The Wedding Guest | Page 8

of gratitude for the beautiful gift of
your thoughts to me,--I realize so fully that you are a 'help meet for
me.'"
Happy Rosa! She gazed into Paul's eyes, and caressed him with her soft
touches, and said--
"Oh, Paul, Paul! when I look at you, and think that some day you will
be an angel of Heaven, and that I will see your glorious, spirit-beauty,
my heart is so happy; for then I can feel, dear Paul, that our love
stretches far away beyond this world and this life; and if I love you so
much here, what will it be when I see you in the beautiful heavenly
light?"
Paul smiled.
"Your fancy is dreaming of what I will be; and can you not dream for
me of how bright and beautiful my Rosa will be in that heavenly light?"
"Ah, yes," said Rosa, "that too is pleasant, for I love to be beautiful,
dear Paul, for your sake; and today I was thinking of how happy I
should make you--not I, but the Lord will make you happy, dear Paul,
through me; and is not that a beautiful thought--that it is God loving us
through each other?"
How holy love grew at once to Paul! though at first he did not see this
beautiful truth as clearly as did Rosa. But she went on, in her loving
way, and very soon she raised him into that inner sunshine in which she
dwelt, and then he saw it all clearly, for she said--
"You know, dear Paul, that we read in the Bible that 'God is a sun, and
that He is the fountain of life,' and thus all life flows from Him into us,
just as in the tiny flowers upon the earth comes the warm living ray of
the material sun, developing in them beautiful colours and odours--so
the life-ray from God fills us with warm affections. We are but dead
forms--the power and the life is in Him, and if we were cut off from
Him, how could we love each other?"
Paul was convinced, and did not fail to make Rosa realize the

Heaven-derived life and power that was in him. And as they kneeled
together in their evening devotions, and Paul clasped his wife in his
arms, how clearly he felt the influence of that Divine sun upon his soul,
filling it with a gushing, yearning tenderness for his beloved and
beautiful one; and how fervently he prayed that the light might grow in
her, and through her descend to him! Beautiful are the prayers of such
loving hearts, for the inner door of their existence then opens, and the
great King of Glory enters in, and they are in the Lord, and the Lord is
in them.
Yes, Paul had found a wife--not an external type or shadow of one to
mock and vex his soul with an unsatisfactory pretence, but a most
blessed and eternal reality. He was married not only in the sight of men,
but before God and the angels. And the heart of Rosa responded to his
mind as truly and unfailingly as his heart beat to the breath of his lungs.
She was as his inner life, and he felt himself strong to guard and protect
her as he would his own existence. She had become one with him, and
henceforth there was no separate existence for these two.
So serenely and lovingly flowed their life in its interior light and beauty,
that cares and anxieties seemed scarce to touch their states. True, these
came to them in the guise of those calamities and disappointments, that
so often sweep as the destructive tornado over the lower lives of the
earth-loving children of men. But as their affections were spiritual, they
were not wounded by the earth-sorrows. Their treasures were laid up
above, where "moth and rust doth not corrupt." Paul realized this when
he saw Rosa hold her dead baby in her arms and smile through her tears.
And yet this was her "little Paul" that she loved with such an intense
delight and devotion; because in him, all the day long, she saw that
wonderful life of God manifested in such a heavenly innocence and
purity, as in a tiny image of her own Paul. Yet, when the spirit of the
child was gone, she adorned the clay form in which it had dwelt, with
such loving care, and laid it in its little coffin, that her hand might serve
it to the very last, and then turned and rested her head in the bosom of
her husband as a wounded bird in its downy nest.
Paul's love seemed to lift her to the Heaven to which her baby had gone;
and when, after a few days,