A heavenly smile spread over his face and a look of perfect satisfaction and acquiescence, and he said after a moment's pause, "I forgot my Heavenly Father. Oh, what a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father He is!" Then, after another moment, he said in a distressed voice, "But must I be broken all to pieces when I go to the Heavenly Father?"
"Oh, dear, no!" said I; "but when we are broken all to pieces, or starved, or are very sick, He takes us; but generally people grow to be old like the old man, and all their bodies get worn out, and they get very tired and kind of go to sleep, and the Heavenly Father takes them, so they do not wake up again in their old bodies, which are buried as the children buried the bodies of the robins."
He expressed himself very happy, and asked a great many questions, and it seemed as if he had already known of the fact of death. At all events, he now accepted it as the common destiny, without any painful feeling, and it seemed to give new realization to his mother's feeling that her own was indeed nothing but a morbid feeling, and that normal nature did not shrink from death. The subsequent questions were innumerable. I read to him Krummacher's parable of the caterpillar and butterfly in the garden of Thirza, after the death of Abel, as it was paraphrased by Mr. Alcott when he read it in his school, in which I was assisting him at the very time that I was called away to the child's mother. And it was the study I had made of childhood in his school which had enabled me to pursue with so much confidence the method I took with the child, though it was in my own childhood I conceived the plan; and I remember speaking of it to Dr. Channing in 1824, and how much interested he was in the idea, though he told me that in his own case he was indebted to the symbolism of nature, especially the ocean seen from the beach at Newport, for clearing his mind of the effects of the teaching and preaching which he had heard. These grand objects, and later the beauty of some manifestations he had seen of love giving courage and power to the weak, kindled his ideal, and gave form and substance to his consciousness of God.
For a time there was nothing but delight expressed in the fact of death, the relief from all suffering, the enlargement of life and joy and new knowledge of God and His ways. At last a little incident showed him the shadow which attends death in this world.