University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTORY.

I.
With my Aunt Tabithy.

—PSHAW!—said my Aunt Tabithy,—have
you not done with dreaming?

My Aunt Tabithy, though an excellent, and most
notable person, loves occasionally a quiet bit of satire.
And when I told her, that I was sharpening my
pen for a new story of those dreamy fancies, and
half experiences, which lie grouped along the journeying
hours of my solitary life, she smiled as if in derision.

—“Ah, Isaac,” said she, “all that is exhausted:
you have rung so many changes on your hopes and

your dreams, that you have nothing left, but to make
them real—if you can.”

It is very idle to get angry with a good-natured old
lady: I did better than this:—I made her listen
to me.

—Exhausted, do you say, Aunt Tabithy? Is life
then exhausted, is hope gone out, is fancy dead?

No, no. Hope and the world are full; and he who
drags into book-pages a phase or two of the great life
of passion, of endurance, of love, of sorrow, is but
wetting a feather, in the sea that breaks ceaselessly
along the great shore of the years. Every man's
heart is a living drama; every death is a drop-scene;
every book only a faint foot-light to throw a little flicker
on the stage.

There is no need of wandering widely to catch
incident or adventure: they are everywhere about us;
each day is a succession of escapes and joys;—not
perhaps clear to the world, but brooding in our thought,
and living in our brain. From the very first, Angels
and Devils are busy with us, and we are struggling
against them, and for them.

No, no, Aunt Tabithy,—this life of musing does not
exhaust so easily. It is like the springs on the farm-land,
that are fed with all the showers and the dews of
the year, and that from the narrow fissures of the rock,
send up streams continually:—or it is like the deep

well in the meadow, where one may see stars at noon—
when no stars are shining.

What is Reverie, and what are these Day-dreams,
but fleecy cloud-drifts that float eternally, and eternally
change shapes, upon the great over-arching sky of
thought? You may seize the strong outlines that the
passion breezes of to-day shall throw into their figures;
but to-morrow may breed a whirlwind that will chase
swift, gigantic shadows over the heaven of your
thought, and change the whole landscape of your life.

Dream-land will never be exhausted, until we enter
the land of dreams; and until, in “shuffling off this
mortal coil,” thought will become fact, and all facts will
be only thought.

As it is, I can conceive no mood of mind more in
keeping with what is to follow upon the grave, than
those fancies which warp our frail hulks toward the
ocean of the Infinite; and that so sublimate the
realities of this being, that they seem to belong to
that shadowy realm, where every day's journey is
leading.

It was warm weather; and my aunt was dozing.
“What is this all to be about?” said she, recovering
her knitting needle.

“About love, and toil, and duty, and sorrow,”
said I.

My aunt laid down her knitting, looked at me over
the rim of her spectacles, and—took snuff.

I said nothing.

“How many times have you been in love, Isaac?”
said she.

It was now my turn to say—“Pshaw!”

Judging from her look of assurance, I could not
possibly have made a more satisfactory reply.

My aunt finished the needle she was upon—smoothed
the stocking leg over her knee, and looking at me with
a very comical expression, said,—“Isaac, you are a sad
fellow!”

I did not like the tone of this: it sounded very much
as if it would have been in the mouth of any one else
—`bad fellow.'

And she went on to ask me in a very bantering way,
if my stock of youthful loves was not nearly exhausted;
and she cited the episode of the fair-haired Enrica, as
perhaps the most tempting that I could draw from my
experience.

A better man than myself,—if he had only a fair
share of vanity,—would have been nettled at this; and
I replied somewhat tartly, that I had never professed
to write my experiences. These might be more or less
tempting; but certainly, if they were of a kind which
I have attempted to portray in the characters of Bella,
or of Carry, neither my Aunt Tabithy nor any one else,

should have learned such truth from any book of mine.
There are griefs too sacred to be babbled to the world;
and there may be loves, which one would forbear to
whisper even to a friend.

