I suppose that people there live dull and simple
lives enough, buy and sell, gossip and back-bite, wed and die; but
for the pilgrim it seems an enchanted place, where there can be no
care or sorrow, nothing hard, or unlovely, or unclean, but a sort
of fairy-land, where men seem to be living the true and beautiful
life of the soul, of which we are always in search, but which seems
to be so strangely hidden away. It must have been for me and my
friend that the wise and kindly artist who lives there in a
paradise of flowers had filled his trellises with climbing roses,
and bidden the tall larkspurs raise their azure spires in the air.
How else had he brought it all to such perfection for that golden
hour? Perhaps he did not even guess that he had done it all for my
sake, which made it so much more gracious a gift. And then we
learned too from a little red-bound volume which I had thought
before was a guide-book, but which turned out to-day to be a volume
of the Book of Life, that the whole place was alive with the
calling of old voices.
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