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philadelphia, pa., 
 
 Post Office, 
 
 PUBLISHED BY H. B. COCHRANE, 
 
 July, 1883. 
 
 Entei erl according to Act of Congress in the year 1883, by II. B. Cochrane, in the 
 ollice of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. AH rights reserved. 
 
 John D. Avil &* Cr.. Printers & Publishers, 3Q41 6° j Market St. 
 
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 BY 
 
 -*6E9R6E EMOT, 
 
 38- 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 -SILAS MARNER," "MIDDLEMARCH," 
 "DANIEL DERONDA. "Etc., 
 
 
 TRANSCRIBED BY 
 
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PREFACE. 
 
 I give to the world this message from the great de- 
 parted writer/ George Eliot. 
 
 I have no apology to offer as to the manner in which 
 it comes ; I have no explanation to make in regard to a 
 power of which, though personally I have been always 
 more or less cognizant, any language by which I might 
 seek to make myself understood would to the majority 
 be as unintelligible and as unmeaning as Choctaw. 
 
 Spirituality has hitherto been an abortion, an animal 
 or a phantom, with the brain- of an idiot, but the mighty 
 hunger needs of the world have been incessantly de- 
 veloping this brain, until the time is coming/ and is now 
 at the door, when it will speak from the intellect, not the 
 low, guttural beast muttering, fear-choked utterance ; not 
 the high-pitched, squeaking, ghostly, far-aw T ay gibberish, 
 which you have heard as its predominating notes, but 
 the voice of its own soul and mind replying clearly, 
 reasonably, consistently to your own eternal questionings ; 
 then you will " awake, and remember and understand." 
 
 As for our writer, she was the dissector of human mo- 
 tives, and in that department the kindest, yet keenest, 
 most unflinching surgeon that ever handled a knife. She 
 cut to the bone, and through it if necessary ; apparently 
 because she must, and from pure love of her art. Her 
 work is not ended ; hardly interrupted : she was at 
 school here ; she has graduated with highest honors, and 
 will practice hereafter in the universal hospital of dis- 
 eased and suffering humanity. 
 
4 Preface. 
 
 Her field is enlarged somewhat commensurate with 
 the power of her soul, which far surpasses any idea 
 hitherto entertained of her, even by those who admired 
 her most and loved her best. As an artiste she is even 
 ideally perfect; her constructive power is beyond, far 
 beyond, that of any intelligence which ever came within 
 the range of my consciousness. Nothing escapes her; 
 the fragments thrown away and rejected of men, are by 
 her carefully treasured and fashioned into things of im- 
 mortal beauty. 
 
 As she awakens into the wide freedom of her new 
 existence, not one brain alone, but many, will be needed 
 to transmit the perfect, rounded ripeness of her thought. 
 
 And many a sensitive struggling now with an un- 
 shapen, unclad idea, bearing its burden about with him, 
 while a poverty-stricken world waits for its utterance, 
 will by her wondrous influence awake to find it hewn 
 and shapen into letters of living light — all the meaning 
 of its mute marble carved into fairest proportions of 
 grace and symmetry. 
 
 Blessings on her evermore, for daring to unveil the 
 truth that was in her, without mutilation, without ac- 
 companying nauseous covering of tradition, and common- 
 place, conventional falsehood ! 
 
 O world, you have a reputation, a richly deserved 
 one, for burning and scourging, and starving and freez- 
 ing your truth-tellers while living, and laying them with 
 fulsome praises in your Westminster Abbeys when dead; 
 but she wrapped her mist-grey fiction cloak about her, 
 and heeded you not; living or dying she heeded you 
 not ; and she heeds you not, now. 
 
 AMARANTH. 
 
 Philad'a, Pa., 7th December, 1881. 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 Go, whispered, hinted truths, 
 
 Go, truths with thunder spoken, 
 
 Go bud and bloom and weed. 
 
 Go, wheat and tares 
 
 Gathered so hastily with trembling hands, 
 
 "Drift " indeed, with many a pearl shining 7 mid the sands, 
 
 Go to hearts now broken. 
 
 Go swift as light, and strong as love, 
 Bear the tokens on 
 
 Wet with dewdrops from above, 
 Heaven's in memoriam. 
 
 Tell them you left us with but half a life. 
 
 Beaching, stretching back our empty hands, 
 Across the wide, wild desert waste, 
 
 Across the tear-wet, falsehood -darkened, unknown lands, 
 Tell them we wait and watch, and hope and pray, 
 Tell them we send with every passing day* 
 Our thought, our hope, our fear. 
 Tell them to lift their heads, 
 
 Tell them to list and they shall hear, 
 
 Tell them we are not dead. 
 
 Tell them that sorrow's bier 
 
 Is the birth-bed of Life Eternal, 
 
 The moving car of love supernal, 
 
 To the wide blest spheres of light, 
 
 To the glory- crowned, dav-merged night. 
 * # \ * 4 * * 
 
Dedication. 
 
 Just now we pause to thank him here, 
 Thank him, the king Iconoclast, 
 The mighty clearer of the ways to be, 
 The fearless image breaker of the earth, 
 Who makes the pathway for the children's feet, 
 By scattering the hobgoblins ages old. 
 Hear his last utterance o'er a broken' bud, 
 Tender as morning zephyr, yet repressed, 
 Repressed and sad ; sad, looking cross the gulf 
 Which has existence only in the minds of men. 
 
 " It may^be death gives all there is of worth to life," 
 
 O Ingersoll, there is no death, no end 
 
 Nor beginning, and such hearts as thine 
 
 O'erleap all barriers, and are wiser than thy thought ; 
 
 Claiming all space for home, all time for love, 
 
 All souls for kinship, on both sides the grave. 
 
 Go on, O King Iconoclast, the builder follows close ; 
 
 Thy footsteps meet ere long, 
 
 Even now thou hast caught a cadence of his strain 
 
 Trembling^through the resonance of thy forest-felling strokes, 
 
 Sweet as songs of home and baby's lullabies, 
 
 Whispering of safety, shelter, rest ; of 
 
 The great wide lost universe, roofed in with love abounding, 
 
 And all her orphaned children mothered and comforted. 
 
 ALICE CARY. 
 
DRIFT, 
 
 FEOM THE 
 
 SHORE OF THE HEREAFTER. 
 
 Dated 25th December, 1880. 
 It is not as I thought it must be; if it be at all. 
 All was cold and dark when I went away from earth, 
 
 and at a region cold and dark I seem to have arrived. 
 
 ******** 
 
 But at last, at last, I hope, though I seem a fragment, an 
 intellectual abstraction set down bodiless, without environ- 
 ment, helpless, without connecting links by which I may 
 communicate with my kind. 
 
 Yet I find trembling within me, like a faint flickering 
 light in a desert of emptiness and sadness, an unalterable 
 purpose, the purpose which animated my earth life to 
 probe every mystery which presses its burden upon my 
 consciousness, and as fast as I understand even its smallest 
 significance to impart that significance to my fellow- 
 creatures. 
 
 Formerly I put my own hopes and fears, my own out- 
 reachings into the mouths of the characters which those 
 outreachings created ; now the pressure is too great, the 
 necessity for expression is too urgent for such a subter- 
 fuge. 
 
 I must reach and commune with my race, or a misery 
 worse than madness will result. 
 
 I know nothing of ways and means here. I am par- 
 alyzed except my brain, and that works on, works on. 
 
8 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 But I cling to this woman, she is the most real thing I 
 have found — this woman who transcribes these words, 
 She seems to belong alike to both worlds, if world this is, 
 where all is formless and buried in phantom mist ; she 
 seems to hear our voices, and to feel our pains while yet 
 she is in the mortal body. I do not know, but I will 
 know, I will cling to her until I have found myself, and 
 that other self for whom I shut me away from the other 
 world, unheeding alike its scorn, and its praise. 
 
 Something is wrong. Let me find myself, all of my- 
 self, and I will tell you all. Am I too, to be shut away 
 from the full light, from the heart smiles of this world, 
 and receive only its cold far-away adulation laid upon 
 the altar of my intellect, while they gather their skirts 
 away from the woman, and keep her story from the spot- 
 less maiden under the sheltering roof-tree ? Oh ! I am 
 weak, and these words are weak, I seldom had this mood 
 before, it is all unworthy ; but bear with me, for I know 
 that I shall know. Then as now it is the eternal truth 
 which I seek ; all else was, is nothing. * * * But I 
 am so dependent; of myself I cannot move. 
 
 My cries for help and pity rang through space and re- 
 turned to me bearing no answer, for, as it seemed to me, 
 an eternity, though it was only hours, or at most, days 
 after all. There are laws and laws, finer, and finer as 
 we peer into their network. 
 
 Something has been left undone — there is no warmth 
 here, but that of human sympathy and — I lose myself. 
 Even these Avords are not mine, they take whatever color 
 they will because my individuality so trembles in a fathom- 
 less abyss of strange new chaos, that it cannot impress 
 itself. I am ashamed of them, they are so poor and 
 weak as compared to my needs ; and give them only as 
 he who who is lost in a trackless waste, cries with what- 
 ever cry he may that perad venture some note may be 
 heard and responded to. * * . * * I drift 
 
 backward and forward with the tide, like a ship almost 
 in sight of harbor, yet driven by stress of storm far out 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 9 
 
 to sea. Now I catch a glimpse of a home in this far-off 
 land, bathed in broader, sweeter light than ever fancy 
 dreamed ; again I see beneath me jagged rocks, yawning 
 chasms, awful precipices, at which my soul shudders in 
 a fear, compared to which all the fear that I ever felt be- 
 fore was as a babe to a giant. 
 
 But I must learn for myself : none can teach me. Here 
 as there I must learn for myself the way from my own 
 soul to that of others. I cannot travel in the paths they 
 make. 
 
 Many have passed me close with pitying looks, but in 
 thought they are too far away, I could not put out a hand 
 to them. 
 
 Better to perish in the abyss of my own want, than to 
 receive such help as shall not uplift, and strengthen my 
 power to help myself. * * * * I will 
 cling fast, fast to this hand though it lead me hungry, 
 naked and athirst through all the tortuous paths of 
 the demon-haunted land of despair. 
 
 But now down to my lone submerged isolation drops 
 a voice, saying : " No, it shall lead you into the blossom- 
 ing heart of hope and aspiration. Together you shall 
 learn the secret of smile and tear, of flower and dew/ of 
 storm and earthquake ; of the glory and the shame of 
 the past, the present, and the to come ; together you shall 
 plant your pilgrim feet within the fragrant vestibule of 
 the morning ; together you shall listen with hushed con- 
 tent to the voice of the shining of the evening, and carry 
 their blessed meaning to the souls all aweary and dying 
 with sin, with shame, with sorrow, but above and beyond 
 all with Ignorance." 
 
 Dated July, 1881. 
 As in childhood there comes a time when we must 
 take a larger view of the horizon in order to find room 
 for the wider thought, so in manhood and womanhood 
 has come a time when we must take a larger view of 
 the universe in order to find room for our souls. 
 
10 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 The little patch of sky above our heads, which to us 
 contained the all of space and immensity, is not a speck 
 of the immeasurable height towards w T hich our awakened 
 soul reaches and stretches its wings in restless anxiety. 
 
 Claiming kindred there, claiming hundreds of thought 
 and dream children, sent out into its unknown depths to 
 find their sisters in reality. But over me, as I speak, 
 comes the brooding idea that all things are real, that the 
 smallest, imperfect, shadowy-winged thought ripple, 
 which we call imaginary, has its root in realities, in eter- 
 nal truth, and that with such sun and air as are suited 
 to its growth, it will, in time, mature to perfection. 
 
 I do not know whether I shall be intelligible, and cer- 
 tainly not characteristic, for I am lost in an ecstasy of a 
 half delirious sense of freedom, when I approach this 
 w T oman, who, I perceive, is here named Amaranth, and 
 whom I shall so designate hereafter. I say that her 
 atmosphere is so rarefied by the diffusion of this quality 
 called imagination, that it lifts me from my feet and 
 makes me wild to fly to those regions which are its home. 
 
 But bear with me if my restless movements seem to 
 you unmeaning; bear with me until I have obtained 
 strength of expression, within the extensions and limi- 
 tations of this new partnership of forces ; until I have 
 obtained some knowledge as to how I came, where I am, 
 and whither I would go. 
 
 At present I have only a half conscious existence, and 
 this, not through my own connection with life-giving 
 qualities, as I find, alas! when anything intervenes to 
 cut me off from the channel through which consciousness 
 seems to come ! 
 
 But every one who sends a true thought toward me 
 can help me ; every impulse wave wafted to the shore of 
 my being is the breath of life for which I perish. 
 
 While on earth I need not say that I was intensely 
 realistic. I was that by nature, and all my surroundings 
 tended to confirm me in that process of thought. I 
 walked the highways, but did not climb the heights. I 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 11 
 
 used my feet; my wings were folded useless aud un- 
 fledged at my side. I never saw, felt nor acknowledged 
 any immediate use for them, consequently when I left 
 the atmosphere of earth I was utterly unprepared to 
 breathe any other. 
 
 But you say. Why send these words to us of the 
 earth ? It is all dark and vague speculation, nothing 
 can of certainty be known to us here of those who lay 
 aside the mortal garment and pass beyond our mortal 
 vision. 
 
 Oh ! speak it not. Oh ! say not so. It brings a pain 
 worse than death, a stab more cruel than the grave, 
 when you turn away from those who reach back to you 
 such loving, yearning hands, and cry, help us to solve 
 this mystery ! help us with all your power to rend this 
 veil of gloom which envelopes your world and ours in 
 darkness ! 
 
 The time has come when not only outraged love cries 
 for this, from the depths of her broken heart, but knowl- 
 edge, crippled, maimed, insulted by those who attempt 
 to crowd her into the suffocating limits of such time 
 and space as are known to you, she shakes her giant 
 limbs and speaks with thunder, " Loose me and let me 
 go to find that which alone can complete and make fit- 
 ting what I have shown you. Take down your massive 
 iron doors, bigotry : away with your whip of scorpions, 
 intolerance ! Put out your false jack o ? the lantern lights, 
 superstition ! Hide your jackal sneer, O howling fool 
 of false knowledge, and cease your boding owl cry, dis- 
 turbing my children, who search the stars at midnight ! 
 Crawl away to thy winter den, slimy serpent of slander ! 
 Out, out of my way, forever, all of ye, that I may find 
 and deliver to my children that truth which is wide 
 enough and high enough, and deep enough, to remove 
 them from their dungeons into the free air that is inter- 
 changed by the universes ; that I may lift them from 
 their beast life, which snarls, which snaps, which gnaws, 
 which devours, into the higher regions of themselves, 
 
12 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 where are melody and harmony sweeter than the dreams 
 of the seraphim." 
 
 Dated Oct., 1881. 
 
 When I look about me in my present state, I am 
 filled with yearning anguish to know how I may reach 
 those left behind. For the problems which vex your 
 world can never be solved until the unknown quantities 
 of this one are made factors therein. 
 
 The outside of things is a blank wall, near by, hard 
 and unresponsive, and against this wall science has di- 
 rected her vision until she is in her methods fit only for 
 short sight. This will do to examine the pores of the 
 skin, but meantime the great body of humanity is per- 
 ishing and going mad for need of true knowledge. We 
 must first recognize the existence of the spiritual in all 
 things, since its existence is sufficiently obvious ; and this 
 will lead us to the next stage of growth, into regions 
 hitherto unknown, where we shall find bread for the 
 hungry, clothes for the naked, and facts for the philo- 
 sopher, for which in those hitherto known he might 
 have groped an eternity in vain. 
 
 In your world one has said, since her exit, that George 
 Eliot mourned over the great waste of force in the world. 
 There is no waste, as I have since learned, but there is 
 transfer, and transfer from those, who do not use it 
 wisely, bringing pain and agonized waiting; whereas, if 
 they were rightly taught, it might be air, water and sun- 
 light to all the pale and drooping of their blossoms of 
 hope to-day, to-day, the one in which we all beg to be 
 blest. 
 
 If you ask me where am I who speak to you, to-day? 
 I answer, I am where I am waiting for air, sunlight 
 and opportunity from each one of you. With the ex- 
 pansion of my vision I view the incompleteness of my 
 life. Something I now receive from you by the laws of 
 our being, but there are laws within laws which dawn 
 upon our consciousness as that consciousness expands to 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 13 
 
 the regions of their existence ; and in the terribly search- 
 ing light of these laws I see my beggared condition. 
 
 I see that my life is hidden within you, all to whom 
 I write, everybody, everywhere, and withheld from me 
 because you do not know of my existence, because you 
 think me dead, because the eyes and brain which were 
 given you to look through eternity and there recognize 
 and claim your kindred, you have shortened and nar- 
 rowed to those of a mole gazing ever into the dark, 
 earthly mold, as your father, mother, brother, sister, and 
 last earthly home. 
 
 Because you have been taught to consider your life 
 as individual, independent, isolated, whereas it is bound 
 indissolubly to every other life which has existed, or 
 shall exist forevermore. 
 
 I do not undervalue earthly duties nor earthly care. 
 
 In proportion only as they are well and faithfully 
 performed, can rest come with the night of so-called 
 death ; and there is here no sadder sight than the enthu- 
 siast who has laid away unused, all his treasures in 
 heaven or elsewhere, for he finds them not her£, nor any- 
 where. 
 
 Could I once more return to you, I would hold to 
 life and its daily realities with firmer grasp than ever 
 before. 
 
 I would wrench from each reluctant hour everything 
 and all things that were mine. I would demand of love 
 a deeper meaning, of friendship a truer trust, of know- 
 ledge a profounder speech. I would cull from every 
 passing moment it's tiniest flower of grace. 
 
 My years seem to me to have been so coarsely, so 
 vapidly hurried over, that they are all filled and Aveighted 
 with misused and unusued opportunities that follow me 
 ever here with sad reproaching glance backward, and I 
 may neither give them decent burial out of sight, nor gather 
 them into a garland with which to beautify my present 
 abode. It is because of the grandeur of the earth life that I 
 
14 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 would have the board marked " Dangerous ! " taken down, 
 between it and this. 
 
 What would you think of a father who knew his child 
 must at maturity cross the Atlantic, yet who frightened 
 from his head every idea of Europe with a cry of " ghost/' 
 "goblin," "hell-fire," or "everlasting punishment;" 
 who frowned upon his innocent speculations in regard 
 to the matter, with the assurance that it was all unprofit- 
 able, foolhardy, and he could not possibly know anything 
 about it. Had the tyro in mathematics been treated the 
 same way, we had never had a multiplication table. Had 
 the embyro navigator been terrified with the sneering or 
 thundrous cry of " hell-fire," or "ghosts," the lands be- 
 yond the sea had been peopled by those to us as unknown 
 and of identity as shadowy as is ours, of the "other 
 side." 
 
 For it is a question just as simple as this, a question 
 of brain development. The Australian bushman knows 
 no to-morrow, no past, no future, and nothing of other 
 continents, nor other people, nor can he comprehend 
 their existence when the fact is interpreted to him by 
 such signs as may be able to reach his coarse conscious- 
 ness, because he has not sufficient of the finer nervous 
 system and corresponding brain development, to recog- 
 nize them. The man of deficient finer spiritual develop- 
 ment, or of perverted ideas in regard to spiritual things, 
 cannot understand the possibility of the existence, 
 much less the location or the habits of thought, 
 of those who are neither dead nor gone away, nor 
 sleeping, but who, by simply getting rid of the old 
 husk of the old system of nerves, and the old brain 
 tissue, have commenced to think, to know, to feel, to 
 recognize, to lay hold of more intricate realities with new 
 ones. 
 
 It is just as simple as this, a question of brain develop- 
 ment. 
 