No, no,—imagination has been playing pranks with
memory; and if I have made the feeling real, I am
content that the facts should be false. Feeling indeed
has a higher truth in it, than circumstance. It appeals
to a larger jury, for acquittal: it is approved or condemned
by a better judge. And if I can catch this
bolder and richer truth of feeling, I will not mind if
the types of it are all fabrications.

If I run over some sweet experience of love, (my
Aunt Tabithy brightened a little) must I make good
the fact that the loved one lives, and expose her name
and qualities, to make your sympathy sound? Or
shall I not rather be working upon higher and holier
ground, if I take the passion for itself, and so weave it
into words, that you, and every willing sufferer may
recognize the fervor, and forget the personality?

Life after all is but a bundle of hints, each suggesting
actual and positive developement, but rarely reaching it.
And as I recal these hints, and in fancy, trace them to
their issues, I am as truly dealing with life, as if my life
had dealt them all to me.

This is what I would be doing in the present book;—
I would catch up here and there the shreds of feeling,

which the brambles and roughnesses of the world have
left tangling on my heart, and weave them out into
those soft, and perfect tissues, which—if the world had
been only a little less rough,—might now perhaps
enclose my heart altogether.

“Ah,” said my Aunt Tabithy, as she smoothed the
stocking leg again, with a sigh,—“there is after all but
one youth-time: and if you put down its memories
once, you can find no second growth.”

My Aunt Tabithy was wrong. There is as much
growth in the thoughts and feelings that run behind us,
as in those that run before us. You may make a rich,
full picture of your childhood to-day; but let the hour
go by, and the darkness stoop to your pillow with its
million shapes of the past, and my word for it, you
shall have some flash of childhood lighten upon you,
that was unknown to your busiest thought of the
morning.

Let a week go by; and in some interval of care, as
you recal the smile of a mother, or some pale sister who
is dead, a new crowd of memories will rush upon your
soul, and leave their traces in such tears as will make
you kinder and better for days and weeks. Or you
shall assist at some neighbor funeral, where the little
dead one—(like one you have seen before)—shall hold
in its tiny grasp—(as you have taught little dead hands
to do)—fresh flowers, laughing flowers, lying lightly on

the white robe of the dear child—all pale—cold—
silent—

I had touched my Aunt Tabithy: she had dropped
a stitch in her knitting. I believe she was weeping.

—Aye, this brain of ours is a master-worker, whose
appliances we do not one half know; and this heart of
ours is a rare storehouse, furnishing the brain with new
material every hour of our lives; and their limits we
shall not know, until they shall end—together.

Nor is there, as many faint-hearts imagine, but one
phase of earnestness in our life of feeling. One train
of deep emotion cannot fill up the heart: it radiates
like a star, God-ward and earth-ward. It spends and
reflects all ways. Its force is to be reckoned not
so much by token, as by capacity. Facts are the
poorest and most slumberous evidences of passion, or
of affection. True feeling is ranging everywhere;
whereas your actual attachments are too apt to be tied
to sense.

A single affection may indeed be true, earnest and
absorbing; but such an one after all, is but a type—
and if the object be worthy, a glorious type—of the
great book of feeling: it is only the vapor from the
cauldron of the heart, and bears no deeper relation to
its exhaustless sources, than the letter which my pen
makes, bears to the thought that inspires it,—or than a
single morning strain of your orioles and thrushes, bears

to that wide bird-chorus, which is making every sun-rise—a
worship, and every grove—a temple!

My Aunt Tabithy nodded.

Nor is this a mere bachelor fling against constancy.
I can believe, Heaven knows, in an unalterable and
unflinching affection, which neither desires nor admits
the prospect of any other. But when one is tasking his
brain to talk for his heart,—when he is not writing
positive history, but only making mention (as it were)
of the heart's capacities, who shall say that he has
reached the fullness,—that he has exhausted the stock
of its feeling, or that he has touched its highest notes?
It is true there is but one heart in a man to be stirred;
but every stir creates a new combination of feeling, that
like the turn of a kaleidoscope will show some fresh
color, or form.

