Explore "The Beatific Vision" by Edith Nesbit on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
OH God! if I do my duty / And walk in the thorny way, / Will you pay me with heavens of beauty, / Millions of lives away? / Will you give me the music of heaven, / And the joy that none understands, / In place of what life would have given / If I had held out my hands?
I have lived in a narrow prison, / I have writhed 'neath a bitter creed, / And I dare to say that no heaven can pay / The renounced dream and deed, / But when my life's portal closes, / If you have no heaven to spare / God! give me a garden of roses, / And some one to walk with there.