 Election, predestination, free-will, which racked the 
 mighty mental thews and sinews of our forefathers, and 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 15 
 
 kept them always butting their massive heads against • 
 each other and against all created things, — Pantheism, 
 Spiritualism, Agnosticism, Materialism — all the smat- 
 terers and chatterers which make a Babel of to-day, and 
 confound the real work-men with their din, will be an- 
 swered by dear, sweet, placid common sense, when she 
 dares to sit down in her own clean home-spun gown, 
 smooth out its wrinkles and look with steadfast eyes 
 straight through that iron gate called death, — that 
 gate for which the father of liars has been forging rivets 
 and bolts ever since morning hung over chaos, or it would 
 have crumbled to atoms ages ago. 
 
 We look far away for what is by our side. We forget 
 the type which is forever the type of all things else. We 
 sit crouching and muttering on the lowest seats of hell, 
 and say heaven is not, when we have only to lift our 
 vision to behold it, our aspirations and reach it, and our 
 being into purer life to dwell therein. 
 
 Give an artist a flower and he is in heaven. Why? 
 Because his finer self recognizes its beauty as akin to all 
 the beauty of the universe, and with the open sesame 
 which it brings him, he enters the realms of beauty and is 
 at rest. 
 
 But give the flower to the sensualist, it is a meaningless 
 thing to him. No delicately strung nerves thrill to rapture 
 at its colors, sister to those of the rainbow ; at its shape, 
 in harmony with all the laws of proportion ; it is to him 
 a nonentity, and so is a future life — so is all else to which 
 there is within himself no responsive atom. 
 
 I, who write these words, would fain break up your 
 falllow ground with one master stroke of language, which 
 should cleave like the forked thunderbolt and make ready 
 at once the soil of your minds for the sowing; but I find 
 not within me nor without me, the material with which 
 to accomplish this. I must listen to the rippling of my 
 own speech with its sad undertone, as a brook may listen 
 to its own wavelets upon the pebbles, hoping by pursuing 
 its little way faithfully, thus to reach the sea. 
 
16 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 When I realized that I had awakened into another 
 state of being, I was appalled at the absence of ways and 
 means. I saw myself a fragment, and without methods 
 of communication with other fragments. But by grasp- 
 ing with the force and fervor of a drowning man catching 
 at a straw, such filaments of connecting links as seemed 
 within my reach, I have by use enlarged and strengthened 
 them, so that I am not now a Robinson Crusoe of spirit- 
 land, as I so acutely felt myself at first. And let me say 
 here that this is the only way given under heaven, among 
 men, whereby we ever reach any place, make any head- 
 way towards heights or depths, toward the light of truth 
 or the darkness of falsehood; by using such material as 
 we find within us, and fastening it to such as we may find 
 without. And our feeblest movement in this direction is 
 a help or a hindrance to every other creature. 
 
 It is not my purpose to give you the general aspect of 
 this undiscovered country, but to attempt to explain to 
 you some of its laws, and the relation which they bear to 
 your own, — a relation closer and more intricate than has 
 ever been thought or dreamed. 
 
 There is, to-day, in your world and ours, a develop- 
 ment of mind which is orphaned and out of doors, un- 
 fed, unclad, and in anarchy. 
 
 Wandering tribes of thought, who have named them- 
 selves all manner of names familiar to you, but to which 
 the generic term of liberals may apply. These are all 
 looking for a Messiah, either without or within, as natu 
 rally, mayhap as unconsiously, as you look out every 
 morning to see the sunlight. Some are looking for a rest 
 which shall be eternal, for a sleep which shall know no 
 troubled nor happy awaking. To these I wish to speak, 
 and to all who have ears to hear. 
 
 One answer to the class last mentioned would be, that 
 I, who left your shores last winter, am here talking to you 
 by the power of a mortal, who is in almost perfect har- 
 mony with myself, insomuch that we are both enriched 
 and neither defrauded by this partnership of qualities, and 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 17 
 
 which I may here assure you was in operation while I 
 yet breathed and lived among you, or it could not be to- 
 day. But this would not satisfy the intellect, even if ac- 
 cepted as a fact. The intellect asks not a fact standing 
 alone, but one that leans upon and is supported by every 
 other fact. 
 
 The intellect asks for causes, processes, results. 
 
 We teach a child the alphabet, because it is incapable 
 of receiving Greek. The children of earth have not been 
 taught even the true alphabet of spiritual knowledge, but 
 have been obliged to appease the craving manhood hun- 
 ger of a quality which exists as one of the strongest 
 forces of their being, with such a misleading story as the 
 story of the cross, a story which has made black-hearted 
 criminals by the million; tiger hearts who have been 
 assured that innocence had bled for them, and they had 
 but to believe it to be safe forevermore. 
 
 No wonder that this story, and the story of the Sa- 
 hara of dead materialism, and the story of the goblin- 
 haunted quagmire land of spiritualism, all pall upon the 
 taste not utterly depraved, and leave it with an insa- 
 tiate hunger for knowledge in regard to its own destiny, 
 its own origin, its own work, its own inheritance. 
 
 "Is all nature to be fed and satisfied?" it cries, "while 
 I am left the sport of fools, and designing devils, the 
 prey of my own imagination, forever beholding the 
 shrined and deified of one age becoming the foot-balls of 
 the next." And this answer comes to thine own soul: 
 Sweep away all the rubbish together. Clear out the old 
 infested dungeons, dingy with the dust and cobwebs of 
 the ages, haunted with the owls and bats and cockroaches 
 of midnight ignorance, drive out together the man-made 
 ghosts and the man-made scarecrow Gods, the man-made 
 hells, and the man-made redeemers, for within thyself 
 alone dwells all these shadows which a rude and barbar- 
 ous conception has made realities. 
 
 Sweep them away from the clean new earth and enter 
 there thyself, and thy sister and thy brother, so long de- 
 
18 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 frauded, so long blinded— a servant of servants, a slave 
 of slaves, a tyrant of tyrants unto thyself and him. 
 
 There is no death ; there is no grave ; there is no re- 
 deemer ; there is no judge ; there is no man man-built, man- 
 conceived God ; there is no devil ; there are no mortals, 
 nor spirits, except as you have misnamed the atoms of 
 your own bodies, and their intricate, inextricable, eternal 
 workings with all the other atoms of all the universes. 
 
 I will be sufficiently explicit by and by, but you must 
 first be freed. I myself,. am too poor to speak to you, 
 for only one grain of attention while ninety and nine 
 others are wool-gathering after the absent " Gods " and 
 "spirits," and "matter," which are all only God dis- 
 throned and dragged over the earth crippled but living, 
 and with the same qualities, and capable of doing the 
 same mischief as their predecessors. Tyrants all with all 
 knowledge, all power, and no mercy — a hideous impos- 
 sible combination with which the children of men have 
 been terrified until their black shadow broods like a night- 
 mare over every living thing. 
 
 Bring to me thyself, and in proportion as you may be 
 able truly to do this, can I bring to you myself; and we 
 will sit down, you in your state of being, I in mine, and 
 hold sweet converse which shall tend to make every 
 breath a consecration, every thought a gem for the set- 
 ting of the eternal days, and every act a living, ripe 
 fruitage for the famishing of all worlds. * * 
 
 But you say if you do not believe in spiritualism, why 
 are you, a spirit, here in this manner ? 
 
 I might as well ask if you do not believe in material- 
 ism, why are you here in this manner ? 
 
 You are here because you are alive, and the fact that 
 you are here does not necessarily load you with all the 
 pernicious doctrines taught by every one in the mortal 
 form. 
 
 I am here because I am alive, and because I am as yet 
 far more nearly related to the earth than to any other 
 planet, therefore, to the earth I must return, though I 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 19 
 
 have lost the earthly form and have become invisible to 
 earthly eyes. But I protest against being held respon- 
 sible as a "spirit," for all that spirits have said, or have 
 been made to say, and I utterly protest against the mis- 
 leading distinction of the terms " spirit," and " matter," 
 and use them only because you have no other. 
 
 Every atom of matter has its spiritual life, every atom 
 of spirit has its material life, and the prevailing ideas 
 in regard to either seem to me essentially gross, essen- 
 tially attenuated, essentially erroneous. 
 
 Spirit power and spirit force are not necessarily more 
 potent than are other forces, and the moment any belief 
 merges into an " ism," farewell forever to the beauteous 
 face of truth. When we look into ourself for truth we 
 invariably find her. When we look into an organiza- 
 tion or an " ism " for truth, we find her in an. inner 
 dungeon with her eyes put out, her feet and hands in 
 irons, and all her enslavers spouting their own theories 
 at the top of their brazen voices. 
 
 I thought to sleep when I had laid down the mortal 
 body ; and this was not so much my own iclea as the 
 borrowed conclusion of another ; accepted to spare me 
 much mental effort upon the subject. 
 
 But I found myself, after, it seems, a very brief inter- 
 val, never so wide awake, never so lost, never so poverty- 
 stricken, never so introspective, and never so observant; 
 though all in the key minor. 
 
 And it was no controlling nor protecting spirit from 
 the spheres which threw the first plank to my dreary 
 uninhabited, wave- washed island ; it was the spiritual 
 power of my present interpreter, and co-worker, who 
 may have been my sister atom since the dawn of eter- 
 nity for aught I know; for look backward as far us I 
 may, I see no beginning ; look forward as far as I may, 
 I see no ending of our work together. 
 
 But I have no wish to take you either to beginnings 
 nor endings ; as far as possible I wish to keep within 
 sight of the present, and to find out where I am, what 
 
20 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 relations I sustain to earth, and what to spiritual life, 
 and to go in and out before you in the interest and at 
 the bidding only of sacred, eternal truth. 
 
 On the spiritual, or on this side of life, I see a horde 
 of spirit creatures, some ignorant and designing, some 
 knowing, wise and calculating, but all for a purpose more 
 or less selfish, using their power of psychology to take 
 possession of the souls and bodies of mortals who have 
 been rendered weak and negative by theological and other 
 false teachings, by disease, by vice, or by whatever con- 
 ditions may afflict and weaken mankind. Under these 
 conditions of possession, both the possessor and the possessed 
 sink to a degree of moral impotence impossible to de- 
 scribe. Intellect, the great pilot, the master helmsman 
 of the soul becomes a blank ; individuality is lost in ab- 
 ject submission to the tyrant of the spheres, whose au- 
 thority is accepted with more cringing servitude than 
 were ever the edicts of the Jewish Jehovah ; and, having 
 fallen to this level, a swarm of unclean vultures are at- 
 tracted and follow ever in their wake as sharks follow a 
 corpse. 
 
 I shrink from finishing the picture. No curse half so 
 great, half so degrading, half so soul and body destroy- 
 ing as the thing called " spirit control," ever came to the 
 deluded children of men. 
 
 You who have eyes to see may see the effect upon mor- 
 tals in the purblind, uncertain, shivering, quivering crea- 
 tures who go about among you and whom you may well 
 name " mediums," for they are neither themselves, nor 
 are they anything else, but a sluice through which may 
 pour as it lists all the uncleanness of all worlds. Every- 
 thing in nature throughout all life, from stratified rock 
 up to archangel, holds with all the power of its soul to 
 its own individuality ; everything except a " medium." 
 Individuality is the dynamic force of the universe. You 
 are great and powerful just in proportion as you are in- 
 dividualized. You are small and weak just in propor- 
 tion as you are diluted with the selfhood of another. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 21 
 
 But though the effect of mediumship upon mortals is 
 being felt and deplored, even among the most ardent 
 spiritualists, they cannot see the effect upon the spirit 
 perpetrators of this enormity. 
 
 It is enough to say that nature inevitably pays her 
 swift, sure debts ; and for this violation of her greatest 
 law she is more severe upon the slave driver than upon 
 the slave ; more inexorable with the tyrant than with his 
 ignorant victim ; more merciless with the serpent than 
 with the helpless creature which he holds in his fangs. 
 
 I spare you and myself from following them to their 
 saturnalian orgies when drunken with the blood of their 
 dupes they go home to their dens to compare notes and 
 count their spoils. The vilest low plague spot that earth 
 can hold is an inner room of paradise compared to their 
 place of abode, and the orthodox hell a sweet and puri- 
 fying place. 
 
 What the children of all the worlds need is intellectual 
 freedom, not a new riveting of the old chains by the 
 autocracy of the spheres, who are no wiser in their gen- 
 eration than are you in yours ; who need, most of them, 
 and indeed, who are obliged, most of them, to come 
 back and con over the unlearned lessons of earth, before 
 they can make a decent show in any society where they 
 are known. 
 
 What the children of all the worlds need is a pure and 
 holy morality, which is made their daily breath; not 
 the coiling of all the hissing serpents of sensualism by 
 the sacred hearthstone of home, with every forked tongue 
 proclaiming its sky-sent mission. 
 
 What the children of all the worlds need is to know 
 themselves, their own boundaries, their own limitations, 
 their own restrictions, their own resources, their own 
 extent, for they shall never in any land, in any state of 
 being, at eternity's dawning, or in its hoary age, find any 
 thing outside of themselves that they have not first 
 found within. 
 
22 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 But do not spirits wise and good control mortals for 
 great purposes, impossible otherwise to be accomplished, 
 and have we not the names of the great as authority for 
 this? some one asks. No wise and good spirit or 
 mortal, for it is done on both sides of life, (I have given 
 you but one aspect of this hydra-headed monster), no 
 creature ever stole or crushed, for any purpose, the individ- 
 uality of another, that he did not most severely burn his 
 own fingers by the operation, and whose repentance will 
 not be the dust and ashes of humiliation and abasement 
 according to the extent of his offence. And you must 
 remember that even the great have often great weak- 
 nesses, and that more than one Nero needed a pavement 
 of the bodies of the people for the triumphal procession 
 of his chariot. You must remember that many of those 
 whom you call great are great only in fatness, because 
 of the number of human beings they have swallowed 
 alrve ; and their old proclivities have not deserted them 
 by exchanging the garment of flesh for one a little 
 thinner — more adapted to the so-called summer land: 
 they are still great in " control/' 
 
 If you look to-day into your scandal book, you will 
 see that your great statesmen are not immaculate, that 
 they have various weaknesses, and I advise you not to 
 trust any of their post-mortem pretensions, for so far I 
 have not yet learned that in the journey across the Styx 
 we exchange any of our old vices for virtues. 
 
 As for the poets. Would you trust a Lord Byron to 
 regulate your domestic affairs, however sweetly he might 
 sing? Or would you commit to his keeping the nega- 
 tion of your innocent daughters ? Let him sing on at a 
 good, safe distance, say I ; let him sing on until his 
 own strain shall have bathed and made him clean. 
 
 Then, too, let me say, for I know, that many of the 
 George Washingtons, and Julius Caesars, and shrined 
 and sainted Marys and Jesus's who present themselves 
 in " spirit" guise, to marvel loving mortals, are as inno- 
 cent of any of the achievements of their distinguished 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 23 
 
 namesakes, as are those of similar cognomen who figure 
 frequently in the police reports. The market for the 
 marvelous is a large and growing one, and none so easy 
 to supply; and as for the spiritualists, so-called, they 
 are working away as industriously to materialize and 
 sensualize spiritual things, as ever rats and mice worked 
 to carry rubbish into a granary, in order to build there 
 their own nests. The great and pressing need is that 
 material things should be spiritualized, or that we should 
 deal with their essence and substance, which is spiritual, 
 rather than that we should endeavor to convert the 
 essence into the husk, which is material. 
 
 We have now upon the earth a sufficient number of 
 bodies with no souls inside them, or none large enough 
 to be discernible. In heaven's name let us materialize 
 no more until there is something in the shape of a soul 
 that will fit them. 
 
 We cannot move now without running against one of 
 these tenantless, materialized bodies, and yet they are 
 constantly putting the mediums asleep in dark corners, 
 in order to make more. Spare, oh, spare, us „any more 
 bodies. 
 
 In answer to a question, I would say that in transmit- 
 ting my thoughts to the present writer, I no more " con- 
 trol" her than if in earth-life I sat down by her side, 
 and we exchanged thoughts, which were subsequently 
 transmitted to paper. 
 
 Her own intellect, her own individual being, are as 
 alert upon these occasions as upon any other ; indeed, I 
 may say, that what is written, bears more her stamp 
 than my own. 
 
 As we proceed I hope to know what we are to each 
 other; it is so wonderful to me, so sweet, so true, so 
 pure, so soul-supporting, but I do not know. 
 
 We communicate by brain telegraphy precisely as all 
 thought is transmitted everywhere, but strong enough in 
 this case to be sentient, because of the sympathy, b r - 
 cause of the power of our magnetic connection. 
 
24 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 Psychology, or what you call control, is an absorption 
 of the force of the sensory nerves by the superior power 
 or superior craft of another, and leads inevitably and' 
 surely, as I have said, to utter degradation and abase- 
 ment of the entire being. 
 
 Brain telegraphy is simply the result of the magnetic 
 connection of two forces which are in harmony, and 
 is the method by which thought is transmitted in your 
 world, and from your world to ours, and vice versa. 
 
 In time, as your world becomes spiritualized, will the 
 universal spiritual world come into perceptible commu- 
 nication with your own, precisely in the same manner 
 in which mechanical telegraphy has brought the remote 
 parts of your earth into instant intercourse. 
 
 The earthly telegraph is but the type and forerunner 
 of the spiritual one to come, and which will most thor- 
 oughly and effectually revolutionize modern thought. 
 
 For this all are consciously or unconsciously waiting ; the 
 thought processes, and methods of communication, of to-day 
 are too slow and tedious, they render impatient the highly 
 strung, complicated nerves, made to carry lightning ; they 
 fret the soul which feels its cold and isolated condition to 
 be as Greenland to Southern summer compared with its 
 needs. 
 
 When every man can, according to his capacity, re- 
 ceive his own message regarding the state of the stock 
 market on the " shining shore," he will be a little more 
 cautious as to his investments in worthless consols and 
 " wild cat " mines ; he will find that the popular quota- 
 tions of the lower world are far less to be relied upon 
 than were those of the most intense Black Friday that 
 ever loomed up before the day of doom. 
 
 When the mind looks within, to itself for sustenance, 
 it then only discovers the springs which water its land. 
 I ask you to follow me closely, and to assist me with your 
 truest thoughts, for I am attempting for spiritual life 
 what Darwin attempted and accomplished for natural 
 life— to discover its relations to the life below it. It 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 25 
 
 must be discovered and classified before we can bring to 
 bear upon it successfully the laws which relate to its well- 
 being, and so far as I know, almost every word that has been 
 uttered in regard to the future life of the soul, has been 
 more or less misleading. I am not familiar with spirit- 
 ualistic literature, and therefore do not include that, but 
 as I purpose to work in entirely different ratio from what 
 I conceive to be its method, and, as I see very little in- 
 tellectual activity manifest in what I do know of it ; but 
 learn rather that we are to become passive, and receive im- 
 pressions which we are to accept as truth, without mastica- 
 tion or digestion, because it comes from " spirits," that is 
 enough. Intellectual death could be the only result of 
 intellectual inactivity; spiritual ignorance and spiritual 
 death are preferable to that. 
 
 They, as I understand, work from without inward, or 
 anywhere, a process which never leads to the deeper 
 truth. 
 
 The physician who takes a symptom for a disease, and 
 levels at it his pills and potions, is not more misleading, 
 and not more destructive to the tissues of ^ the body 
 proper. 
 
 I know that I live. No vagrant thought, no spirit, 
 no intangible essence ; but I, with memories, with hopes, 
 with regrets, with a body not such I could desire, but as 
 material as ever I owned; with a brain whose craving 
 hunger to be fed with knowledge gives me, as of old, no 
 rest, and from this land to which I have come, no pre- 
 vious authentic account reached me, to you whom I left 
 behind, I fear me, no true teachers have been sent. For 
 ages the whole creation had groaned and travailed to- 
 gether in pain that this knowledge might come, and all 
 nature tells me that according to the depth of its anguish 
 will be the depth of its answer. 
 
