“Be that as it may, and be heaven where it may, I am not afraid. With all my guessing and my studying and my dreaming over these things, I am only a child in the dark. ‘Nevertheless, I am not afraid of the dark.’ God bless Mr. Robertson for saying that! I’m going to bless him when I see him. How pleasant it will be to see him, and some other friends whose faces I never saw in this world. David, for instance, or Paul, or Cowper, or President Lincoln, or Mrs. Browning. The only trouble is that _I_ am nobody to them! However, I fancy that they will let me shake hands with them. “No, I am quite willing to trust all these things to God. ‘And what if much be still unknown? Thy Lord shall teach thee that, When thou shalt stand before His throne, Or sit as Mary sat.’ I may find them very different from what I have supposed. I know that I shall find them infinitely _more_ satisfying than I have supposed. As Schiller said of his philosophy, ‘Perhaps I may be ashamed of my raw design, at sight of the true original. This may happen; I expect it; but then, if reality bears no resemblance to my dreams, it will be a more majestic, a more delightful surprise.’ “I believe nothing that God denies. I cannot overrate the beauty of his promise. So it surely can have done no harm for me to take the comfort of my fancying till I am there; and what a comfort it has been to me, God only knows. I could scarcely have borne some things without it.” “You are never afraid that anything proving a little different from what you expect might--” “Might disappoint me? No; I have settled that in my heart with God. I do not _think_ I shall be disappointed. The truth is, he has obviously not _opened_ the gates which bar heaven from our sight, but he has as obviously not _shut_ them; they stand ajar, with the Bible and reason in the way, to keep them from closing; surely we should look in as far as we can, and surely, if we look with reverence, our eyes will be holden, that we may not cheat ourselves with mirages. And, as the little Swedish girl said, the first time she saw the stars: ‘O father, if the _wrong side_ of heaven is so beautiful, what must the _right side_ be?’” January. I write little now, for I am living too much. The days are stealing away and lessening one by one, and still Faith plays about the room, though very softly now, and still the cheery sunshine shimmers in, and still we talk with clasping hands, less often and more pleasantly. Morning and noon and evening come and go; the snow drifts down and the rain falls softly; clouds form and break and hurry past the windows; shadows melt and lights are shattered, and little rainbows are prisoned by the icicles that hang from the eaves. I sit and watch them, and watch the sick-lamp flicker in the night, and watch the blue morning crawl over the hills; and the old words are stealing down my thought: _That is the substance, this the shadow; that the reality, this the dream_.