“It may not be as we have dreamed,
Not half so awful, strange, and grand;
A quiet, peaceful, home-like land,
Better that e’er in vision gleamed.”
John W. Chadwick, “The Other Side” (1874)
John W. Chadwick was a Unitarian minister and minor poet, and his poem “The Other Side” was in the late nineteenth century a staple of funeral sermons. The full text is copied below, but the poem is easily paraphrased. The narrator is climbing a mountain, wondering what he will see when he reaches the summit and looks out on “the other side.” When he arrives at the mountain’s crest, he finds that all his fanciful and fearful images of the other side were false, “but better far had I attained.” On the other side of the mountain “stretched a valley broad and fair,” nothing in it astounding or forbidding, but rather “a pleasant, smiling, home-like land.”
This sight causes the narrator to ask himself if life is analogous to his recent climb, and heaven to his present prospect.
“Who knows, I thought, but so ’twill prove
Upon the mountain-top of death.
Then follows the stanza I quote in my epigraph, “It” being, of course, heaven or the hereafter.
“It may not be as we have dreamed,
Not half so awful, strange, and grand;
A quiet, peaceful, home-like land,
Better that e’er in vision gleamed.”
This is, to me, a very attractive vision of heaven or the hereafter. I have a northern sensibility that is repelled by images of oriental magnificence and Mediterranean drooling over cities, celestial or otherwise. I earnestly hope that what lies within the pearly gates is more like a park than a palace, and that when Jesus spoke of “many mansions,” he meant the blessed reside in a countryside of well-spaced farms.
Squaw Creek Valley, Florence E. McClung (1937)
My heart leaps if I think of heaven as a “home-like land.” A place more like the Shire than it is like Minis Tirith.
Chadwick was a son of New England, and therefore wrote “home-like” because the word “homely” had come to mean something different than home-like in his native land. Homely is an old word that at first meant suited to use at home. Homely food was the food a family ordinarily ate; homely garb was their everyday garb; homely talk was their talk when they were not embarrassed or putting on airs.
A homely woman was not necessarily ugly, or even plain in the sense that word has when it is applied to the female face. She simply was not a women with any pretense to grandeur: a woman unacquainted with splendor, a simple woman who was happiest at home.
In New England, however, “homely” became a pejorative word that denoted a young woman who, owing to a deficit of pulchritude, had very poor marriage prospects. From there it came to denote anything unattractive, contemptible, and low. So Chadwick tells us “the other side” is a “home-like” rather than a “homely” land.
If there is a city in heaven, I hope I can view it from afar. If there is grandeur and splendor and pomp, I hope there is rusticity as well. I hope for a homely heaven, and New England usage be damned.
The Other Side
Climbing the mountain’s shaggy crest,
I wondered much what sight would greet
My eager gaze whene’er my feet
Upon the topmost height should rest.
The other side was all unknown;
But, as I slowly toiled along,
Sweeter to me than any song
My dream of visions to be shown.
Meanwhile the mountain shrubs distilled
Their sweetness all along my way,
And the delicious summer day
My heart with rapture overfilled.
At length the topmost height was gained;
The other side was full in view;
My dreams – not one of them was true,
But better far had I attained.
For far and wide on either hand
There stretched a valley broad and fair,
With greenness flashing everywhere,
A pleasant, smiling, home-like land.
Who knows, I thought, but so ’twill prove
Upon that mountain-top of death,
Where we shall draw diviner breath,
And see the long-lost friends we love.
It may not be as we have dreamed,
Not half so awful, strange, and grand;
A quiet, peaceful, home-like land,
Better than e’er in vision gleamed.
Meanwhile along our upward way,
What beauties lurk, what visions glow!
Whatever shall be, this we know
Is better than our lips can say.
*) John W. Chadwick, A Book of Poems (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876), pp. 120-121.