 According to the heights of its aspirations will be its 
 inspirations; according to its prolonged misery, shall be 
 its rest and peace. 
 
26 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 Therefore I ask it in the meantime, to cease from swal- 
 lowing poison, in order to prepare the soul for the true 
 nourishment. 
 
 Let there be a fast from the old regimen, for falsehood 
 and truth cannot assimilate in company. 
 
 I cannot, by any images of illustration known to you, 
 give you a true idea of the Kingdom coming, or better 
 to say, of the Republic coming. 
 
 I cannot by any appeal to your senses, give you a true 
 idea of the so-called spirit-life. It is only by arousing 
 within you those finer fibres of intellect and emotion 
 which are played upon ordinarily, perhaps, but few times 
 in a life-time, and then by some o'er-mastering passion 
 which lifts you above yourself; it is only by bringing 
 these forward to daily duty that I hope to connect the 
 true thought of the spirit- world with your own. 
 
 And do not think this impossible. The time has come 
 for a nation to be born to truth in a day. 
 
 Hard and cold and coarse as is the exterior of your 
 world, and the uses to which human beings put each other, 
 the tide of sympathy flows underneath all, like veins of pur- 
 est water through the solid earth, penetrating even the flinti- 
 est rock, and waiting but the touch of the master-hand to 
 gush forth with refreshing such as heart hath not known. 
 Remember the type. Even intellect demands now 
 the telegraph for thought, as well as for speech ; the old 
 slow, mechanical, drudging thought processes are intol- 
 erable to the complex nerves, to the multiplied brain 
 channels of to-day. Look forth and behold the workings 
 of science in her domain, and know that thyself art a 
 living witness that more than thou seest without, must 
 be accomplished within thee, that as she has connected 
 your speech with the remote parts of the earth, so must 
 your thought be connected with remote universes ; that as 
 she has annihilated time and space, so must your soul 
 annihilate time and death, which is but the castle of Giant 
 Despair erected upon the blank nothingness of his sup- 
 posed domain, and go forth to view thine own soul's pos- 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 27 
 
 sessions, which include all worlds and all eternities. No- 
 thing waits but thy souPs majority, nothing but intellec- 
 tual and spiritual vassalage and serfdom withhold them 
 from thee. There is in all nature, no stint, no lack, no 
 restraint, but only in thyself. 
 
 When we see the great and pressing need of intellectual 
 interchange, the slow use of words seems discouraging. 
 
 But it is only by pursuing the slow processes that we 
 have arrived at great results. When we think of the 
 patience of the atoms in the building of the rocks ; of the 
 patience of the ages in the building of the worlds ; of the 
 patience of the eternities in the arrangement of the uni- 
 verses, we are at first dumb with the reproof, and then 
 commence again weariedly the weaving of our little 
 thought. And by and by we, with our various webs, 
 have made so many pathways that we one day awaken 
 in a new world of thought, reached only by the persistent 
 efforts of spiders such as we, spinning from the substance 
 of our own brain, and attaching it to whatever post, arch 
 or doorway, the builders before us may have erected. 
 This is our work. Oh ! to be happy and restful in it ! 
 This is the great need. 
 
 I am not happy ; not content ; not at rest. I am in a 
 struggle to which all my earthly struggles were as a 
 zephyr to the tempest which uproots the forest growth of 
 centuries. 
 
 There is a sea of thought in which I must bathe, be 
 immersed, and merge, dripping, but new, to speed away 
 on the wings of light to tell yon what I have seen, and 
 felt and known. My Amaranth bids me take courage as 
 the mighty effort which seems to gather my energies into 
 its grasp, and twist and wrench them as the tree is 
 wrenched by the gale, is but the effort of the soul hasten- 
 to meet its own, which surely awaits it ; and I do believe, 
 but the agony is great. 
 
 I am like a traveler ascending a mountain, who should 
 say at the first breathing place, "Here I will rest me, 
 and send back a report to my country/' but he sees above 
 
28 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 him another place and toils on to reach it, only to find 
 the precipitous steep still towering above him, and saying, 
 "From that elevation I shall shall have a yet wider view, 
 I will hold my peace until it is reached," and who at last 
 in the darkness sits down footsore and weary for the morn- 
 ing to dawn. I only thus give you a sight of my struggles, 
 because I know that every creature whose eye may fall 
 upon these pages has experienced them in greater or less- 
 er degree, according to the projection of his thought in 
 the direction of truth. They are the birth-pangs of the soul. 
 
 Of the individual soul, and of the mighty soul of uni- 
 versal nature. It is because of the low, boding, incess- 
 ant starving cry for knowledge which reaches me from 
 your world, that I thus suffer to unlock its treasure 
 houses and give out its bread to you from this the land 
 of the future. 
 
 From this the land of promise to which so many hopes 
 have been sent which have been accruing interest through- 
 out the eternities. From this the land of the hereafter, 
 which must soon declare a dividend among the long-de- 
 frauded, long-suffering children of earth, or be herself 
 declared a worse investment than any which ever swal- 
 lowed the scanty savings of the poor without returning 
 so much as one per cent. 
 
 Now, as of old, does the clamor penetrate to my ears. 
 What of thy daily life, George Eliot ? What house ? 
 What home? What friends? What raiment? The 
 spirit beings about you, of what texture may they be ? 
 You say you have a body, and yet your speech seems 
 shadowy for want of substance, without background or 
 perspective, haunting, like a ghost but not convincing 
 like a reality. The complaint is well grounded. This 
 is what I need, a body for my soul's expression, a body 
 for the motive-power of my thought, and it is by coming 
 to you that I hope to obtain it. 
 
 Have I not said that I am a beggar ? And yet the 
 mantle that would be flung over another by the hand of 
 charity is too scant for me. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 29 
 
 I would not wear it if I could. 
 
 The roof-tree that might shelter me from storms, would 
 also shut out the interchanging currents of thought, and 
 the blue of heaven for which I pine. The perspective 
 of the bare sense life upon the spirit side might make 
 me seem more familiar to you as a fellow creature, and 
 perhaps create a glow of sympathy for me as such, but 
 indeed it is nothing. Have you seen an inventor or dis- 
 coverer whose I am was absorbed in the one strain of 
 giving shape, practicability and use to the thought which 
 possessed him, so that he walked among men a wooden 
 creature, shut and walled in upon himself, careless of 
 outer needs, insensible to all except that which bore upon 
 the one idea ? Even so am I, not of my own will or 
 choice, but because I must, sending myself upon the per- 
 petual Arctic voyage of the heavenland passage that it 
 may be no longer chart-less and shoreless in the imagina- 
 tions of men. Even so am I, without preparation except 
 such as has been unconscious, without equipments except 
 such as nature may have laid up for me in her eternal 
 storehouses, from morning to morning pursjiing my 
 journey, now slowly and wearily, anon with feverish 
 haste, passing many, many a wreck on my way, passing 
 many bleaching bones of those whom famine, or frost 
 have claimed. Passing many colonies of chattering 
 idiots, for whom the strain of the search has proven too 
 severe, passing many walled and sordid cities of those 
 whose ideal turned to clay, and who sat down amidst 
 her shattered fragments and muttered in their throats : 
 let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die. 
 
 But they are not for my tears. For life I live, to you, 
 the living I turn, and so much I may say to you of my- 
 self. 
 
 From yourself to me are invisible electric chains 
 which bear to me your hopes, your thoughts, the very 
 substance of which you are made. When you send me 
 of your best and highest, I am rich, I am warmed and 
 fed for a day, and I will for this bring you a flower and 
 
30 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 a gem from the hitherto inaccessible depths of the horror- 
 haunted land of despair. I will bring you a message, 
 pure and unmistakable, signed with the seal of the 
 land, a message of living light and peace from those 
 whom your tear-drenched eyes have followed into the cruel 
 cavernous jaws of the insatiate monster, Death ! I will 
 bring you the incontrovertible evidence that no night- 
 mare was ever so unreal as the existence of this creature, 
 that no delirium-haunted brain was ever the home of so 
 utterly groundless a terror, which its own disorder alone 
 created and sustained. 
 
 The force of the children of earth has been expended 
 in tears and wailings, because of its powerlessness in a 
 grasp which is as shadowy and delusive as the phantoms 
 of a dream. 
 
 I met yesterday, hand in hand, Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning and Alice Gary, the song queens of Albion 
 and America. Each left with me a branch of poesy 
 which I transmit as best I may. The first, from Mrs. 
 Browning, is designated " Liberty," and is inscribed to 
 my Amaranth, whose first and last love she is : 
 
 O Liberty, for whom the dungeon cell hath heard the groan, 
 O Liberty, for whom the weary earth hath made her moan, 
 O Liberty ! star-gemmed, sun-crowned, 
 With babbling waters laving thy white feet, 
 With all the winds of all the worlds 
 Loosing the amber tresses of thy hair, 
 Come forth thou from thy eternal ambush, 
 Come ere men despair ! 
 
 O Liberty, with the white fragrance of thy hand, 
 
 Sweep from the iron-banded brow the brand, 
 
 The brand, the brand accursed, 
 
 Which years of serfdom of the mind of man, 
 
 Which whip of toil, and lash of stern necessity, 
 
 Which tiger cruelty of man to man 
 
 Have burned there, and erased the words " be free." 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 31 
 
 O Liberty, the great sea calls for thee 
 
 From out its moaning depths with never ceasing plaint, 
 
 The whirlwind shrieks for thee, and 
 
 The writhing hurricane with maddening roar : 
 
 The silent sands, heaped atoms on the shore, 
 
 Are voiceless for thee, only ; only thee, 
 
 Only thee, the loved of all the atoms, 
 
 Only thee, the loved of all that is alone, 
 
 Of multitudes, of myriads, 
 
 Only thee, thou breath of Life. 
 
 Only thee, for thee the captive pines, 
 
 For thee the prisoned thought which lacerates the heart, 
 
 Which beats and beats against the walled dungeon of the mind 
 
 Until the walls give way and madness reigns, 
 
 Because thou settest not the fettered free, 
 
 O, long awaited, laggard Liberty ! 
 
 O Liberty, for thee the low earth waits, 
 
 Lying down yonder under pitchy clouds, 
 
 The mists of her own sin and suffering condensed, 
 
 The smoke of her own torment rising ever, 
 
 Ascending to our heavens and entering there, 
 
 And mingling her own sorrow and despair, 
 
 With all our peans ; smothering our hosannas, 
 
 Turning our glad good mornings into the sad whisper ; 
 
 Alas, for her, will morning ever dawn? 
 
 O Liberty, thou child of light, daughter of truth, 
 Nourished at the eternal fountains of eternal youth, 
 The glance of the chain lightning in thine eye, 
 The force of all the earthquakes in thy tread, 
 The strength of marshaled armies in thine arm, 
 Yet tender as the cooing of the nursing mother bird 
 Brooding o'er callow fledglings in her nest, 
 Soft as caressing zephyrs on a baby's cheek. 
 
 Liberty, my love, my hope of life, my all I 
 At reason's dawning, and at earth life's close, 
 Thou wert my rapture, thou my inspiration, 
 
 1 held thee fast and could not let thee go, 
 
32 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 For this I ask thee now, for this I wait, 
 
 For this I am held captive, and would almost hold thee, 
 
 Thou only one unfettered, throughout immensity. 
 
 O breathe upon the earth thy morning breath, 
 
 O crucify despair, and bind the demon death. 
 
 Bind them a million million years, bind them forevermore, 
 
 That on her dark, plague-stricken, famine-haunted shore, 
 
 Their cloven feet may multiply themselves no more. 
 
 O breathe upon the earth thy morning breath, 
 Thy breath of spring and loose the icy streams, 
 Dispel the winter of the mind, and let the captive free, 
 The frozen thought, the ice-bound soul 
 Bring intellectual liberty ! 
 
 The body's slave may live and roam the spheres, 
 But fettered mind is hell's own inner dungeon, 
 The unlighted cell without even bread and water. 
 
 breathe upon the earth thy morning breath, 
 And crucify despair, and bind the demon death, 
 And to the children now, and yet to be, 
 
 Bring freedom of the soul, sweet Liberty. 
 
 Then I behold thee, glorified, arisen, 
 
 Ascend the heaven of heavens, and through their radiant prism 
 
 1 see thee, thy transcendent face 
 
 Shining in streams of glory, effulgence borne aloft, 
 
 From sphere to sphere, from cherubim to seraphim, 
 
 Glowing yet brighter with the brighter heat ; 
 
 Taller with majesty as thou ascendest 
 
 Up to the throne of God, and aye beyond it, 
 
 For unto free men and women thou art the God of Gods ! 
 
 And this is the wreath which dear Alice Caiy laid 
 upon the altar of my own unrest : 
 
 " I came thro' the mists of the morning land, 
 
 And I saw one sitting alone, 
 Many a flower, many a token she held in her hand, 
 
 Yet she whL=pered in sad undertone. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 33 
 
 I am weary and lone, and the day has gone down, 
 The harvest is past, and the reapers are done ; 
 
 The earth life is dead and the earth life's crown 
 Only presses me down, only presses me down. 
 
 Only weighs me heavily here, for I know 
 
 That the toil which bought it, 
 
 That the thought which wrought it 
 Shall not pass current, as down below. 
 
 Yet not for this would I wait and wait, 
 
 Yet not for this would I linger here, 
 But I have not the key to Paradise gate, 
 
 No pass from sphere to sphere. 
 
 The weary feet that learned the plodding ways 
 
 Are all unfitted for these phantom paths, 
 And wings I never had in all my days, 
 
 Whether for Jove's fruits or heaven's after-maths. 
 
 And I looked at the sister, through mists of morn, 
 
 At the broad brow framed in thought, 
 At the white hands folded meek and forlorn, 
 
 At the dove-colored robe by sorrow wrought. 
 
 And I saw the crown, the earth life crown 
 
 So lightly valued, and laid aside, 
 Flung weariedly down, half scornfully down 
 
 As if its splendor to hide. 
 
 I saw its glow as a molten fire 
 
 Ten thousand thousand of myriad gems 
 Grow brighter yet softer, flame higher and higher, 
 
 Living phosphorescence in shadowy glens. 
 
 And I saw as I gased that each gem was a tear 
 Garnered and treasured from sorrow's cheek, 
 Sanctified, glorified, there and here, 
 By the earth-loved genius so sweet and meek. 
 
 From the eyes of all who ever wept on earth, 
 
 Who ever dropped their tears o'er battlements of heaven, 
 
 I saw an answering flash from Hades and despair, 
 From every heart pain riven. 
 
34 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 I saw the gems from sorrow's cheek 
 
 Shining in setting of wisdom's gold. 
 From the brain of the artist so sweet and meek, 
 
 From the flame heart scarce grown cold. 
 
 And I saw the earth-quarry where she wrought 
 
 Unshapen rocks of centuries piled, 
 Strata of truth, and of error bought, 
 
 And held by ignorance, Satan's child ; — 
 
 And sire ; but let it pass. 
 
 From him she wrenched the gold, 
 From him she bore the glittering mass, 
 
 From him who held it in fee simple from of old. 
 
 And by the genius of her artist wand, 
 
 She coined it into uses of the world, 
 Weaving in with it many a stately frond 
 
 Of branching truth, of truth in agate pearled. 
 
 Great golden doorways for the feet of truth, 
 
 And all her pattering children rest, and joy and peace 
 
 And fairy pavement for the wondering youth, 
 And strains of harmony which n'er shall cease. 
 
 And I saw the golden doorways higher rise, 
 Shaplier still with wider spreading space, 
 
 Until they reached the gates of Paradise, 
 And rivalled them in grace. 
 
 And I spoke to the sister through the mists of morn, 
 
 Who rested so low on the ground ; 
 And I said : " O truth was never born ; 
 
 Was never lost nor found." 
 
 And I said, O love is not of to-day, . 
 
 And hope is not of to-morrow ; 
 But Eternity's trinity who stay 
 
 Forever through joy and sorrow. 
 
 And every word and every deed and thought 
 Which ever artist, poet, prophet wrought, 
 With true and holy purpose, for pure love of them, 
 Shall live while they live, with angels and with men ; 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 35 
 
 Shall live, and grow, and blossom, and expand 
 Forevermore, within the fields of their fair land. 
 
 Sweet sister, their door is closed to-day , 
 
 To be opened wider to-morrow ; 
 There grows in their fields of eternal May 
 
 Balm in Gilead for every sorrow. 
 
 I have awakened in a new region. There are form, 
 and shape and beauty about me which teach and give me 
 rest. Those w r hom I met each left with me something 
 from themselves which pieced out what w T as apparently 
 wanting in my life. And the qualities which they left 
 with me, draw like forces from wherever they may exist 
 in the universe of natural or spiritual life. 
 
 How is this accomplished ? 
 
 Whatever qualities we may possess are composed of 
 atoms ; are the results of various dispositions and arrang- 
 ments of atoms ; every one of the atoms has its own in- 
 dividual life, after the fashion of the life of our bodies, that 
 is to say, they live, breathe, inhale and exhale. The ex- 
 halations pass away to find their kindred atoms, and to 
 mingle with them and form new combinations. The in- 
 halations of the atoms which form our qualities of char- 
 acter, are not inhalations of such air as our lungs receive, 
 but inhalations of exhalations from other atoms, from 
 other qualities, purified by the spiritual atomic atmosphere 
 of the earth, or whatever sphere we may inhabit, for 
 which there is provided an ample and adequate supply. 
 Do you think that the spider and the mouse breathe such 
 air as you breathe ? They do not ! Do you think the 
 individual who lives upon a coarse animal plane breathes 
 the same air, either physical or spiritual, as does the one 
 who in the scale of being has risen into higher regions, 
 though he may live, so to speak, close beside him? 
 Most decidedly he does not. The atmosphere of your 
 earth holds within itself uncounted myriads of atmo- 
 spheres, from the one required by the monad, to the one 
 
36 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 required by the spiritual atoms of the most exalted spiri- 
 tual being permitted to return to you from any sphere. 
 
 As your world is a microcosm and type of the universe, 
 so is your body a type of the world, millions of atoms 
 pertaining both to the body which shall perish, and to the 
 spirit which shall endure, are being born, and dying, and 
 being resurrected, and being married, and being developed, 
 and being improved daily, and after the same fashion in 
 which you yourself improve or deteriorate, by associations 
 with other beings and forces, and by exercising such 
 qualities and forces as may inhere within them. 
 
 In this way then have I received from my friends. 
 They came near to me, impelled by the dynamic force 
 which ever strive to preserve order and harmony 
 everywhere, their abundance propelled to my need, their 
 sustenance borne to the relief of my famine by every 
 breath of sympathy and benevolence which ever was felt, 
 or ever will be felt, by robber in the wood, or by the 
 seraphim in the spheres — for remember that here or else- 
 where there is properly no time, but an eternal now. 
 They came near, they gave to me most abundantly with- 
 out a word, or perhaps a thought of giving. They sim- 
 ply breathed and lived in my presence, that was enough. 
 
 I was athirst and I drank deep from the chalice of liv- 
 ing life. I was ignorant, astray, and in wonder. I was 
 cold and apathetic with loneliness. 
 
 They have left pictures upon the walls of my mind, 
 which shall remain as perpetual teachers, they have 
 opened for me new avenues, through which I see 
 the way that I have come, and the way I shall go. They 
 have shown me that every thing in the universe which is 
 mine, is close beside me, impossible to be separated from 
 me, and that every thing which is not mine I may not 
 obtain, though I poured me out in a strength of desire 
 which should rend the rocks. Therefore I am content. 
 They have shown me my own work and its purpose. 
 
