Just Beyond

WHEN out of the body the soul is sent,As a bird speeds forth from the opened tent,As the smoke flies out when it finds a vent,To lose itself in the spending,—

Does it travel wide, does it travel far,To find the place where all spirits are?Does it measure long leagues from star to star,And feel its travel unending?

And caught by each baffling, blowing wind,Storm-tossed and beaten, before, behind,Till the courage fails and the sight is blind,Must it go in search of its heaven?

I do not think that it can be so;For weary is life, as all men know,And battling and struggling to and froMan goes from his morn to his even.

And surely this is enough to bear,—The long day’s work in the sun’s hot glare,The doubt and the loss which breed despair,The anguish of baffled hoping.

And when the end of it all has come,And the soul has won the right to its home,I do not believe it must wander and roamThrough the infinite spaces groping.

No; wild may the storm be, and dark the day,And the shuddering soul may clasp its clay,Afraid to go and unwilling to stay;But when it girds it for going,

With a rapture of sudden consciousness,I think it awakes to a knowledge of this,That heaven earth’s closest neighbor is,And only waits for our knowing;

That ’tis but a step from dark to day,From the worn-out tent and the burial clay,To the rapture of youth renewed for aye,And the smile of the saints uprisen;

And that just where the soul, perplexed and awed,Begins its journey, it meets the Lord,And finds that heaven and the great rewardLay just outside of its prison!