The Mysteries

We know not what it is, this sleep so deep and still;

The folded hands, the awful calm, the cheek so pale and chill;

The lids that will not lift again, though we may call and call;

The strange white solitude of peace that settles over all.

We know not what it means, the desolate heart-pain;

The dread to take our daily way, and walk in it again;

We know not to what other sphere the loved who leave us go,

Nor while we’re left to wonder still, nor why we do not know.

But this we know: Our loved and dead, if they should come this day—

Should come and ask us, “What is life?” not one of us could say.

Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be;

Yet, oh, how dear it is to us, this life we live and see!

Then might they say—these vanished ones—and blessed is the thought:

“So death is sweet to us beloved!  Though we may show you naught;

We may not to the quick reveal the mystery of death—

Ye cannot tell us, if ye would, the mystery of breath.”

The child who enters life comes not with knowledge or intent,

So these who enter death must go as little children sent.

Nothing is known!  But I believe that God is overhead,

And as life is to the living so death is to the dead.

-       Mary Mapes Dodge[1]

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[1] Mary Mapes Dodge was born in 1831 to Professor James Jay Mapes and Sophia Furman in New York City. She acquired a good education under private tutors. In 1851 she married the lawyer William Dodge. Within the next four years she gave birth to two sons, James and Harrington. In 1857, William faced serious financial difficulties and left his family in 1858. A month later his body was found; he had apparently drowned. Mary became a widow.

In 1859 she began writing and editing, working with her father to publish two magazines, the Working Farmer and the United States Journal. Within a few years she had great success with a collection of short stories, The Irvington Stories (1864), and a novel was solicited. Dodge then wrote Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, which became an instant bestseller.

Later in life she was an associate editor of Hearth and Home, edited by Harriet Beecher Stowe. She had charge of the household and children’s departments of that paper for many years. She became an editor in her own right with the children’s St. Nicholas Magazine, for she was able to solicit stories from a number of well-known writers including Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. St. Nicholas became one of the most successful magazines for children during the second half of the nineteenth century, with a circulation of almost 70,000 children. Dodge died in 1905 and is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery, Hillside, New Jersey. (Source: Wikipedia)