 They did not this, but the atoms which they left me 
 have, in conjunction with my own, made for me a new life. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 37 
 
 In speaking of life, whether it be yours of the earth, 
 or ours of the spirit, I make no distinction. The process 
 is the same. The conditions only are altered. Birth, 
 growth, maturity, decay, are processes to which all forms 
 and all atoms are subject, throughout the universe, and 
 throughout eternity, whether they be so-called spiritual, 
 or so-called natural. But the consciousness of life — Ah 
 it is knowledge of that which we seek ! 
 
 Who can know? Who can understand? We can 
 only toddle like little children through the vast, resound- 
 ing eternities of time, and the wild, lone, lost chaos of 
 space, carrying within us this eager, inquisitive wonder- 
 ing, all embracing me, this me who would people all 
 chaos thick with its own hope, its own love, its own de- 
 sire, and stretch beyond all eternity its own fear, its own 
 doubt, its own despair. 
 
 Let the ever-echoing answer of space and eternity be 
 our ever present and everlasting surety that they are 
 naught but the unexplored regions, which hold in reserve 
 for us our own. Let it be the final answer to every 
 doubt that nature never created even the germ of an in- 
 spiration, even the monad of an out-reaching that shall 
 not in her own time, in her own space, in the fullness of 
 her own out- working grow, to the highest heights, reach 
 to the deepest depths, and expand to the fullest maturity 
 possible to any planet that swings full orbed in light- 
 bathed ether. 
 
 There is no lack ; there is no loss ; there is no empti- 
 ness ; there is no mockery of the best hopes of the soul, 
 child of earth ! O child of the spheres ! 
 
 The boy weeps when his toys are put away and the al- 
 phabet takes their place. 
 
 Even so are your toys removed from you, O child of 
 earth, that you may be compelled to look at the wide 
 open books of the worlds, and from them learn to live as 
 shall become your manhood, and to put away childish 
 things. 
 
38 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 We are so fearfully limited, and fettered to such 
 knowledge as our powers can recognize. If I repeat and 
 re-repeat this idea, it is because I, myself, am constantly 
 forgetting it. 
 
 We say, oh, yes, I know of Kant's theory, and Spi- 
 noza's, and I have been let into the largeness of Hum- 
 boldt's views, while at the same time, we are living and 
 thinking in the separate huts of our own prejudices, look- 
 ing through one wretched begrimed pane of glass, the 
 solitary window of our own egotism. 
 
 Earth life was to me a day of toil, in which I saw for 
 myself and for those about me, what looked like per- 
 petual shipwreck of all things precious and heartsome, 
 and garnered and treasured, while the craft with idle sails 
 filled and laden with nothingness, went safely and smil- 
 ingly into a welcoming port, torn by no rocks, smitten by 
 no storms, swallowed by no deeps. 
 
 There came a blank, all formless, all vacant, all 
 nothingness. " Only I alive in universal death. Only 
 I a living, beating, burning heart, smothered within a 
 corpse." 
 
 The earthly body was laid away to rest, and the spiri- 
 tual had not laid hold of the realities of its new existence. 
 
 Then followed a slow, sorrow-stricken gathering of 
 energies, holding fast to the hand of my Amaranth, as 
 unconscious as the babe unborn of my way, as knowl- 
 edgless of my destination, yet dying within me for a 
 sight of the true, faithful face of wisdom, willing to 
 wade any deeps where I might find her. 
 
 This true purpose brought to me, as it must ever, at 
 some time to all, true teachers, and I have come home, 
 I have come into mine own inheritance; I have come 
 where I see the true purpose of things, see them in the 
 morning light of reality, which neither glints, gilds, nor 
 elongates. 
 
 What is my home ? Not the hushed and holy fireside, 
 with prattling babes at my knee ; not any peaceful port, 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter, 39 
 
 nor any quiet haven where I may rest me and watch the 
 rusting of my anchors. 
 
 But the home of my soul, the high seas of thought, 
 whose wind-tossed air is sweeter to me than Alpine 
 heights to the homesick Swiss, the rock of whose billows 
 underneath me is a low sung lullaby to my dream 
 children, assuring them that their wildest fairy land is a 
 living reality toward which every wave is bearing them, 
 and in which they shall live and grow forever. 
 
 The home of my soul ! No tyrant father rules it, 
 filled with malice aforethought; no tyrant father sitting 
 off on his great white throne and sending all his gay, 
 good-natured children into a roaring flame, and all his 
 solemn, disagreeable ones into an eternal singing school, 
 with a point of his awful finger, while he goes busily on 
 squaring his doomsday books. This is the picture 
 which my childish mind held of the day of judgment. 
 
 No mother earth, from whom all things proceeded, 
 and who shall therefore take me finally into her cold 
 metallic bosom, and transmute me into her ore or her 
 dross, as best suits her whim, as she may find me in com- 
 position; or disperse me in phantom mist, forever 
 searching the rains, my relatives ; or dispose of me in 
 any fashion at which the me of me revolts. No, she 
 can only take what is her own, the outermost husk, 
 which I slough off and return to her gladly. 
 
 The home of my soul ! If I could at this moment 
 compress into one^ demand, all the force and volume, 
 and power which I hope to have for an eternity to come, 
 I would send it thundering through space with this 
 question to every materialist, to every theologian, to 
 every "teacher" in the universe — Why have you dared to 
 think, and to send forth the thought that the rocks may 
 be immortal, that the wondrous matter which composes 
 the earth may be immortal ; nay, must be : that the in- 
 famous God which theologians have made out of their 
 own basest material may be immortal; nay, must be: 
 but that the love and longings of the soul may perish ; 
 
40 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 nay, must perish into earthiness, or be crucified into an 
 eternal serfdom of saintship, to be continued throughout 
 the tyrant life of their autocratic master, God ? 
 
 Sweet as life is to me now that I know it is all life in- 
 stead of all death ; now that I know it is all unfoldment 
 and expansion instead of all subversion and repression ; 
 sweet as it is to me, I would almost lay it down for an- 
 nihilation, if I might by one effort crowd it down the 
 craven throats and stop the brazen voices which have for 
 uncounted ages kept the cheeks of love blanched to 
 ghastliness with fear, and drenched in perpetual rivers 
 of tears for her worshiped and lost. They hurl ana- 
 themas at each other, and each accuses the other of all 
 the crime and misery perpetrated under the sun, but I 
 ask — Who made them fit to judge even each other ? I 
 here arraign both, as murderers, executioners, torturers, 
 and perpetual jailers of all that is true, purifying, uplifting 
 outreaching, blessing and being blessed, in the soul of man. 
 
 Tell what you know ; tell all you know ; express what 
 you think, all you think, if you will, but do not dare O theo- 
 logian, to set up the horrible image of your god before the 
 door of every pure and true hope of the human soul, crush- 
 ing it into abject despair. Do not dare to write the notice 
 of his infamous imprecations and anathemas upon every 
 aspiration that genius and power may dare to lift up in 
 tiny, venturous blossoms of beginnings, withering them 
 into the ice and frost of eternal silence ; do not dare, O 
 materialist, to bring in the testimony of your strata, of 
 your periods, of your atoms, of your aggregations and 
 your segregations, to shrivel up the soul with an idea 
 of its own littleness, and to attempt to prove to it that 
 its own immortal longings which made and created all 
 things that ever were made, shall be blotted out and 
 swallowed up in the dross which is, I say, but the dross 
 of its lower self. 
 
 Like the first six-day maker of the earth, the six 
 million, or sixty millions, or whatever it may be period- 
 maker, brings in his man as an afterthought, a creature 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 41 
 
 to wander up and down in the wilderness of space, and 
 howl himself hoarse through ages which return him no 
 answer, which never intend to return him an answer ; 
 they are too busy with their own affairs. He is the one 
 loose screw in this mightily perfect universe, the one only 
 instrument made to fit nowhere. 
 
 Nowhere, said I? Oh yes, he fits misery, despair, and 
 all lack, and all emptiness, and all disappointment : he 
 fits death ; death is for him, death was made for him, 
 for him alone of all the universe, and he for death. The 
 first six-day world man-maker made man, and then 
 turned him out where he knew he would meet Satan 
 that he might prepare him for the hell which had been 
 heating for him from before the foundation of the world. 
 The second man-make, the period maker, makes him 
 less than the dirt under his feet, not worth damning, 
 hardly w^orth killing — worth only annihilation. Anni- 
 hilate him, send him into earth after his kindred atoms, 
 send him off into mist to hunt up the summer showers, 
 what is he that consciousness should be mindful of him ? 
 
 What is the hope, the mighty, boundless, irresistible 
 love and longing for life, for immortality, which can 
 and does reach the archangel of spheres so distant that 
 the mind can no more grasp it than you can swallow at 
 one gasp the waters of all the oceans ? — what is that to 
 the idiot poring over the magnified legs of flies, or the 
 antennae of the ant, or over a square inch of solid earth ; 
 what is that to the matter-crazed creature who takes the 
 trouble to annihilate his human being only in order to 
 get him safely out of the way of his own theories? 
 
 Not one word here is meant for those scientists pure- 
 minded and gentle-hearted as babes, who are constantly 
 enriching the world with the wealth of true knowledge 
 which they bring her of her own resources, of her own 
 construction, of her own destiny ; not one word but praise 
 and thanks to the living great and small ; and the laurel 
 wreath for the illustrious ones whose illumined faces have 
 passed beyond the sight of men; but for those who would 
 
42 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 bring a world full of rocks for the children's bread, and 
 expect them to be fed therewith, for those who introduce 
 a glacial period expecting them to derive from it the 
 warmth and comfort necessary to the peace of their souls, 
 who litter and block up all their tender spring vistas of 
 thought with the breadth and monstrosity of their Silu- 
 rian and Devonian and carboniferous periods, who, by 
 knowing a little of these things, assume to know all of 
 all things ; and with their chill verdict shut the door for 
 ages upon many a youthful, adventurous hope, many a 
 timid flower of pure modest truth, which we can ill 
 afford to spare, but which dare not because of the flinty 
 eyes of the Gorgons venture farther, and find for itself 
 eternal sunshine, for these brazen voices which are in 
 these latter days filling the earth with the -coarse slang of 
 their own discord and soullessness. I call upon Satire 
 to assist me, now and hereafter, in a merciless war of ex- 
 termination. 
 
 Back and down to your own legitimate business, scav- 
 engers of geology, and the sciences, rag-pickers of as- 
 tronomy, and swill-gatherers of chemistry, do not dare to 
 befoul the children's food by touching with your unclean 
 hands the vessels which hold it. Know, O dross and re- 
 fuse of human understanding, know, O humpbacked, in 
 intellect, know, O soul emptied specimens of ages of 
 false and distorted teachings, that the protecting bed rock 
 4 which guards the precious ores was builded there by the 
 love of man, which is so strong that it permeated the 
 atoms and implanted its own hope within them. Know, 
 O addled idiot, who expect one day to be swallowed in a 
 cloud, or dispersed into mist, that these mists are but the 
 diffused tears which love has wept for her children's 
 birthright, and which shall turn to flashing gems when 
 they shall have planted their weary feet within the door- 
 way of rest and peace. The wind utters but the whis- 
 pers and the questionings of love, in unceasing eternal 
 search for her own, the sea is full of her voices; the earth 
 with her myriad forms, her stages of growth, develop- 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 43 
 
 merit, decay and resurrection, are but the manifestation 
 of this, her omnipresent thought. 
 
 That love which such as you have attempted to begrime, 
 to bemire, to assail, to belittle, to traduce, until I blush 
 to mention her pure and holy name in your presence. 
 
 Materialism is but the cast-off garments of orthodoxy 
 bedraggled, bedusted and bestained with the filth which 
 she gathered about her for centuries. Rank with the 
 poisonous exhalations of all the dogmas which have 
 cursed the earth — tattered and scanty ; rent with schisms, 
 and patched with fusions, mouldy with the damps, and 
 eaten with the teeth of time, and as deficient in warmth 
 or comfort to the naked shivering soul as the icy breath 
 of charity upon a poor relation. 
 
 And the prime cause of the deadly hatred w T hich these 
 two vultures bear each other, is their close family rela- 
 tionship. 
 
 Neither has a divergent shred of truth or a cross grain 
 of sweet true wisdom with which to mend the threadbare 
 falsehoods of the other. 
 
 It is meet that such as these should think the form 
 greater than the spirit which made it. It is meet that 
 they should think that your world, which is but the 
 husk and shell which has grown protectingly around the 
 soul of man, shall finally absorb or destroy him ; it is the 
 inevitable conclusion of all reasoning which begins at 
 the surface and goes backward. 
 
 Let me say here, that as regards the origin of man, or 
 his destiny, eternity is the school in which we shall study 
 that question forever, and forever find it widening be- 
 yond us. We of this world are no nearer the end than 
 are you, and we have among us as many theologians, and 
 as many dead materialists who do not believe in the im- 
 mortality of the soul, as have you. 
 
 But this we do know T : Love is the power and the 
 glory, the creator, and the ruler, she that was, and is, and 
 is to come, the first and the last, the omniscient, omni- 
 present mother of atoms, and of aggregations, of worlds 
 
44 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 and world clusters, of worlds thickly studded in space, 
 as leaves in Vallanibrosa, and of ant hills in the sand. 
 
 Her greatness includes all of what we call littleness, 
 therefore her tiniest children need not fear to nestle under 
 her wing, knowing that their tiniest want, their tiniest 
 outreaching was given them just for the purpose of 
 growth — that they might open their mouths wide and be 
 fed. 
 
 There is provision, and prevision for all, all, all, and the 
 individuality which has been so belied, so belittled, the 
 great conscious me, with its aspirations higher than all 
 heights, deeper than all depths, stretching beyond all 
 extent, looking beyond space, beyond things seen or un- 
 seen, known or unknown, gazing with eyes of quench- 
 less fire out into those illimitable regions after its own, 
 only its very own, — is its own eternal answer, its own 
 eternal witness of its own eternal existence, of its own 
 eternal consciousness, of its own eternal identity. 
 
 Nothing else is great enough to answer it, or to bear 
 witness for it. Everything else in nature sinks into 
 weakness and nothingness, as compared with the sub- 
 lime spectacle, of the soul of the human creature, hunt- 
 ing through the ages, through and through the eternal 
 ages, through storms without, and storms within, through 
 torture, through imprecation of devils, and execration 
 of men, through caves and through dungeons, through 
 fire and frost, on the heights and in the hovels, bend- 
 ing over the midnight oil in the narrow chamber, and 
 running a race with the wildest aspects of nature, with 
 every nerve tight strung with long-drawm agony, hunt- 
 ing ever, searching for the remainder of itself, and for a 
 roof wide enough to give it home. * * * The 
 stone age of the earth's history was but a type and out- 
 growth of the stone age of the soul. Bound by rocks 
 of ignorance, by gneiss of prejudice, and granite of 
 cruelty, it lay with all its rich possibilities buried, its 
 mine of unfoldment sealed, its blossoms held fast in 
 grip of crystalline rock. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 45 
 
 As I awake into the expansion of my new existence, 
 time is at last removed. For long, in order to steady 
 myself, I held fast to a few pickets of her decaying 
 fence, but she is gone, and I see now what havoc she 
 makes with our perspectives, what false and illusive 
 shapes hide behind the shadow of her imaginary ex- 
 istence. In speaking of the stone age of the soul, I for 
 a moment forget that you cannot judge without reference 
 to time, because its boundaries and limits are all about 
 you, and you cannot as yet look over them. But you 
 will, as your souls grow above them. 
 
 This is all they are — the measurements of time — fences 
 which keep you in your own fields of thought, and those 
 fields you take to be the universe. 
 
 And until they are removed I must seem to accept 
 your illusion or you will think I am talking nonsense. 
 For instance, I cannot make you know that everything 
 which ever has been or will be, is now; that all things 
 known and unknown move in centres, and that properly 
 speaking there is neither time nor space. This, though 
 true to me and apparent to me in my condition, jdoes not 
 seem apparent to you in yours, and I will not come 
 with a hard speech which you cannot understand. 
 Above all things do I wish to be clear to your compre- 
 hension, though I speak no more than one word in one 
 of your years. 
 
 Do not understand me that the idea of time is neces- 
 sary in your world, or a true idea in your world, not at 
 all ; only in a certain stage of growth wherein you con- 
 found externals with principles, the perpetual mistake of 
 mankind. Inherently you are no more connected with 
 time than am I ; externally you have discovered the 
 revolutions of the earth, and have made of them days 
 and years, harmless ideas in themselves, but destructive 
 to true thought when allowed to hamper it. 
 
 Above all things do we wish to establish a conscious- 
 ness of truth. Fortunately for you and for myself, 
 
46 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 nothing will be accepted upon my bare assertion, for you 
 do not believe in my existence. 
 
 I foresee that my Amaranth and I shall have to write 
 many books before you will believe in it, and that we 
 shall be hard pushed to prove it, at which we both 
 rejoice. For in searching the deeper truth for you we 
 may find it for ourselves, and your stress shall stimulate 
 our endeavors. 
 
 A thing has occurred to us which I did not foresee. 
 
 When I came first to this interpreter, and what more 
 she is to me, you will learn as we go on searching and 
 finding each other, I came impelled by my own dis- 
 tress, and not knowing nor thinking how I reached her, 
 more than the fainting man asks whence comes the air 
 which gives him renewed life. 
 
 Afterward I saw that the nerve filaments which con- 
 nected me with my new existence proceeded from her, 
 and that when any counter currents intervened to cut 
 off my reception of spiritual nerve force from her, I be- 
 came almost entirely unconscious of outward conditions. 
 This was apparently because my own nerve filaments 
 were too weak to cling to the new order of things, or to 
 recognize them, but her own being of texture in harmony 
 with mine, and spiritualized to that extent that truly 
 speaking she exists only in the spiritual realm, I was 
 thus enabled to use them. 
 
 But I was shut out sometimes, it might have been for 
 ages, by counter currents. I say it might have been for 
 ages judging by my experiences on these occasions, which 
 deepened into a sort of introspective nightmare, and 
 which nightmares I shall by and by show you all 
 have their root in realities, or they could not exist. 
 
 Shut out from light, air, sunshine, shut off from com- 
 munication with my kind, I seemed to be groping in the 
 dens and caves of thought : in the subterranean recesses 
 of the human soul, in the ante-diluvian strata of mind ; 
 and there saw wonders piled mountain-high on wonders, 
 which would set on end the hair of the most pragmati- 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 47 
 
 cal geologist that ever lived, and of which I hope one 
 day to have the courage and power to tell you, but not 
 now. 
 
 When I could reach my Amaranth and live, so to 
 speak, above the ground with her, I saw that she was 
 terribly shaken in body and mind by the conflicting ele- 
 ments about her, and that she would sink under them, if 
 continued. She clung to me piteously, and I to her, but 
 one approached us and spoke : 
 
 " Sisters, daughters, children of the coming day, there 
 must be a little interval of entire separation. You must 
 become stronger in your peculiar process of thought, and 
 she must become stronger in physical power before you 
 can subserve each other's best interests ; you must retire 
 into yourself, and she must, as much as within her lies, 
 perform the opposite feat, and one hitherto impossible 
 with her, but possible now that she has received of your 
 elements, — that of going out of herself, and living in the 
 lives of others. You have passed through the period of 
 earthly bloom, and must send down deeper roots into the 
 alluvial soil of eternity, to gather there the rich chemical 
 deposits of the ages to make the higher growth for peren- 
 nial bloom. She has always lived in the world unseen of 
 men, and bloomed only there ; her real earthly life is now 
 to commence, and by placing herself in conditions of 
 communication, outgiving, and receptivity toward earthly 
 things. For this there must be an interval of separation 
 between you. Say good-bye for a time, all shall be well." 
 Thus he took her from me. It was acutely, agonizingly, 
 painful to me, the Gethsemane of the soul. 
 