A bachelor to be sure has a marvellous advantage in
this; and with the tenderest influences once anchored
in the bay of marriage, there is little disposition to scud
off under each pleasant breeze of feeling. Nay, I can
even imagine—perhaps somewhat captiously—that after
marriage, feeling would become a habit, a rich and
holy habit certainly, but yet a habit, which weakens the
omnivorous grasp of the affections, and schools one to a
unity of emotion, that doubts and ignores the promptness
and variety of impulse, which we bachelors
possess.

My aunt nodded again.

Could it be that she approved what I had been
saying? I hardly knew.

Poor old lady,—she did not know herself. She was
asleep!

II.
With my Reader.

HAVING silenced my Aunt Tabithy, I shall be
generous enough in my triumph, to offer an
explanatory chat to my reader.

This is a history of Dreams; and there will be those
who will sneer at such a history, as the work of a
dreamer. So indeed it is; and you, my courteous
reader, are a dreamer too!

You would perhaps like to find your speculations
about wealth, marriage or influence, called by some
better name than Dreams. You would like to see the
history of them—if written at all—baptized at the font
of your own vanity, with some such title as—life's
cares, or life's work. If there had been a philosophic
naming to my observations, you might have reckoned

them good: as it is, you count them all bald and
palpable fiction.

But is it so? I care not how matter of fact you
may be, you have in your own life, at some time,
proved the very truth of what I have set down:
and the chances are, that even now, gray as you may
be, and economic as you may be, and devotional as you
pretend to be, you light up your Sabbath reflections
with just such dreams of wealth, of per centages, or of
family, as you-will find scattered over these pages.

I am not to be put aside with any talk about stocks,
and duties, and respectability: all these though very
eminent matters, are but so many types in the volume
of your thought; and your eager resolves about them,
are but so many ambitious waves, breaking up from
that great sea of dreamy speculation, that has spread
over your soul, from its first start into the realm of
Consciousness.

No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so
blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams. Each
little episode of life is full, had we but the perception
of its fullness. There is no such thing as blank, in the
world of thought. Every action and emotion have
their development growing and gaining on the soul.
Every affection has its tears and smiles. Nay, the very
material world is full of meaning, and by suggesting

thought, is making us what we are, and what we
will be.

The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my
balcony, is calling up to me this moment, a world of
memories that reach over half my life time, and a
world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of
sparrows. The rose-tree which shades his mottled coat
is full of buds and blossoms; and each bud and
blossom is a token of promise, that has issues covering
life, and reaching beyond death. The quiet sunshine
beyond the flower and beyond the sparrow,—glistening
upon the leaves, and playing in delicious waves of
warmth over the reeking earth, is lighting both heart
and hope, and quickening into activity a thousand
thoughts of what has been, and of what will be. The
meadow stretching away under its golden flood—
waving with grain, and with the feathery blossoms of
the grass, and golden butter cups, and white, nodding
daisies, comes to my eye like the lapse of fading
childhood,—studded here and there with the bright
blossoms of joy, crimsoned all over with the flush of
health, and enamelled with memories that perfume the
soul. The blue hills beyond, with deep blue shadows
gathered in their bosom, lie before me like mountains
of years, over which I shall climb through shadows to
the slope of Age, and go down to the deeper shadows
of Death.

Nor are dreams without their variety, whatever your
character may be. I care not how much, in the pride
of your practical judgment, or in your learned fancies,
you may sneer at any dream of love, and reckon it all a
poet's fiction: there are times when such dreams come
over you like a summer cloud, and almost stifle you
with their warmth.

Seek as you will for increase of lands or moneys, and
there are moments when a spark of some giant mind
will flash over your cravings, and wake your soul
suddenly to a quick, and yearning sense of that
influence which is begotten of intellect; and you task
your dreams—as I have copied them here—to build
before you the pleasures of such a renown.

