning of this living allegory which passed before him was in great part hidden, and he saw no sharp line dividing the firmament below from the firmament above; rather he leaned toward the ground, as one does in a garden, seeing how quickly it was fashioned into the climbing trees, into the clean flowers, and into his own shapely frame.  It was upon the ground he lay when that deep sleep fell upon him from which he woke to find his mate, lithe as the serpent, yet with the fluttering heart of the dove.

As the Dove, though winged for flight, ever descended, so the Serpent, though unable wholly to leave the ground, tried ever to lift himself therefrom, as if to escape some ancient bond.  The cool nights revived and nourished his memories of an older time, wherein lay his subtile wisdom, but day by day his aspiring crest grew brighter.  The life of Eden became for him oblivion, the light of the sun obscuring and confounding his reminiscence, even as for Adam and Eve this life was Illusion, the visible disguising the invisible, and pleasure veiling pain.

In Adam the culture of the ground maintained humility.  He was held, moreover, in lowly content by the charm of the woman, who was to him like the earth grown human; and since she was the daughter of Sleep, her love seemed to him restful as the night.  Her raven locks were like the mantle of darkness, and her voice had the laughter of streams that lapsed into unseen depths.

But Eve had something of the Serpent’s unrest, as if she too had come from the Under-world, which she would fain forget, seeking liberation, urged by desire as deep as the abyss she had left behind her, and nourished from roots unfathomably hidden—­the roots of the Tree of Life.  She thus came to have conversation with the Serpent.