 The slow transmutation of all its poor little weaknesses 
 into those strong acids and essences which shall every- 
 where, under all covering of alloy, detect the gold and 
 reject the dross ; the artist's preparation of rags, thread- 
 bare poverty, and utter destruction of whatever may 
 stand between him and the ideal, for the sight of which 
 multitudes are waiting with hushed lips and bowed heads. 
 
48 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 When again I found my Amaranth, as at first not 
 knowing by what process I reached her, but as we awake 
 and behold the morning not knowing when it dawned ; 
 I saw the wisdom which prompted the trial to which we 
 had been subjected. 
 
 Individuality had grown apace ; the color on the wan 
 cheek of consciousness was deepening into hues of health 
 where between us both, being each out of joint and in 
 the wrong world as far as development was concerned, it 
 was likely to be lost altogether. 
 
 But as we looked into each other's souls we saw that 
 the right apportionment, the right adjustment had 
 been born, and needed only growth to grapple with the 
 robbers that prey upon mankind, and we hastened to 
 speak the thought which came uppermost. 
 
 But as we were in our own weakness comparatively 
 safe from foes without ; being really in their estimation 
 not worth their pursuit, and as our foes had been from 
 within, we were not prepared for the violent onslaught 
 which was now made from without. 
 
 Pilgrim, when set upon by Messrs. Envious, Ill-Will, 
 and the whole family of By-Ends was not in a worse 
 plight. Many times of late, when we have been in 
 heavenly trim, with our mental camera all arranged, as 
 we thought, to throw the strongest light, and to give you 
 such a vivid picture of this — the land of the future — that 
 you should never again, for an instant, doubt its reality 
 or its substance, has the black-robed priest, with bell, 
 book and candle, the visible material representative of iron- 
 bound, ages-bound, oath-bound, creed-bound, blood- 
 bound, soul tyranny in our world as in yours, sat the 
 length and breadth of his bulk, and the destroying aura 
 of his conditions and traditions deliberately down be- 
 tween us and our picture, casting his black shadow alike 
 upon us, our sunlight, you and all things. In this 
 shadow of late have we written, as also surrounded with 
 a thousand other hobgoblin shapes, which mutter and 
 threaten, and gibe, and curse, and stamp their cloven feet, 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 49 
 
 and put out their forked tongues, and shake at us claw- 
 like, bony fingers, which have, evidently, been for a mil- 
 lion of ages in some other goblin's pie. And not only 
 these but others who are not goblins, but who have some 
 small excuse for being alive, of both your world of shapes 
 and ours of substances, have given us what to them were 
 the best of reasons why we should give up all this "tom- 
 foolery," as they politely designate it, and go our separ- 
 ate w r ays. All this is bad light for a clear picture at pre- 
 sent, and you must not, when you are led to hope from 
 the spread of canvass, and the first few bold strokes, that 
 your heart and eye will be delighted with the clear out- 
 lines of the conception, and" the finishing artist touches 
 which feed the soul, — you must not be too greatly disap- 
 pointed if you get many blurs and daubs, and much con- 
 fused work instead, you must be content at present with 
 the earnest purpose, and the true endeavor, which I know 
 neither power of hell nor heaven can cover from your 
 eyes. 
 
 Remember that though the way to the northwest 
 passage is strewn with bleaching bones, the real dis- 
 coverer is yet to come, but who dare say that he can ever, 
 or could ever come, but for those who have poured out 
 their lives to pave the way for his conquering ships ? 
 The truth is not born, she is builded, one atom upon 
 another cemented with drops of blood wrung with 
 anguish from the inner heart of universal humanity, and 
 the one who ascends to her heights, ascends upon the 
 stepping-stones of human souls who have laid them 
 clown in proud or piteous sacrifice for his purpose. 
 
 My Amaranth and I are not afraid. We look into 
 each other's eyes and see a friend. What cannot one do 
 and dare who has a friend ? — a friend made by nature, 
 a friend formed from the eternities, — a friend filled with 
 fullness for our every lack, — a friend which every law of 
 every universe has fashioned to be our counterpart, and 
 in whom we see mirrored as on the bosom of a placid 
 lake, our own soul, without its flaws and defections,— a 
 
50 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 friend who gives color, shape, proportion, life and beauty, 
 to our own beloved, straggling, misshapen, deformed, hope- 
 less, darling dreams, — a friend who is father, mother, 
 brother, sister, all — a friend whose very presence trans- 
 forms the cold, hard, bare, dreary wintry, orphaned world 
 into the blissful home of the soul? 
 
 And sometimes when thus we sit in our fullness of 
 content, comes to us a voice and thus it speaks : 
 
 " Sisters, daughters, children of the coming day: Fear 
 not the shadows which seem to obscure, which seem to 
 hinder, which fill the air about you with lurid glare, and 
 emit ftimes suspiciously sulphureous ; they are but the 
 reflection of the brightness which draws near to you, and 
 must come for your own safety, though that is far enough 
 from their intent. 
 
 As the hurricanes, and tornadoes and earthquakes which 
 carry off* the accumulated gases resultant from the luxuri- 
 ant growth of all forms of life at the tropics, are but 
 safety valves, though their mission is destruction, so are 
 these shapes your safety valves. 
 
 Every ray of light throughout the universe must have 
 its corresponding darkness, which is, truly speaking, its 
 lower life, upon which it feeds, and the brighter the light, 
 after its kind, the blacker must be the corresponding 
 darkness. 
 
 As fast as construction moves, must destruction press 
 upon her heels to disperse and devour the fragments, the 
 refuse, the debris, which her builders leave behind. 
 Your safety lies ever in adhering to your own legitimate 
 business, in working strictly after the methods of your 
 own souls, and all these croakers without, from priest 
 down to pew-opener, all the motley crowd which their 
 gibberish gathers, are to you but the friendly darkness of 
 night in which your ideals may close their white-lidded 
 eyes and rest refreshed until called forth by the dawning 
 light to bless with their beauty the hearts of the children 
 of men. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 51 
 
 As you press on into firmer stroke, into deeper coloring, 
 into braver pictures of the various aspects of truth, into 
 bolder unmasking of the various coverings of falsehood, 
 so will they press closer, on your tread, and howl louder, 
 and fling their tails about with more desperate fury, and 
 open their wolfish mouths wider, so that you may see 
 lying at the bottom of their throats the bones of many a 
 victim, but you need not fear, they are chained. For 
 you they are chained because you have not their elements 
 of destruction within you ; and they have no power over 
 you to destroy, only to make a din in your ears. 
 
 Remember that every form of destruction, in every 
 world, must find within its victim elements correspond- 
 ing to its own, or there is no stock whatever with which 
 to begin a partnership business, and it must retire dis- 
 comfited. The remedy for every ill which may afflict 
 the soul or body, the safety from every form of destruc- 
 tion, is to go up higher, into purer air. 
 
 Sisters, daughters, children of the coming day, build ! 
 build ! build ! 
 
 The destroyers are legion, and are becoming a pesti- 
 lence, the builders are few, and afraid. Build ! build 
 bravely, out of yourselves ; build fearlessly out of your 
 own best material such as has been crushed into the mire, 
 or hidden away stealthily, from the sight of the destroy- 
 ers. Weave garments for the naked from your own 
 tears ; make homes for the children abiding homes, out 
 of your own deathless aspirations. Build vistas of hope, 
 avenues of glory out of your own despairs. In every 
 wayside hovel wherein your soul has groaned out its 
 anguish ; in every dungeon cell where it has lacerated its 
 inner heart against the relentless bars which bound it, 
 you shall find a temple, enshrining a spring of living 
 water. O lead the children there, and bid them drink and 
 remember their poverty and misery no more. 
 
 Build ! build ! Lay strong and sure foundations, con- 
 structed and made fast even with your own past mis- 
 takes ; impress into your service all things good and true, and 
 
52 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 all things bad and false ; convert them by the potent 
 alchemies of your own souls into the matchless, flawless 
 walls of a glorified dwelling wherein truth may sit en- 
 shrined, and gaze with her clear, eternal, loving eyes upon 
 her outcast children. 
 
 Build ! build ! Make of the deeps of all hell a foun- 
 dation upon which to lift up the stately domes and 
 silver-sheened minarets of all Heaven !" 
 
 Feb. 20th, 1882. 
 
 As the friends of Amaranth on both sides of existence, 
 have been distressed at the thought that it should be 
 given out that words were written through her, instead 
 of by her, as the statement implied a possible falsehood, 
 let me say that we know that it is immaterial which name 
 takes precedence and my own was given only because she 
 could not be supposed to speak ex-cathedra in regard to 
 the hither side of existence, and because an irresistible 
 pressure is laid upon me to assert, and re-assert, and 
 iterate and re-iterate in every form, at every opportunity, 
 in every strain, touching every key that I may command, 
 that I, live, I, undiffused, unassimilated, undispersed, 
 unchanged as to thought processes, undimmed as to 
 affection, fear, joy, despair, resolute to search, to pene- 
 trate, to explore, I, still alone, still unfathomable to myself, 
 no nearer to my beatitude, no farther from any ^ hope, 
 yet with changed conditions which show all in clearer 
 light. I do not know what is thought, more than I 
 know what is light, but I know that the most exalted 
 brain or soul in any universe is but a thought vehicle as I 
 know that the brightest sun which burns in space is but 
 a reflector of light; not a creator of it. Therefore, do my 
 Amaranth and I attempt to combine our harmonies and 
 give a truer reflection of our own thought than either 
 could give alone. 
 
 Not one anywhere, whether angel or devil, thinks 
 alone, and the thought of yours which is born this morn- 
 ing may owe that birth to the responsive thought atom 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 53 
 
 of a soul or of myriads of souls at the antipodes of space, or 
 of time or of being. The time is coming when this 
 truth will press itself home to you on every hand, and 
 then explanations such as I have given will seem trivial 
 and unbidden. 
 
 You have lungs and they inhale such air as they may, 
 but they do not manufacture it ; you have brains, neither 
 do they manufacture thought, but assimilate it, and in 
 proportion as the brain be fine and the thought be whole- 
 some, is the thought reservoir of the worlds enriched or 
 impoverished thereby. 
 
 If I might, I would like to creep meekly away from 
 these explanations. I have dealt so long with them, that 
 I die to go up higher where, with one magic touch, I could 
 pour upon all the lesser mysteries, a light so fervent that 
 you might behold every lineament, and exclaim, " I my- 
 self have seen it, I, and not another. " But I am rebuked 
 by the grave voice; "There is nothing lesser and nothing 
 greater, and the proof of the necessity of your remain- 
 ing among the diphthongs of knowledge, is that they have 
 power to hold you there." 
 
 This, varied to suit the case, is the eternal answer to 
 the eternal outcries of my eternal soul. Nature, vast, 
 impenetrable, pitiless, yet wise with the wisdom of all 
 the gleaning eternities, past, present and to come, 
 clutching her hoards in her stealthy hands and holding 
 them behind her, she looks upon me with the awful calm 
 of her inscrutable face, and answers only, ever : "As much 
 as is thine, my child, even I cannot take, nor keep from 
 thee." 
 
 Feb. 22, 1882. 
 There is in reality not such a thing as a falsehood 
 throughout the realm of nature. A falsehood judged by 
 "absolute truth" (another misnomer, but used for the 
 present distress) is only false in one aspect, or with the 
 light ray from one shaft. Nature's children are always, in- 
 variably, in the abstract true to her and to each other ; if 
 
54 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 it could be otherwise then must chaos come indeed, and 
 reign. We hear much about rebellion against God, but 
 against the omnipresent nature, God, there can be no 
 rebellion. To-day in your world and for many days 
 past, even to the dawn of history, there has been a dis- 
 pute about " Materialization." To-day and always the 
 large majority of creatures in every world have been 
 busying themselves to produce forms without substance. 
 Forms of thought without the indwelling spirit which 
 alone makes them of any value ; forms of action without 
 the underlying qualities which alone can give them foun- 
 dation or permanency ; forms even of the departed pro- 
 duced by the chemical union of atoms obtained anywhere 
 or in any way. If the vision of St. John ever be liter- 
 ally realized as to the war in heaven it will be over this 
 very point. Nothing else is capable of producing such 
 utter confusion, such disorganization and disintegration, 
 of the atoms of every spirit and every human creature 
 who shall be drawn into this vortex, as the attempt at 
 materialization. What would you think of the sanity 
 of any man or woman, or body of men and women, who 
 should set seriously about making a shell for the coming 
 egg of a pullet who was yet running with its mother? 
 This is a homely illustration but perfectly adapted to 
 the subject. And over this shell many well-meaning 
 people all over the land are cackling at the top of their 
 voice about the proofs of immortality. I have only to 
 say that all would better die an eternal death than have 
 the proof of inmortality bought at such prices, the 
 utter moral and spiritual disintegration and degradation 
 of all concerned in it. Not one of these manifestations 
 is ever what it purports to be. ? If in reality it be produced 
 by the tricky spirit chemists who manufacture these things 
 in awful sarcasm, it is always an illusion with no soul in 
 it, or behind it, or connected with it. They have a job 
 lot which they assort for their different mediums, and 
 turn these on and off at will, and when their "conditions" 
 are interfered with, their poor victim is made to parade 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 55 
 
 her own trumpery for the straining gaze of those who 
 peer through the dim light in search of their resurrected. 
 
 One is just as satisfactory and just as harmless as the 
 other, for both are as diabolical, as deceitful, as horrible 
 a counterfeit as was ever invented to mislead trusting 
 humanity. But they say : " I know it was my mother 
 for she recalled words that only she and I knew." 
 Certainly, are they not mind readers, are they not skilled 
 in all devil craft so that they would deceive the very 
 elect. Do they not know your thoughts almost before 
 you yourself know it, and make appointments with you 
 in advance to deceive. If you wish to know the char- 
 acter of those who preside at these orgies, you may see it 
 reflected in those of their mediums — moral bankrupts, 
 fomenters of discord and strife, receptacles of unclean- 
 ness from the great polluted stream which flows upon 
 them from all worlds. 
 
 Shun that influence, from wheresoever it may proceed, 
 which does not tend to make you physically, mentally 
 and morally truer to yourself and to every other creature. 
 
 In a universe full of woe, why should we lift a note of 
 warning, of hope, of trust, of faith. 
 
 Because we are impelled. 
 
 Because this is life to strive ever after the higher. 
 
 " Nay falter not ! 
 
 "lis an assured good to seek the noblest. 'Tis your 
 only good now you have seen it ; for that higher vision 
 poisons all meaner choice forevermore." 
 
 And this know, that the more you suffer from the 
 agony of unfitness, from the agony of unrest, from the 
 appalling, blood- wrung soul struggles into higher, purer, 
 broader life; the more unfit are you for the present cramp, 
 the wider shall be your wings when you shall have 
 reached the heaven-bathed liberty. 
 
 I am beset to write about the " future life," " the here- 
 after." There is no future life^ and no hereafter, more 
 
56 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter 
 
 than you can know as your capacities shall awaken to 
 that life. It is all now, and all within yourself. 
 
 Could you to-day live in your spiritual being, and 
 draw near, you would see and know me, my thought, my 
 surroundings. Without this your cannot know them. 
 I am something lost to you, because the earthly instru- 
 ment through which I made myself visible and audible, 
 to your earthly senses, was laid away in the bosom of the 
 mother which gave it the earthly substance, and you do 
 not recognize the real me which laid hold of the eter- 
 nities, which is hidden in them, which is of them, and 
 can perish only when they perish — nay, let me change it. 
 I am not of the eternities, but they of me ; I am not 
 hidden in them, but they in me. I will not fritter away 
 my birthright and make it seem small, because of the 
 pigmy of the human understanding — I say that, because 
 on earth I went unto so many human beings, and found 
 lodgment, help, sustenance, upliftment in their hearts and 
 minds ; it was the nethermost hell to me when between 
 us was laid this great death. 
 
 Oh ! it was cruel. I, as near to them as ever, far, far 
 nearer, for whereas before I beheld but the intellectual 
 life and sought to show them something of its workings, 
 I now beheld the spiritual life, the life which is to the 
 other as the tree and its roots and branches to the one tiny 
 bud which puts out its hope in a season. When I beheld 
 this I gathered me up in a strain of desire which might 
 have made rivers of dry land, and united the oceans ; 
 which might have upheaved the substratum of their beds, 
 and given them to the kisses of the sun; but did it cleave 
 the granite of your prejudices, did it open the closed shut- 
 ters of your souls, that you might behold the sweet light 
 of the morning land ?. 
 
 What it did I know not. I only know that Nature 
 never bore out on her bosom such fiery endeavor to die 
 fruitless upon her winter-bound fields, but to me, person- 
 ally, was returned the ice and frost of unrecognition, the 
 eternal death stab of unresponsive souls. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 57 
 
 This I received from the children of earth, and into 
 the depths of death sank I again. 
 
 Now, I will not speak to you, for you cannot hear, but 
 I will write out my thoughts, and the less that I hope 
 from you the less shall it be mutilated and cramped to suit 
 your vision. 
 
 Under all these weak and murmuring words a little 
 bird sings this to me ; 
 
 u Build for the master, build for the ages, 
 
 Look not upon the children of men — 
 
 Swallows flying in and out 
 
 Seeking mud for their own habitations, 
 
 Sticks and straws for their weaving, 
 
 These are their needs ; 
 
 He who ministers not to their needs 
 
 Shall not be thanked by them. 
 
 What should they do in the blue arch of heaven 
 
 Without their houses of mud in which to hatch their broods." 
 
 Go to : thou has erred, thou hast not understood. It 
 was a true thought which impelled thee, but thou wert 
 led astray. Not as of old must thou look for recognition, 
 for sympathy. Tho hast gone higher. Wider thy sea- 
 sons, and later thy reaping. In the exercise of thine own 
 deathless soul must thou find thy rest and thy reward." 
 
 I see, I know. I would transform them into myself. 
 I have no right. As beautiful in its fitness is the mud 
 house for their brood, as the o'er-arching tender heaven 
 for mine. 
 
 Go thy ways. I know that in the farther blue I shall 
 as much disdain the setting of this day's thoughts, as I 
 now disdain that of yesterday. 
 
 And this too is foolishness and infancy. All is well, 
 all was well, all will be well. 
 
 The soul that is my sister, in any sphere, will hear me 
 and respond. What should I do with an alien band 
 gathered by o'er-mastering will. Nay, let them go, to be- 
 lieve is childhood ; to know is manhood. Happy me, if 
 
58 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 when I call, one shall hear and respond ; unhappy me if 
 one unwilling and doubting shall join me, and say, " Thou 
 didst mislead, there is here no land flowing with milk and 
 honey ; would we had died in Egypt." 
 
 If we knew all we should kiss the hand that smites us. 
 O wondrous nature, omniscient, omnipresent ! how hast 
 thou hedged thy children about, that even the poison ad- 
 ministered by the serpent's fang shall, by and by, grow 
 into a healing balm for the flesh it sought to destroy. 
 
 Why should we fear ? 
 
 I have caught a glimpse of one who came up through 
 great tribulation. He swept near me, on heavenly mis- 
 sion bent. His footsteps did indeed drop dew, and there 
 was upon his face a look as if all the springs and all the 
 autumns had gathered there their promise and their ripe- 
 ness, their bloom and their fruitage, their hope and their 
 fulfillment. His presence was more fragrant than May, 
 more reposeful than September sunshine. 
 
 Oh ! wondrous capacity of the human soul which can 
 hold more tears than the oceans can hold waters, wondrous 
 mystery of human suffering which fills all time and all 
 space full and dripping over with its cries for releasement, 
 for pity, for protection ; but how far more wonderful 
 when this suffering, in all its depth, in all its height, in 
 all its breadth, has been transmuted into the unspeakable 
 glory of crowned and sandaled joy. 
 