I care not how worldly you may be: there are times
when all distinctions seem like dust, and when at the
graves of the great, you dream of a coming country,
where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker,
you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and
feel, that your life is but a dream. Yet you call this
fiction: you stave off the thoughts in print which come
over you in reverie. You will not admit to the eye
what is true to the heart. Poor weakling, and
worldling,—you are not strong enough to face yourself!

You will read perhaps with smiles: you will possibly

praise the ingenuity: you will talk, with a lip schooled
against the slightest quiver, of some bit of pathos, and
say that it is—well done. Yet why is it well done?—
only because it is stolen from your very life and heart.
It is good, because it is so common:—ingenious,
because it is so honest:—well-conceived, because it is
not conceived at all.

There are thousands of mole-eyed people, who count
all passion in print—a lie:—people who will grow into
a rage at trifles, and weep in the dark, and love in
secret, and hope without mention, and cover it all
under the cloak of what they call—propriety. I can
see before me now some gray-haired old gentleman,
very money-getting, very correct, very cleanly, who
reads the morning paper with unction, and his Bible
with determination: who listens to dull sermons with
patience, and who prays with quiet self-applause,—and
yet there are moments belonging to his life, when his
curdled affections yearn for something that they have
not, when his avarice oversteps all the commandments,—when
his pride builds castles full of splendor;
and yet put this before his eye, and he reads with the
most careless air in the world, and condemns as arrant
fiction, what cannot be proved to the elders.

We do not like to see our emotions unriddled: it is
not agreeable to the proud man to find his weaknesses
exposed: it is shocking to the disappointed lover to see

his heart laid bare: it is a great grief to the pining
maiden to witness the exposure of her loves. We do
not like our fancies painted: we do not contrive them
for rehearsal: our dreams are private, and when they
are made public, we disown them.

I sometimes think that I must be a very honest
fellow, for writing down those fancies which every one
else seems afraid to whisper. I shall at least, come in
for my share of the odium in entertaining such fancies:
indeed I shall expect the charge of entertaining them
exclusively; and shall scarce expect to find a single
fellow-confessor, unless it be some pure, and innocent
thoughted girl, who will say peccavi, to—here and
there—a single rainbow fancy.

Well, I can bear it; but in bearing it, I shall be
consoled with the reflection that I have a great
company of fellow-sufferers, who lack only the honesty
to tell me of their sympathy. It will even relieve in
no small degree my burden, to watch the effort they
will take to conceal, what I have so boldly divulged.

Nature is very much the same thing in one man, that
it is in another: and as I have already said, Feeling
has a higher truth in it, than circumstance. Let it
only be touched fairly and honestly, and the heart of
humanity answers; but if it be touched foully or
one-sidedly, you may find here and there a lame-souled

creature who will give response, but there is no heart
throb in it.

Of one thing I am sure:—if my pictures are fair,
worthy, and hearty, you must see it in the reading:
but if they are forced and hard, no amount of kindness
can make you feel their truth as I want them felt.

I make no self-praise out of this: if feeling has been
honestly set down, it is only in virtue of a native
impulse, over which I have altogether too little control;
but if it is set down badly, I have wronged Nature,
and, (as Nature is kind) I have wronged myself.

A great many inquisitive people will, I do not doubt,
be asking after all this prelude, if my pictures are true
pictures? The question,—the courteous reader will
allow me to say,—is an impertinent one. It is but a
shabby truth that wants an author's affidavit to make it
trust-worthy. I shall not help my story by any such
poor support. If there are not enough elements of
truth, honesty and nature in my pictures, to make them
believed, they shall have no oath of mine to bolster
them up.

I have been a sufferer in this way before now; and a
little book that I had the whim to publish a year since,
has been set down by many as an arrant piece of
imposture. Claiming sympathy as a Bachelor, I have
been recklessly set down as a cold, undeserving man of

family! My story of troubles and loves has been
sneered at, as the sheerest gammon.