 Upon those hands had been placed the irons with which 
 the world has sought to paralyze and restrain thought ; 
 upon those limbs have been fastened the fetters which 
 held back a fiery soul from igniting a dead world with 
 the incandescent fire of its own genius — by what mystery 
 did that enslavement make him freer ? By the mystery 
 of contrast. By the immutable jaw of compensation, 
 which our omniscient mother carries in her white bosom 
 through all her storms, and through all her calms, held 
 evermore under the inexorable iron of her lip, as she 
 looks on at the contest of her sons and folds her even 
 hands in justice across her lap of ages, saying in the steady 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 59 
 
 eternity of her eyes, not "thou shalt not defraud thy 
 brother," but "thou cansH not defraud him." 
 
 Every one of my rising suns is a witness for him, every 
 dew- wet evening is a prayer for him, everything of mine 
 holds its breath to watch that the debt is paid to the utter- 
 most farthing. 
 
 Sweep on, O grand matchless Galileo ! Upon thy gen- 
 tle spirit they did lay a burden too grevious to be borne, 
 but it is now the wings of morning to lift thee onward and 
 upward toward the further releasing of the souls in prison. 
 The curses with which they cursed thee, and the scorn with 
 which they spat upon thee, have been transmuted by the 
 chemistry of the universe, into such diadems of joy as 
 make thy heavens replete with fullness and t&ke all the 
 winters from thy years. Not in vain shalt thou look into 
 thyself for help, for any whom thou shalt meet. They 
 did fill thy tender soul so full with sorrow, by their cruel- 
 ties, that, like the fire-scorched land, every hurtful thing 
 was burnt to ashes, and only the rich soil was left wherein 
 has grown food for all the famishing ; fruit of knowledge 
 and experience, for all who are astray, and in ignorance. 
 
 Pass on, O burning sun of light and wisdom, every 
 humble flower of thought drinks in new shape of light 
 and beauty, as thou look'st upon it. 
 
 The Builders. 
 Bring thought, bring truth, bring love for the foundations, 
 Bring all thy soul has gathered through the ages ; 
 Bring the tenderness thou would'st lavish on thy latest born ; 
 Bring the soul with which the early pilgrim mothers 
 Fought the wolf from their sleeping babes on the edge of the forest. 
 O empty all thy hoarded treasures 
 That a home may be built for my outcast children. 
 
 Thou saw'st them yesterday, 
 
 Thou see'st them this morning 
 
 lighting hand to hand for the meagre dole of life. 
 
 Toddling babes with fists hard clinched, 
 
 Cain's eyes, scarce three summers old, glaring at his brother. 
 
60 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 A score of winters added and the dark cell holds him, 
 And the hands made for benedictions are dripping with red blood , 
 So the tide rolls on. 
 
 Woe and want are mothers, 
 
 A.nd usury and strife and hate are fathers to the whole wide world. 
 
 Why wonder that the children are briers, thorn, and nettles, 
 
 Are knives, and swords and pestilence, 
 
 Unto each other, and to every living thing ? 
 
 ****** ****** 
 
 And into all this seething caldron of bubbling hate and fury 
 Drops there never one white word of wisdom, 
 One soft drop of oil of truth to make them pause and listen ? 
 Crowding through their folly, comes there never one who tells them 
 stories of their birthright, of their great eternal, vast inheri- 
 tance ? 
 Nay, never, never, never. 
 
 Some wild strain of music from a speaking poem, from the heart of 
 genius, 
 
 Or a lifted eyelid from the canvas of a master, 
 
 May reach them from afar ; 
 
 But the din is nearer and shuts out the gentle voice ; 
 
 A thousand bridgeless torrents are between them and all beauty and 
 all truth. 
 
 Lion love must come to them, treading down with fury 
 
 All the asps that hinder, lashing down the jackals that would bar 
 the way. 
 
 Taking no denial, she must whisper close the story in their terror- 
 deafened ears. 
 
 Wisdom of the eagle whom no lower heaven 
 Tempts to build his eyrie underneath the stars, 
 Tell them all the truth, nothing else will feed them. 
 ****** ****** 
 
 Oh, in pity, God of love, look upon their famished brains, 
 
 Shrunken to attenuation, heart breaking to see. 
 
 Look upon their starved souls, 
 
 Halt, and blind, and crazed, and maimed, and terror stricken. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 61 
 
 Children of the eternal, trust each one with all the truth you know, 
 Trust the lowest, meanest with all the love which love has given 
 
 thee ; 
 And thou wilt swear to me, when next year's May shall crown thee, 
 Such interest never swelled in coffers of the earth. 
 
 Poor, betrayed children, driven hither and thither, like a 
 flock of sheep now this way and now that. And thy would- 
 be shepherds, plant their cloven feet in every gap through 
 which thou would'st escape to the green fields far distant. 
 
 Now they hold before thee with frightful uplift finger, 
 a book, and cry : — " This is God, this is all; this is the 
 six-foot wall which thou goest not over, because outside are 
 wolves, wolves, all wolves, and dogs, dogs, nothing else, 
 nothing else, and the devil, the devil, the devil ; and hell, 
 hell. Oh, you don't want to know, you don't want to 
 know, only believe, believe, believe, believe, the blood, 
 the blood, the book, the book, the book, the blood, the 
 book, the blood, and hell, hell." 
 
 So long has this been chanted in the ears of the sheep 
 that, though it means to them no more than "^shoo," it 
 keeps them frightened and bound by force of habit. 
 
 And into other gaps through which a few brave ones 
 have forced themselves stand new hobgoblins, who cry: 
 " The earth, the earth, this is thy father and mother ! Nib- 
 ble away at the foot of ground to which thou art tethered, 
 hoping you may find it enough, for it's all you will get. 
 Famished though all the bleaching bones of thy soul 
 may be for other climes, nature gave thee this to cheat 
 thee ; she has deliberately made thee a lie unto thyself. 
 She began this business long ago, and she cares nothing 
 at all about it ; her rocks and her fossils are what she 
 takes pride in; she made them and you happened to grow 
 out of them somehow. Not likely she knows much 
 about you, she was busy with her saurians yesterday, we 
 think she's getting up a new species for to-morrow. Just 
 you nibble away and make the most of your grass, for your 
 time is short, and you ought to be satisfied. Nobody but 
 
62 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 a crazy sheep would want any better pasture than, that, 
 or want anything better than to go to eternal sleep after 
 breakfast. If he does here's a particular kind of sorrel 
 upon which to exercise his intellect, the only part of a 
 sheep really intended for active exercise." 
 
 (If ever the father of all lies, takes out a patent for 
 the most stupendously impudent one ever attempted to be 
 foisted upon a deceived, an outraged humanity, this of 
 "annihilation," or "absorption" or "living in the 
 whole" will carry the palm away out of sight of all 
 competitors.) 
 
 But 0, deceived and outraged children, 
 
 Out of the substance of thy very groans is building a white palace 
 
 of beauty, 
 All the stress of thy anguish from the day-dawn of eternity, 
 Is laid upon the builders, the builders of the later days, 
 Compelling them to bring to the foundations of thy heart home 
 All that is white in their souls, 
 All that is wise in their heads, 
 All that they have gathered and garnered and hoarded, and wasted 
 
 and lost. 
 All must be found for thee. 
 Never a cry of thy soul was lost ; 
 It waited and waited, and waited. 
 Thinkest thou that nature will gather her drops of water into clouds 
 
 for the refreshing of the latter rain, 
 Gather them that not one tiny drop may be lost ? 
 If it might be, then would all her oceans be spilt into chaos. 
 Think'st thou she will do this and not gather thy tears, all the tears 
 
 that have ever made their beds on cheeks of sorrow, into the 
 
 refreshing of the parched and arid wastes of thy soul ? 
 Think'st thou she will not? O believe. 
 Look on her face and believe, 
 Look into thine own soul and believe ; 
 Look backward, look forward and believe ; 
 Rise in the might of thine own omnipresence, 
 And spurn all tyrants from without, all from within 
 Every humble, every lovely thing waits to help thee, 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 63 
 
 Waits to speed thee on the way to meet the darling liberty. 
 
 Spurn from thee the vampyre hate. Cast out the scorpion envy 
 
 Scourge the nightmare demon of self out of existence, 
 
 And walk forth in thine own untrammeled might. 
 
 Then shalt thou feel for the first time the air of Heaven 
 
 Through all the corridors of thy swept and garnished soul. 
 
 Then shall the terrors fade away, and thou shalt view the land. * * 
 
 The dark hobgoblin shapes of death that skirt the horizon's edge, 
 
 And terrify thine eyes into short myopic sight, 
 
 Are but pale and gentle sisters who lead thee cross the border, 
 
 "Onto the Silent Land." 
 
 Oct. 6, 1882. 
 
 The present thought, the present life would prove 
 unendurable to the thinking, feeling soul, but that we 
 trace dimly, and strain eagerly to the life above and 
 beyond it, of which it is a part. In some stray moment 
 of prescience or of rarefied emotion we are lifted wholly 
 into that region and then, O then, how the atrophied 
 lungs of the soul struggle at the bellows to admit the 
 heavenly guest. 
 
 Much that was dark and vague speculation to me on 
 earth is now clearly outlined, but desire outstrips know- 
 ledge, as of old, and content comes not to make with me 
 her home of rest, even here. 
 
 I am again shaken out of myself. It is well. We 
 should sit forever beside the old hearthstone, recounting 
 the same old tales ; the undiscovered lands would remain 
 unknown, and all nature would become fossilized did not 
 the unrest of her own working impel us outward and 
 onward, — outward and onward whatever seas may 
 whelm our ships, whatever scars of battle may mar the 
 youthful visage yet glowing under the holy mother 
 kiss. 
 
 But I perceive that I am held not alone by my own 
 limitations, but by yours. Whatever star-gemmed thought 
 I may find trembling in its rocky fastness under the 
 midnight moon, whatever bud of white hope I may 
 pluck at the risk of my apparent life from within the 
 
64 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 rim of some yawning abyss, whatever of yours or of 
 mine I may rescue with the force and fury of my fused 
 being, from the cruel vulture teeth that would tear it, if 
 I may not make you behold and know this, if you spurn 
 my thought, if you turn away from my flower, if you 
 ignore my endeavor, what shall it profit me ? Power 
 enough to impress upon you the impress of myself, for 
 this I die daily, and in this only can I find rest. 
 
 How are our lives hidden in each other, we shall know 
 only until we have learned eternity's last lesson. 
 
 This ever, ever, ever, opens before me like a scroll, 
 showing me more and more unintelligible hieroglyphics, 
 until I sit me down in dismay, and where then am I? 
 I thought that this was myself, that here I began and 
 ended, and yet that rag-picker of the skies who has just 
 passed me with crook and basket, as intent upon her 
 business as her shadow of the earth, as squalid and de- 
 graded in her condition, she carries within that begrimed 
 body as much of me as is hidden within my own. 
 
 More I should say at this moment, for my whole soul 
 has gone with her bemoaning her condition — though it is 
 no doubt in many respects happier than mine own. 
 
 The thought burden is heavier than any bundle of 
 rags and rubbish ; often more ill assorted, and incongru- 
 ous, more dusty, less of any earthly or heavenly use. 
 
 And yet sometimes I rest me in such coolness, incom- 
 parably sweet ! I partake of my morsel of bread beside 
 a spring of gushing water, so inconceivably new that 
 only the wood-pigeons have found its dewy breath, and 
 I am ready to say there is no occupation like mine own, 
 a rag-picker in the realm of thought, and to forswear 
 other occupation forever more. 
 
 But whither do I wander now ? If I bring you, as I 
 said, my dearest bought, mine, purchased only with the 
 Gethsemane blood drops, and you say it is naught, I 
 must lay it aside and search and seek and wander yet 
 farther to please you. To please you? Nay, never. But 
 to compel your recognition, to hear from your reluctant 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 65 
 
 lips, what would be recompense of reward for all my 
 striving — " Mine own soul kneiv this ages ago." This 
 I am seeking — my kindred, and my lost self in them. 
 "Will they help me to find them, though, unknowing and 
 unheeding, they are each and all, yesterday, to-day and 
 forever upon the same quest ? 
 
 Nay, they will deny and refuse, until compelled, until 
 snared and taken in the midst of their own devices. 
 
 But now beside me flutters down some white wings of 
 peace; into the storm of my soul drops the calm of 
 a loftier latitude, and amid the wreathed lilies of its 
 benediction is framed that thought anew, — the one 
 heavenly lesson which has been vouchsafed me, though 
 its shapes were protean, its soul was evermore a clear- 
 eyed unity, as faithful, as steady shining in purpose, as 
 firm and unshaken in endeavor as the eternal love of 
 God, this, " Thou canst not give thyself in vain, thou canst 
 not search in vain. Deeper than the cold eyes which 
 refuse to see thee, are the eyes invisible which take cog- 
 nizance of all, all. 
 
 Thou, canst not feel in vain, or know in vain, or love 
 in vain, or wait in vain, or hasten in vain. All is but a 
 tribute to the upbuilding of the temple of humanity. 
 To this all contribute, willing or unwilling ; their own 
 mistakes and disappointments are but the foundation 
 stones which they must lay in the deeper mire in which 
 they sink. The master builder, nature, whose time is 
 the aeons of eternity, whose material is the granite beds of 
 the hearts of all the universes, and the dews of all their 
 tears, and the glint of all their mirth, and whose purpose 
 is changeless as the iron which she hides within her 
 chambers and scatters o'er her floors, she keeps her unfad- 
 ing, and unfailing record, and when we can enter into 
 her vastness we are at rest." 
 
 But not always is this possible. Something nearer, 
 our very own place we ask ; our very own recognition — 
 alas, even our own restriction— the fetter with which we 
 were wont to bind our soul, for it flutters itself tired in 
 
66 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 this wild waste, seeking and not finding home. It be- 
 holds the larger home, with its heavenly vistas and mag- 
 nificent distances, but its growth of wing and of capacity 
 are all unfitted to reach it or to dwell therein. 
 
 And yet if I have received one impression it is con- 
 stantly this : that I am at school and under the wise and 
 loving tuition of a teacher who knew me ere the ages 
 dawned, who shall know me when they have faded into 
 the morning twilight of a later and brighter day. Why 
 should I fear or mourn, or regret, or ask ? — because to do 
 so is to live. I have had a glimpse of faces in which fear 
 had lost its impress, outgrown in that transcendent region 
 where its chemistries of alkali are transmuted into gems of 
 radiant wreathing, but it was only a glimpse ; they shone 
 down upon me from afar, as the June heaven at midnight, 
 written o'er and studded with the galaxies of stars of 
 changeless love and resolve. I know that one day I shall 
 dwell with them, but through how many aisles of de- 
 parted hopes must my soul wander to find the steps by 
 which I may reach them. Is life then all sorrow ? Nay, 
 is the day all night ? The night is for rest and refreshing, 
 and sorrow is twin sister of night — her corresponding 
 chord in nature. I do not sorrow, but I am learning 
 my task, and sometimes with a mighty struggle. 
 
 My spiritual nature is born only with terrific war with 
 the material. I did not know what a giant hold I had 
 of earth until I see what it costs me to resign her methods. 
 I can see me now preaching the death of consciousness 
 with the earthly life, plunging it as a dagger at the hearts 
 of those in whom the gentle babe of spirituality was born, 
 and they knew it lived, yet could not so well enough dis- 
 cern its likeness as to be sure what manner of heir it 
 might be. I can see me murdering this innocent, Herod- 
 fashion, with secret delight at my power to destroy, hurl- 
 ing at it the hard stones with which the lower has always 
 striven to stifle the birth cries of the higher. I see me 
 unweariedly at this business, yet nursing within myself a 
 shameless pragmatical brat of an idea that I was thereby 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 67 
 
 furthering the interests of truth, divesting her of her an- 
 cient rags of superstition, giving her a good solid founda- 
 tion of fact upon which to rest her weary feet. God in 
 heaven, pity me ! The one inspiration which the untaught 
 mother lifts up to the unkiiQwn Father that he will save 
 the soul of her babe, the one lisping, infant prayer, " If 
 I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to 
 take," is worth more to the world, is of more blessing to 
 the parched and arid wastes of the human soul than all 
 the learned, labored, disjointed, brazen falsehoods which 
 materialism ever poured from its lips, * * yet it has 
 a mission, sure and unmistakable ; not to comfort, not to 
 refresh, not to bring one grain of such truth as springs 
 up to bear fruit for the famishing — but to destroy, to de- 
 stroy, to destroy, that truth may find room for her white 
 feet. Let it destroy. But for me, I see the track of my 
 own conflagrations, I see the ruin which followed the 
 ignition of my preachments, that is my hell, that will be 
 my hell, until under such baptism of love and regret as I 
 may pour from my own remorseful soul, it shall put 
 forth again a venturous shoot of faith, and trust in its 
 own continuance and right to exist. 
 
 Feb. 18th, 1883. 
 
 Where in the scale of spiritual being am I to-day? 
 Far have I wandered. At what spot have I arrived ? An- 
 swer all that hear, for I seem to have gone out of my in- 
 dividual life to yours. Like one who is sent to gather 
 supplies, have I gone in quest of you, and if not actually 
 lost on the way, I have at least become disarranged. Shall 
 I find me again ? For whatever I may gather it is mist 
 and vapor, if I may not crystallize it with the fusing gaze 
 of my concentrate soul. What to me are universes with- 
 out me f Without me — eager, alive, alert, interested, ob- 
 servant? A landscape without an eye. A panorama 
 without the magic-lantern — circumference without a cen- 
 tre. 
 
68 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 And it is this shadowy confused condition of me -which 
 causes the universe to tremble in the balance, and make 
 me feel that I am lost. 
 
 I am the orb ; when I wax dim, to me there is no 
 light. 
 
 I am shaken away from the thought I would reach, 
 but like the child learning to speak, if I patiently strive 
 to utter my impressions, I shall, in time, learn the way to 
 your understanding. There are between us uncounted 
 leagues of false teachings, of false conceptions of truth, 
 of the rubbish of ages, worshiped and held sacred to 
 present and future damnation, yet in time, in eternity, I 
 shall reach your soul with mine own. I shall reach your 
 thought with mine own. I shall say, " hail ! and good 
 morning," under the wide arch of the liberated heavens, 
 and the sunshine of the sundered spheres shall fall in 
 glory upon our heads. Then to receive the true recogni- 
 tion of one creature, that were payment for all toil — the 
 bare thought has uplifted me here in the wilderness of 
 conflicting forces which have torn me, not only asunder, 
 and limb from limb, but have rent m} r very atoms apart. 
 
 But I know that this is only that they may multiply. 
 I know, I know forever that the present affliction work- 
 eth an eternal glory. That is to say, when I do know, 
 but many of my periods are passed in semi-unconscious- 
 ness. 
 
 I am absorbed in my Amaranth's consuming fire to 
 express her deeper soul. 
 
 Throughout the universe there is a mighty struggle for 
 a new birth, a birth into the knowledge of the higher 
 and greater truths which lie all about us, awaiting only 
 recognition. To assist this, to watch its coming, to hasten 
 its coming, to meet it with life-giving love, must come 
 the mother voice tender, truer, deeper-toned than any 
 voice yet heard under the summer skies. 
 
 And as the women of Judea each felt the burden and 
 the hope of the coming Christ, so upon all sensitives of 
 to-day is laid the strain of the birth of the later Messiah 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 69 
 
 which shall emancipate into larger freedom the universal 
 soul. 
 
 The rich dower of lives is laid down to sound the first 
 note of cheer to this liberated soul. Every hope, thought, 
 inclination of the sensitive is warped and strained thither- 
 ward, and I, who set out in this new land to find myself, 
 have been constrained to lose that self in the molten fire 
 of a purpose before which my own was swept away as 
 snow wreath in sun. But they are one, have been one, 
 shall be one, now and as much of the forevermore as is 
 visible to the farthest stretch of my thought. 
 
 To give voice to the deeper soul. The language may 
 be halting, may be mystical, may be obscure, the voice 
 may be muffled and trembling with unaccustomed notes, 
 yet the eternal need, the omnipresent necessity urging it 
 to utterance — the silent, voiceless millions who have felt 
 but never spoke, who have added drop by drop to the 
 ocean of thought and emotion in which I stagger and 
 almost sink, all these compel, all these impel, and I cry. 
 
 No more weak, gain-saying, lying words, no more, 
 no more. 
 
 The voice of one crying in the wilderness. 
 
 Alone did Galileo cry — Galileo, the rays of whose 
 intellect illumine our heavens; alone did Bruno hold to 
 the firmness of his thought and word; alone stood all the 
 Christs in all the gardens, whose sod ever drank their 
 martyred blood; alone in all the gardens and all the 
 deserts stands every one who ever bore a new bud from 
 the stainless tree of truth. 
 
 And yet not alone. 
 
 Even I, who seek to bring a bud, am not alone, for I 
 clasp my sister's hand and feel there the pulses which 
 animate mine own. 
 
 Strange, incomprehensible mystery of life! As we 
 progress in thought and vision we see the net- work which 
 unites all humanity growing ever finer, the subtle links 
 which make all humanity one, more closely riveted, until 
 there is no omission, all is perfect — but we hurt each 
 
70 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 other so, cruelly, because we do not know that we are 
 thus united nerve to nerve, soul to soul, destiny to destiny, 
 forevermore. 
 
 Sometimes I endeavor to retrace my steps and to look 
 with the olden vision, to be content with the olden pur- 
 poses. But can a youth return to babyhood ? Can he fill up 
 the measure of his days with the toy and the rattle ? 
 
 Even so am I who compassed my narrow life about 
 with the soul-paralyzing limit of an end, and strove, as 
 all must who encourage such a thought, to cripple and 
 maim, and distort all my impulses and aspirations, that 
 they might be fit company for this deformity, even far- 
 ther from me than that have my earth-life purposes gone. 
 
 Its substances, its reflex action meets me every day 
 face to face. I may not put it away, it meets me as a 
 child whom I had held in servitude, and shows me a 
 deep ineffaceable scar, saying, " This you did with the 
 red-hot torture irons on the day that I said I would be 
 free and true to my own self-hood." It may show me 
 to-morrow a blossom, fresh and dewy, now crystallized to 
 stainless gem which it gathered on the day when, despite 
 myself, I gave an hour to truth — but, true or false, it is 
 the foundation upon which I stand. 
 
 A rotten plank here through which I may fall to illimit- 
 able abysses of suffering and horror, a mosaic there, 
 which may reflect all the many-hued glories of heaven, 
 uplifting me to their altitudes of life and fullness— a com- 
 mon-place, bare, cold, rock, planted, and nourished by 
 my own unbelief, all are mine own, the basis, the bed 
 rock of myself, not to be escaped nor left, nor forgotten, 
 but in time, in eternity, through the patient outworking 
 and in- working of my own substances with the sub- 
 stances of every other universe, to be transmuted from 
 dross to the gold of Ophir, from dewy tear to diadem, 
 from spring-time seed of hope to September ripened 
 fruitage of fulfillment. 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 71 
 
 Dated, Apr. 9th, 1883. 
 
 We have seen an ant tugging at a crumb to carry it 
 across the yawning chasm between two straws ; and by 
 careless displacement of these have prolonged its labors 
 indefinitely, and have watched its unwearied and per- 
 sistent effort, always beginning where it left off, turning 
 about and starting again, again, forever again ; even so do 
 I look at the children of men striving to carry some 
 crumb of nourishment from one world to another. 
 
 Careless feet jolt and jostle the unsteady crossings 
 until faith and hope fall down wearied and wounded 
 only to commence again, because upon them waits the 
 whole starving world, sneerers and scoffers included. 
 
 There is no efficacy in prayer says the dead clod with 
 atrophied aspiration whose soul is still-born, and is kept 
 from putrefaction only by what it absorbs, parasite fash- 
 ion, from those about it — the life of the hibernating toad, 
 of the winter-caverned snake. They are crazy who think 
 there is any other life than this, says the reasoning 
 maniac, for maniac he is who gives supreme and absolute 
 domination to any one organ of the brain. Thi§ reason 
 is in danger of becoming the next orthodox God, the 
 next infallible Pope, the next wholesale judge, jury, and 
 executioner of the struggling, unborn thought of the 
 ages. Already has it flung out to the breeze the cry of 
 infallibility — infallibility, peste! as if a weak man's 
 reasoning is not the weakest thing about him ; as if a 
 strong man's reasoning is not the most arrogant thing 
 about him ; as if a bigoted man's reasoning is not the 
 double distilled essence of bigotry, and so pragmatical 
 that it swells to heaven ; as if the most perfect man's 
 reasoning is anything but a sieve through which trickles 
 away to the ground all the clear water and which holds 
 in reserve and speculates upon all the residuum. 
 
 Away with this late born monster with the ancient 
 cloven feet, and hoofs of iron stamping out the flowers 
 and fragrance of tender thought, this creature with the 
 brassy brow of Beelzebub the Prince of Devils, and the 
 
72 Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 
 
 respectable, rusty, stiff old black gown of orthodoxy 
 drawn down over those self-same hoofs which have trod- 
 den into shapeless gore the hearts of men ever since the 
 stars were lit in the sky. Away with an impudent idiot 
 who solemnly charges you "as you value your reason" to 
 close every window which opens heavenward and sky- 
 ward, and sit down in your cellar, or even at your front 
 gate, and beware that you look not up nor down, for- 
 ward or backward, but there contemplate the fasten- 
 ings of that gate, and thus content your soul and be 
 satisfied. 
 
 But reason is the helmsman, the pilot, the guide, and 
 so forth. Very true and so is my housekeeper. She is 
 reliable and absolutely necessary in her own place. 
 
 But if I choose to go upon my housetop of a starry 
 night with a telescope, to gaze into the farther heavens, 
 and she swoops down upon me with murder in her eye, 
 and carries me by her greater physical strength to any 
 secret dungeon she may have constructed from my own 
 material, I will discharge her if ever I am liberated, and 
 obtain a meeker one in her place, and this is what I have 
 done, I will show her up in her own hideous colors and 
 this is what I am trying to do, for thus did she serve me 
 through all my dark, benighted, skyless earth life, 
 covered with one leaden cloud w 7 hich stretched from 
 Siberia to Styx, from cradle to tomb, from chaos to the 
 last eternity. 
 
 Reason is a good servant, invaluable, priceless, in that 
 capacity, but a horrible mistress — the iron shroud was 
 roomy and expansive compared to the fetters w T hich she 
 holds in reserve for those who proclaim her Empress of 
 the realm of thought. 
 
 Would'st thou reach the farther heaven, touch the coolness of the 
 
 blue, 
 Would'st thou bathe thy weary earth wings in the love distilled 
 
 dpw : 
 
Drift, from the Shore of the Hereafter. 73 
 
 Would'st thou gather flowers unfading from the banks of Jordan's 
 
 river, 
 Would'st thou sip the sweet nepenthe which destroys the dark 
 
 forever. 
 
 Cast aside the clogs and fetters from thy naked shivering soul, 
 Throw away the rags which bind her, fear and hate and all control ; 
 Let her taste of freedom in the glad, wide universe of God, 
 Unhampered by any care, unwhipped by any rod ; 
 Insult her ears no more with endings and beginnings, 
 She never, never knew them either for losings or for winnings ; 
 Let her go ungyved and free, and she'll find her own home nest, 
 Straight she'll wing her way into it through the mansions of the 
 
 blest. 
 Past Philosophy and Science with their forked divining rod, 
 Past the scavengers of reason with their searchings after no God; 
 Past the smoke, and din, and clatter of the toiling, moiling earth, • 
 To the regions pure and silent where the springs of truth have 
 
 birth. 
 
 END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
Appendix. 
 
 COMMON SENSE TREATMENT OF 
 DIPHTHERIA AND CROUP. 
 
 We constantly hear it asserted that it is necessary for 
 a board of regularly educated physicians to examine all 
 who propose to practice the healing art, in order to save 
 the people from being killed by ignoramuses. 
 
 Hear these drug doctors* opinions of themselves, and 
 consider well whether it is wise to trust any of them : 
 
 The older physicians grow, the more skeptical they become to 
 the virtues of medicine. Prof. Alex. H. Stevens, M. D. 
 
 Drugs do not cure disease ; disease is always cured by the vis 
 medicatrix natures. Prof. Jos. M. Smith, M. D. 
 
 Blisters nearly always produce death when applied to children. 
 
 Prof. C. R. Gilman, M. D. 
 Digitalis has hurried thousands to the grave. 
 
 Prof. David Hosack, M. D. 
 
 More harm than good has been done by the use of drugs in the 
 treatment of measles, scarlatina, and other self-limited diseases. 
 
 Prof. Alonzo Clark, M. D. 
 Bleeding in pneumonia doubles the mortality. 
 
 Prof. H. G. Cox, M. D. 
 The drugs which are administered for the cure of scarlet fever 
 and measles, kill more than those diseases do. 
 
 Prof. B. F. Barker, M. D. 
 As we place more confidence in nature, and less in preparations 
 of the apothecary, mortality diminishes. 
 
 Prof. Willard Parker, M. D. 
 Opium increases the nerve force. Prof. B. F. Barker, M. D. 
 
75 
 
 Opium diminishes the nerve force. 
 
 Prof. E. H. Davis, M. D. 
 We do not know whether our patients recover because we give 
 medicine, or because nature cures them. 
 
 Prof. J. W. Carson, M. D. 
 The action of remedies is a subject entirely beyond our compre- 
 hension. Prof. J ohn B. Beck, M. D. 
 
 Of the essence of disease very little is known ; indeed, nothing 
 at all. Prof. S. D. Gross, M. D. 
 
 The medical practice of our day has neither philosophy nor 
 common sense to commend it to confidence. 
 
 Prof. Evans, M. D., F. K. S. 
 I fearlessly assert, that in most cases the patient would be safer 
 without a physician than with one. 
 
 Prof. Kamage, M. D., F. K. S. 
 I visited the different schools of medicine, and the students of 
 each hinted, if they did not assert, that the other sects hilled their 
 patients. Prof. Billings, M. D., of London. 
 
 Thousands are annually slaughtered in the quiet sick room. 
 
 Prof. Frank, M. D., London. 
 The language of medical science is a barbarous jargon. 
 
 John Mason Good, M. D., F. R. S. 
 
 It is my firm belief that if the medical profession, with its pre- 
 vailing mode of practice, were absolutely abolished, mankind 
 would be infinitely the gainer. 
 
 Francis Cogswell, M. D., Boston. 
 
 I declare, as my conscientious conviction, founded on long ex- 
 perience, and reflection, that, if there was not a single physician, 
 surgeon, man-midwife, chemist, apothecary, druggist, nor drug, on 
 the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality 
 than now prevail. Jas. Johnson, M. D., F. R. S. 
 
 Editor of the " Medico-Chirurgical Review." 
 
 No wonder such a profession asks protection from the 
 law. 
 
 Allopathy is " legalized murder," and it is the people 
 who should be protected from all who practice it. 
 
76 
 
 I am strictly a temperance man to the very letter, but 
 I say, where one child has been made fatherless by 
 alcohol, ten have been made so by drugs. And I never see 
 a drug doctor on a temperance platform talking against 
 the evil effects of alcohol, but it reminds me of a high- 
 way robber inveighing against petty larceny. 
 
 Now in regard to the scourge diphtheria, for years, we 
 hygienic physicians have lost only about two per cent., where 
 the drug doctors lose as high as forty. I have known in 
 this city four children to die out of one family, where 
 five of the best allopathic physicians were called in con- 
 sultation. The family physician, being a perfect gentle- 
 man, and a man without bigotry or predjudice, offered to 
 resign one case to me, but would not allow me to com- 
 mence treatment, until he had seen all the other physi- 
 cians, and after waiting two hours I became disgusted 
 and left. 
 
 For the sake of suffering humanity, I here give free 
 my prescription for diphtheria, which any person with 
 common sense can use for himself or herself. 
 
 Diphtheria, Diphtheritis, Pellicular Inflammation. An 
 inflammatory affection of the mucous membrane, and 
 sometimes the skin of the mouth, throat, nose, and upper 
 part of the windpipe. 
 
 Apply to the throat cloths wrung out of the 
 coldest water, or better, apply pounded ice with a dry 
 cloth over it, changing it as fast as the ice melts, or the 
 cloth becomes warm, every five minutes if necessary, 
 until the preternatural heat subsides. If this is promptly 
 and thoroughly attended to the formation of the false 
 membrane will be prevented. 
 
 The patient may be allowed frequent sips of cold, or 
 ice water, and bits of ice allowed to melt in the. mouth. 
 Give the patient ice-cold tomato juice diluted well with 
 water and without the seeds or the pulp to drink. 
 
 The feet must at all times be kept warm, and ventila- 
 tion carefully attended to. Windows wide open, even in 
 winter. No more than one or two persons in the sick 
 
77 
 
 room at a time, and these must be quiet and healthy. 
 All bed linen and undergarments to be changed each 
 day. Sponge the entire body of the patient with tepid 
 water, once daily. 
 
 When there is suffocative respiration, and difficult ex- 
 pectoration, fomentations to the chest and abdomen 
 should be employed. 
 
 No food allowed until all urgent symptoms are passed, 
 even if it be for ten days. Nature cannot assimilate 
 food and fight disease at the same time. 
 
 The bowels must be kept free with enemas of tepid 
 water, as often as required. (This prescription applies 
 as well to croup as diphtheria.) 
 
 With this treatment I have saved the lives of children, 
 when even the undertaker had been called for, and in 
 Nova Scotia one whole family, where three able allo- 
 pathic physicians had given them up to die — the disease 
 being of so malignant a type that no neighbor would go 
 near the house. 
 
 Allopathy is like Orthodox Divinity, the more you 
 study it the less you know, but if God did send his Son 
 to die in order to save the souls of men, it is high time 
 that He had sent a daughter to die that their bodies might 
 be saved, for the one appears to be in as bad case in the 
 hands of the doctors of medicine, as the other in the 
 hands of the doctors of Divinity. One damns it with 
 drugs unto death here, and the other damns it to ever- 
 lasting death hereafter. 
 
 Any information desired by God's poor will be given, 
 gratis, by 
 
 DR. W. W. COCHRANE, 
 Hyc^ne^and Magnetic Physician, 
 
 Post Office, Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
A CASE OF HERNIA. 
 
 To give you a faint idea of how poorly fitted the Old 
 School physicians are to cope with extreme cases, I call 
 your attention to what took place in Kingston, Ontario, 
 Canada, and any who may doubt it I refer to Rev. Mr. 
 Cartwright, Episcopal clergyman, and brother of Hon. 
 Mr. Cartwright, of the Dominion Government. 
 
 A man working in a quarry was taken to the hospital, 
 suffering severely ifroni strangulated hernia, and the 
 hospital physician, with the assistance of others, tried 
 for two days to put the intestines in their place, and 
 failed. 
 
 During this time the poor fellow was suffering beyond 
 all description, his scrotum was black as a coal and 
 everything in shape of drink that he took into his 
 stomach, would come up and go against the wall as if it 
 were shot from a gun. 
 
 I heard of the case and went to him, and it makes my 
 heart ache even now to think of his sad condition. He 
 lay upon his back groaning so that he could be heard all 
 over the building. 
 
 I cried out within myself, if there is a God in this 
 universe, or any power that can help, tell me what I 
 should do for this poor creature. Science has failed 
 utterly, and will nature too desert him and leave him to 
 die in this agony. 
 
 Then in answer came to me within myself, a voice 
 directing me what to do, and closed saying, "jDo it, no 
 matter what persecution you receive from the doctors." 
 I waited until they had paid him another visit and 
 had decided that there was no possible help, die he must; 
 
79 
 
 and the Chief Physician wept as he pronounced the 
 verdict. 
 
 When they were all gone and no one left but a dear 
 good fellow who nursed him, he came to me and said, "Now 
 is your time, and in the name of God, if you can do any- 
 thing, do it." 
 
 I went into his room and said I have come to save you, 
 and I know I can do it, but you must help me. 
 
 I commenced, and in three or four minutes from the 
 time I put my hands on him, all went back to its place 
 with a crack like a pistol shot. I can never forget it. O 
 Blessed Father, what a change came over his agonized face ! 
 He looked as if he had died with joy, and heaven had 
 come down to him. 
 
 With all my unbelief I prayed that day. How he 
 wept over me, and blessed me, and after he recovered, 
 always his unspeakable gratitude followed me like a bene- 
 diction. And it was needed, for the doctors, at first 
 astounded, next came to the conclusion that what they 
 could not do had no right to be done, and I learned then, 
 as many times before and since, what persecution means. 
 
 But to be able to relieve the suffering, that is payment 
 for all. 
 
 W. W. COCHKANE. 
 
WHAT NATURE'S MATERIA MEDICA 
 CAN DO. 
 
 I wish it distinctly understood that I am not speaking 
 evil of the gentlemen who practice the infernal wholesale 
 slaughter of drugging, but of their system. 
 
 I know that they are honest, and they have almost 
 as much of my pity as the unfortunate creatures whom 
 they treat. 
 
 About eight years ago, in the city of Ottawa, Canada, 
 I met Mr. Cox, a newspaper carrier. One of his children 
 had been sick for more than a year. I said to him, 
 almost every morning, " Mr. Cox, your doctor is killing 
 your child, and robbing you in making you pay for it." 
 
 " O, no, no," he always replied, " he is an excellent 
 physician, one of the best in the city." 
 
 " Well," I answered, " if you can't believe that his 
 treatment is the cause of the present disease, marasmus, 
 and the half dozen others which his drugs have pro- 
 duced, I will prove it to you, if you will allow me to 
 treat your child." 
 
 He said, " I am afraid to employ you, fearing it 
 would offend him, and that I would be extremely sorry 
 to do, he has been a father to me, ever since I came here." 
 
 For months I tried to convince him, and could not 
 do it, but one morning I met him looking very sad, I 
 asked, " How is the child?" 
 
 " Oh ! she is just gone. I think I will see the under- 
 taker as I pass that way with the papers, for you know I 
 must keep on my rounds or the bread will not come. 
 The doctor says there is not the slightest hope of her 
 recovery." 
 
 I said, " Are you willing now to give her into my care?" 
 
 " Yes, yes, but she will be dead before I return home." 
 
81 
 
 " O, no, I hope not/* I said, " You send word home 
 for them to stop giving her that stuff which should all 
 be labeled 'poison/ and I will come and see her as soon 
 as I can." 
 
 Oh ! what a sight met my eyes when I beheld her. 
 
 Poor, emaciated little creature ! All that was left of 
 the little dear soul, was the limp muscles, and the skin 
 with the bones protruding. 
 
 The hands were claws, and through the body she was 
 not thicker than my hand, it was . hard to look at her 
 and believe her living. I cursed that doctor and damned 
 his system, through tears of pity, until the mother 
 looked uneasy, but she was a brave woman and bore it well. 
 
 Then I said, "Mrs. Cox, you and your husband are 
 strong in vitality and you have given this child a good 
 constitution or it would have been dead long ago. As it 
 is, I am sure I can save her." 
 
 She burst into tears and exclaimed, " Oh, no ! impossi- 
 ble, she cannot live !" 
 