But among this crowd of cold-blooded critics, it was
pleasant to hear of one or two pursy old fellows who
railed at me, for winning the affections of a sweet Italian
girl, and then leaving her to pine in discontent! Yet
in the face of this, an old companion of mine in Rome,
with whom I accidentally met the other day,—wondered
how on earth I could have made so tempting a story
out of the matronly and black-haired spinster, with
whom I happened to be quartered in the Eternal City!

I shall leave my critics to settle such differences
between themselves; and consider it far better to bear
with slanders from both sides of the house, than to
bewray the pretty tenderness of the pursy old gentlemen,
or to cast a doubt upon the practical testimony of
my quondam companion. Both give me high and
judicious compliment—all the more grateful because
only half deserved. For I never yet was conscious—
alas, that the confession should be forced from me!—
of winning the heart of any maiden whether native, or
Italian; and as for such delicacy of imagination as to
work up a lovely damsel out of the withered remnant
that forty odd years of Italian life can spare, I can
assure my middle-aged friends, (and it may serve as a
caveat)—I can lay no claim to it whatever.

The trouble has been, that those who have believed

one passage have discredited another; and those who
have sympathized with me in trifles, have deserted me
when affairs grew earnest. I have had sympathy
enough with my married griefs; but when it came to
the perplexing torments of my single life—not a
weeper could I find!

I would suggest to those who intend to believe only
half of my present book, that they exercise a little
discretion in their choice. I am not fastidious in the
matter; and only ask them to believe what counts
most toward the goodness of humanity, and to discredit
—if they will persist in it—only what tells badly for
our common nature. The man or the woman who
believes well, is apt to work well; and Faith is as much
the key to happiness here, as it is the key to happiness
hereafter.

I have only one thing more to say, before I get upon
my story. A great many sharp-eyed people, who have
a horror of light reading—by which they mean whatever
does not make mention of stocks, cottons, or moral
homilies,—will find much fault with my book for its
ephemeral character.

I am sorry that I cannot gratify such: homilies are
not at all in my habit; and it does seem to me an
exhausting way of disposing of a good moral, to
hammer it down to a single point, so that there shall be
only one chance of driving it home. For my own

part, I count it a great deal better philosophy to fuse it,
and rarify it, so that it shall spread out into every
crevice of a story, and give a color and a taste, as it
were, to the whole mass.

I know there are very good people, who if they
cannot lay their finger on so much doctrine set down in
old fashioned phrase, will never get an inkling of it at
all. With such people, goodness is a thing of understanding,
more than of feeling; and all their morality
has its action in the brain.

God forbid that I should sneer at this terrible
infirmity, which Providence has seen fit to inflict: God
forbid too, that I should not be grateful to the same
kind Providence, for bestowing upon others among his
creatures a more genial apprehension of true goodness,
and a hearty sympathy with every shade of human
kindness!

But in all this, I am not making out a case for my
own correct teaching, or insinuating the propriety of
my tone. I shall leave the book in this regard, to
speak for itself; and whoever feels himself growing
worse for the reading, I advise to lay it down. It will
be very harmless on the shelf, however it may be in the
hand.

I shall lay no claim to the title of moralist, teacher,
or romancist:—my thoughts start pleasant pictures to
my mind; and in a garrulous humor, I put my finger

in the button-hole of my indulgent friend, and tell him
some of them,—giving him leave to quit me whenever
he chooses.

Or, if a lady is my listener, let her fancy me only an
honest, simple-hearted fellow, whose familiarities are so
innocent that she can pardon them;—taking her hand
in his, and talking on;—sometimes looking in her eyes,
and then looking into the sunshine for relief;—sometimes
prosy with narrative, and then sharpening up my
matter with a few touches of honest pathos;—let her
imagine this, I say, and we may become the most
excellent friends in the world.