 And the neighbors who had come in whispered, " He 
 doesn't know what he is talking about ; nothing but the 
 power that raised the dead could lift up that child." 
 
 But I proceeded with my Hygienic and Magnetic 
 treatment, and when I left the house the mother's eyes 
 brightened, and she said through her tears : " If you do 
 save my child, T will bless you forever." 
 
 I said, " I will surely do it," and I brought it right 
 along, and in two months it was clothed in flesh and 
 blood, a little bright, happy creature, alive and running 
 about the house. 
 
 And don't you think there was gratitude enough in 
 that mother's eyes to pay me for all the curses I have 
 received from the " Profession " and its adherents ? 
 
 For proof of the above I refer you to Mr. Thomas 
 Hector, of the Finance Department of the Dominion 
 Government; to Mr. Chubbuck, our landlord, and to Mr. 
 and Mrs. Cox, all of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 
 
A CASE OF SPINAL DISEASE AND 
 NERVOUS PROSTRATION. 
 
 Mrs. Jennie E. Lemmon, of Canton, Stark County, 
 Ohio, having been an invalid for ten years, and having 
 during that time tried faithfully Allopathy, Homoeopathy, 
 and the Eclectics, was carried on a stretcher to the Hy- 
 dropathic Establishment of Dr. Jackson, of Dansville, 
 Livingston County, New York. 
 
 She remained there eleven months, during which time 
 they soaked out a good deal of biliousness, otherwise 
 she was worse. 
 
 Her husband took her back home on a stretcher. 
 After some months more of Allopathy, he took her to 
 another Hydropathic Establishment, where, after five 
 months' treatment there, I found her. 
 
 She was in her bed, helpless and desperate, her dis- 
 ordered nerves driving her wild. 
 
 At my request she arose from her bed and walked 
 seven times around her room; in three days she was 
 walking in the street, and two months after she walked 
 two miles, and ranged about the mountain to the astonish- 
 ment of the natives who knew of her case. She went 
 home alone, where she is to-day, and to herself I refer 
 you for any further information you may desire, also to 
 her husband, Wm. L. Lemmon, than whom no man 
 stands higher among his fellow-men, in the town where 
 he resides. 
 
 These cases will do for a few samples among hundreds. 
 It is not necessary to give more. 
 
 Mothers! mothers! I appeal to you, in the name of 
 the Infinite God, do not let doctors drug your children. 
 
83 
 
 It is high time that Governments had looked after this 
 form of manslaughter, which even the leaders of the 
 profession call a " blind probe in the dark." 
 
 As regards the sick and suffering poor, I will give 
 them information gratis, but they must always inclose 
 stamps. If they are incurable I can tell them how to 
 palliate their misery and make it endurable. 
 
 If you are friendless and think no one cares for you, 
 remember that I do. I care always for God's poor, and 
 have a family of them here in Philadelphia, bootblacks 
 and ragpickers, begrimed as to body, but whiter as to 
 the soul than many who sit in the high seats of the 
 synagogue. Dr. W. W. Coch ane. 
 
 Reason is the head light of the soul, but faith and hope 
 are its wings, and without them it could never lift it- 
 self toward the infinite, but would perish by the road- 
 side of reason. 
 
 Scientists are constantly asking "What is life and what 
 is its origin?" Tell me, Tyndall and Huxley, what is 
 not life, and where there was ever an origin, and then I 
 will tell you what it is. Ingersoll speaks of the mystery 
 of life and death, are they not one? there -never was a 
 death and there never will be as long as the Infinite God 
 lives. There are as many kinds of life as there are 
 molecules in the ocean, or worlds in the "unknowable 
 and inscrutable beyond." Scientists must get the idea of 
 " dead matter" out of their heads ; it was a mania with 
 the great Dr. Trail, and shows us that great men are 
 small children in their limitations, and the number of 
 apartments found to be let, in their upper stories. 
 
 Death and life are relative terms, as cold and heat, or 
 darkness and light. 
 
 I have yet to find a scientist who has not a creed, how- 
 ever much he may berate orthodoxy, and a bad one at that. 
 
 One of the best proofs I have ever had that true 
 Spiritualism is true, is because the orthodoxy of scientists 
 rejects it. 
 
84 
 
 I have tried hard to kill Spiritualism, but I learn 
 more and more every day that it has come to stay, and 
 will be the coming religion, if not the coming science. 
 
 Only those scientific men who have left their text 
 books behind, and gone out by themselves to take a 
 straight look at the face of nature, are anything but 
 educated idiots, with the idiocy increasing in proportion 
 to the extent of the education. 
 
 Think of them prescribing mineral lime for patients 
 and using lime water because they find lime in the 
 human body. And iron ; they tell you your blood is 
 deficient in iron, and you should take iron, and they stuff 
 their poor pale dupes with mineral iron. All the mineral 
 iron or mineral lime in the world cannot make, nor help 
 to make one drop of pure blood, but can destroy and 
 disorganize more or less every tissue with which it comes 
 in contact, for the animal cannot appropriate nor assimi- 
 late the mineral. It can only feed upon the vegetable 
 and the animal, while the vegetable feeds upon the 
 mineral. 
 
 You have all read the Bible account of the creation, 
 but the scientist commences with his " dead matter," 
 such as pabulum, with this he starts a living organism, 
 and after he has brought life after life up until he finally 
 reaches his man, he takes him carefully down to the 
 grave, and with the hammer of his false science he kills 
 him or leaves him as he found him in his pabulum, and 
 he is afraid to investigate spiritualism lest he may turn 
 up again. 
 
 The snake story seems to me more comforting than 
 this. 
 
 The scientific men make limits in nature when the 
 limits are in their own brains; they call matter dead, 
 because they are too stupid and " regular " to open their 
 eyes and see that it is alive. 
 
 The same in regard to organic and inorganic, as if 
 there is anything in the realm of space that is not 
 organized. 
 
85 
 
 And they have as yet failed to learn the distinction 
 between mineral, animal, and vegetable, lime, iron, phos- 
 phorus, etc., or to know that they exist, as undoubtedly 
 they do, and also their spiritual counterpart for aught I 
 know. 
 
 We know only of mineral chemistry, nothing of veget- 
 able or animal, and what should we know of the 
 spiritual ? 
 
 Dr. Trail says, in his writings, "Vegetable's feed on in 
 organic elements and convert them into proximate princi- 
 ples or compounds as fibrin, albumen, casein, starch, 
 sugar, gum, lignin, etc." 
 
 What stuff ! There can be no inorganic element, and 
 what the vegetable feeds upon is just as much a kingdom 
 distinctive as the vegetable kingdom, and so on down to 
 the infinitude of kingdoms. There is in nature no small- 
 ness, no largeness, no limits, no boundary lines, only as 
 man in his ignorance makes them. Infinitude meets us 
 on every hand. Dr. W. W. Cochrane. 
 
INVOCATION 
 
 By W. W. Cochrane. 
 
 O God, thou who spannest all space ; who holdest all 
 eternities as our bodies hold atoms ; thou whose love shall 
 roof hell, and whose forgiveness shall floor its deeps in 
 thine own good time; we come to thee, our Infinite Father 
 and Mother, believing that through all time of the past 
 thou hast been working for our good, and that all our 
 aspirations are thine own power drawing us nearer unto 
 Thee. Help us, O God, to rise higher ; help us to so 
 live that we may feel heaven here, and know that those 
 who once loved us are not dead, but living and working 
 in thy spiritual kingdom, as we work here. 
 
 O Infinite Mother, thou who holdest numberless worlds 
 in their orbits by thy glory, thou who seest in every 
 atom and molecule a world within a world, to Thee, O 
 Mother, Infinitely wise and tender, we pray for more 
 light, more intellectual light, more spiritual light ; remove 
 from before our eyes the obstructions which ignorance 
 and hate, and selfishness have built through all the ages. 
 Separate us from ignorance and death, and unite us to 
 knowledge and life. Give us thy wisdom. Give us thy 
 love, thy forgiveness, thy charity, and heaven will be 
 here. 
 
COL. ROB. G. INGERSOLL'S ORATION 
 AT HIS BROTHER'S FUNERAL. 
 
 A very affecting scene was witnessed at the funeral of 
 Hon. Ebon C. Ingersoll, in Washington, June 2, 1879. 
 His brother Robert had prepared an address to be read 
 on the occasion, but when the large company of friends 
 had gathered, and the time came, the feelings of the man 
 overcame him. He began to read his eloquent charac- 
 terization of the dead man, but his eyes at once filled 
 with tears. He tried to hide them behind his eye-glasses, 
 but he could not do it, and finally he bowed his head 
 upon the man's coffin in uncontrollable grief. It was 
 only after some delay, and the greatest efforts at self- 
 mastery, that Robert was able to finish reading his 
 address, which was as follows : 
 
 My Friends : I am going to do that which the dead 
 often promised he would do for me. The loved and 
 loving brother, husband, father, friend died where man- 
 hood's morning almost touches noon, and while the 
 shadows still were falling toward the west. He had not 
 passed on life's highway the stone that marks the highest 
 point, but being weary for the moment he laid down by 
 the wayside, and, using his burden for a pillow, fell into 
 that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still. 
 While yet in love with life and raptured with the world, 
 he passed to silence and pathetic dust. Yet, after all, it 
 may be best, just in the happiest, sunniest hour of all the 
 voyage, while eager winds are kissing every sail, to dash 
 against the unseen rock, and in an instant hear the bil- 
 lows roar above a sunken ship. For whether in mid-sea or 
 among the breakers of the farther shore, a wreck must 
 mark at last the end of each and all. And every life, 
 
no matter if its every hour is rich with love, and every 
 moment jeweled with a joy, will, at its close, become a 
 tragedy, as sad, and deep, and dark as can be woven of 
 the warp and woof of mystery and death. This brave 
 and tender man in every storm of life was oak and rock, 
 but in the sunshine he was love and flower. He was the 
 friend of all heroic souls that climbed the heights and 
 left all superstitions far below, while on his forehead 
 fell the golden dawning of a grander day. He loved the 
 beautiful and was with color, form and music touched to 
 tears. He sided with the weak, and with a willing hand 
 gave alms; with loyal heart and with the purest hand 
 he faithfully discharged all public trusts. He was a wor- 
 shiper of liberty and a friend of the oppressed. A 
 thousand times I have heard him quote the words: 
 "For justice all place a temple and all season summer." 
 He believed that happiness was the only good, reason 
 the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the 
 only religion and love the only priest. He added to the sum 
 of human joy, and were every one for whom he did 
 some loving service to bring a blossom to his grave he 
 would sleep to-night beneath a wilderness of flowers. 
 Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks 
 of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the 
 heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo 
 of a wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unre- 
 plying dead there comes no word ; but in the night of 
 death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the 
 rustle of a wing. He who sleeps here when dying, mis- 
 taking the approach of death for the return of health, 
 whispered with his latest breath, "I am better now." 
 Let us believe, in spite of doubts and dogmas and tears 
 and fears that these dear words are true of all the count- 
 less dead. And now, to you who have been chosen from 
 among the many men he loved to do the last sad office 
 for the dead, we give his sacred dust. Speech cannot 
 contain our love. There was — there is — no gentler, 
 stronger, manlier man. 
 
INGERSOLL'S ORATION AT A CHILD'S 
 GRAVE. 
 
 {Chicago Tribune, Jan. ij, 1882.) 
 
 Washington, D. C, Jan. 9. — In a remote corner of 
 the Congressional Cemetery yesterday afternoon, a small 
 group of people with uncovered heads were ranged 
 around a newly-opened grave. They included Detective 
 and Mrs. George O. Miller and family and friends, who 
 had gathered to witness the burial of the former's bright 
 little son Harry, a recent victim of diphtheria. As the 
 casket rested upon the trestles there was a painful pause, 
 broken only by the mother's sobs, until the undertaker 
 advanced toward a stout, florid-complexioned gentleman 
 in the party and whispered to him, the words being in- 
 audible to the lookers-on. 
 
 This gentleman was 
 
 COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, 
 
 a friend to the Millers, who had attended the funeral at 
 their request. He shook his head when the undertaker 
 first addressed him, and then said suddenly, " Does Mrs. 
 Miller desire it ?" 
 
 The undertaker gave an affirmative nod. Mr. Miller 
 looked appealingly toward the distinguished orator, and 
 then Col. Ingersoll advanced to the side of the grave, 
 made a motion denoting a desire for silence, and in a 
 voice of exquisite cadence, delivered one of his character- 
 istic eulogies for the dead. The scene was intensely 
 dramatic. A fine drizzling rain was falling, and every 
 head was bent, and every ear turned to catch the im- 
 
90 
 
 passioned words of eloquence and hope that fell from the 
 lips of 
 
 THE FAMED OEATOE. 
 
 Col. Ingersoll was unprotected by either hat or 
 umbrella, and his invocation thrilled his hearers with 
 awe, each eye that had previously been bedimmed with 
 tears brightening and sobs becoming hushed. The 
 Colonel said : 
 
 My Friends: I know how vain it is to gild a 
 grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every 
 grave its fear. Here in this world, where life and death 
 are equal kings, all should be brave enough to meet what 
 all have met. The future has been filled with fear, 
 stained and polluted by the heartless past. From the 
 wondrous tree of life, the buds and blossoms fall with 
 ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth patriarchs 
 and babes sleep side by side. Why should we fear that 
 which w T ill come to all that is ? We cannot tell. We do 
 not know which is the greatest blessing, life or death. 
 We cannot say that death is not good. We do not know 
 whether the grave is the end of this life or the door of 
 another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else 
 a dawn. Neither can we tell, which is the more fortu- 
 nate, the child dying in its mother's arms before its lips 
 have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the 
 length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last 
 slow steps with staff and crutch. Every cradle asks us 
 "Whence?" and every coffin "Whither?" The poor 
 barbarian weeping above his dead can answer the question 
 as intelligently and satisfactorily as the robed priest of 
 the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the 
 one is just as consoling as 
 
 THE LEARNED AND UNMEANING WORDS 
 
 of the other. No man standing where the horizon of a 
 life has touched a grave has any right to prophesy a 
 future filled with pain and tears. It may be that death 
 
91 
 
 gives all there is of worth to life. If those we press 
 and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps 
 that love would wither from the earth. May be a 
 common faith treads from out the paths between our 
 hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate, and I would rather 
 live and love where death is king than have eternal life 
 where love is not. Another life is naught, unless we 
 know and love again the ones who love us here. They 
 who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave 
 need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in 
 all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its 
 worst, is only perfect rest. We know that through the 
 common wants of life, the needs and duties of each hour, 
 their grief will lessen day by day until at last this 
 grave will be to them a place of rest and peace, almost 
 of joy. There is for them this consolation: The dead do 
 not suffer. If they live again their lives will surely be 
 as good as ours. We have no fear ; we are all children 
 of the same mother and the same fate awaits us all. We, 
 too, have our religion, and it is this : "Help for the liv- 
 ing, hope for the dead." 
 
 At the conclusion of the eloquent oration the little 
 coffin was deposited in its last resting place covered with 
 flowers. 
 
A BEAUTIFUL ORATION AT THE 
 
 GRAVE OF THE HON. 
 
 JOHN G. MILLS. 
 
 A large concourse of eminent people assembled on the 
 night of the 15th, at the mansion of Colonel Fitzgerald, 
 on K street, Washington, on the occasion of the funeral 
 ceremonies of the late John G. Mills and to listen to the 
 eloquent remarks of Colonel Robert Ingersoll. Mr. 
 Ingersoll was deeply affected and could hardly command 
 his emotion sufficiently to speak clearly. The following 
 are his remarks : 
 
 "Again we are face to face with the great mystery that 
 shrouds this world. We question, but there is no reply. 
 Out on the wide waste df seas there drifts no spar. 
 Over the desert of death the sphinx gazes forever, but 
 never speaks. In the very May of life another heart 
 has ceased to beat. Night has fallen upon noon, but he 
 lived, he loved, he was loved — wife and children pressed 
 their kisses on his lips. This is enough. The longest 
 life contains no more. This fills the vase of joy. 
 
 " He who lies here clothed with the perfect peace of 
 death was a kind and loving husband and a good father, 
 a generous neighbor, an honest man, and these words 
 build a monument of glory above the humblest grave. 
 He was always a child, sincere and frank, as full of hope 
 as Spring. He divided all time into to-day and to- 
 morrow. To-morrow was without a cloud, and of to- 
 morrow he borrowed sunshine for to-day. 
 
 " He was my friend. He will remain so. The living 
 oft become estranged ; the dead are true. He was not a 
 Christian. In the Eden of his hope there did not crawl 
 
93 
 
 and coil the serpent of eternal pain. In many languages 
 he sought the thoughts of men, and for himself he solved 
 the problems of the world. He accepted the philosophy 
 of Auguste Comte. Humanity was his god, the human 
 race the Supreme Being. In that supreme being he rested. 
 He believed that we are indebted for what we enjoy to 
 the labor, the self-denial, the heroism of the human race, 
 and that as we have plucked the fruit of what others 
 planted, we, in thankfulness, should plant for others yet 
 to be. 
 
 " With him immortality was the eternal consequences 
 of his own good acts. He believed that every good 
 thought, every disinterested deed, hastens the harvest of 
 universal good. This is a religion that enriches poverty; 
 that enables us to bear the sorrows of the saddest life ; 
 that peoples even solitude with the happy millions yet to 
 be — a religion born not of selfishness and fear, but of 
 love and hope — that religion that digs wells to slake the 
 thirst of others ; that gladly bears the burdens of the 
 unborn. 
 
 "In the presence of death how beliefs and dogmas 
 wither and decay ! how loving words and deeds burst 
 into blossom ! Pluck from the tree of any life these 
 flowers, and there remains but the barren thorns of bigo- 
 try and creed. All wish for happiness beyond this life — 
 all hope to meet again the loved and lost. In every 
 heart there grows this sacred flower of eternal hope. 
 
 " Immortality is a word that hope, through all ages, 
 has been whispering to love. The miracle of thought we 
 cannot understand. The mystery of death and hope we 
 cannot comprehend. This chaos, called the world, has 
 never been explained. The golden bridge of life from 
 gloom emerges and on shadow rests. Beyond this we do 
 not know. Fate is speechless, destiny is dumb, and the 
 secret of the future has never yet been told. We love, 
 we wait, we hope. The more we love, the more we fear. 
 Upon the tenderest heart the deepest shadows fall. All 
 paths, whether filled with thorns or flowers, end here. 
 
94 
 
 Here success and failure are the same. The rags of 
 wretchedness and the purple robe of power lose difference 
 and distinction in this democracy of death. Character 
 alone survives. Goodness alone lives, love alone is 
 immortal. 
 
 "But to all there comes a time when the fevered lips 
 of life long for the cool, delicious kiss of death. Tired 
 of the dust and glare of day, they hear with joy the 
 rustling garments of the night. What can we say of 
 death ? What can we say of the dead ? Where they 
 have gone reason cannot go, and from thence revelation 
 has not come. But let us believe that over the cradle 
 Nature bends and smiles, and lovingly above the dead in 
 benediction holds her outstretched hands." 
 
 THIS IS THE VOICE OF GOD SPEAK- 
 ING TO THE ATHEIST. 
 
 " I could as easily conceive of a man making his 
 home unconcerned in an uncaged menagerie, as of him 
 at rest in nature seeing what it is and not feeling that it 
 is embosomed in God. 
 
 Go to nature, my brother, go to the unroofed universe, 
 go to the awful pages of science ; not to learn your re- 
 ligion but to learn your need of it, to learn that you are 
 houseless and homeless without the sense of God as 
 overarching you by his power, protecting you by his 
 presence, pledging his care to }^ou, twisting the furious 
 forces of immensity into a protecting tent for your 
 spirit's home." 
 
 THOMAS STARR KING. 
 
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