University of Virginia Library

Second Reverie.
Sea Coal and Anthracite.

BY A CITY GRATE.

BLESSED be letters!—they are the monitors,
they are also the comforters, and they are the
only true heart-talkers! Your speech and their
speeches, are conventional; they are moulded by
circumstance; they are suggested by the observation,
remark, and influence of the parties to whom the
speaking is addressed, or by whom it may be overheard.

Your truest thought is modified half through its
utterance by a look, a sign, a smile, or a sneer. It
is not individual; it is not integral: it is social and
mixed,—half of you, and half of others. It bends, it
sways, it multiplies, it retires, and it advances, as the
talk of others presses, relaxes, or quickens.

But it is not so of Letters:—there you are, with
only the soulless pen, and the snow-white, virgin
paper. Your soul is measuring itself by itself, and
saying its own sayings: there are no sneers to modify
its utterance,—no scowl to scare,—nothing is present,
but you, and your thought.

Utter it then freely—write it down—stamp it—
burn it in the ink!—There it is, a true soul-print!

Oh, the glory, the freedom, the passion of a letter!
It is worth all the lip-talk in the world. Do you say,
it is studied, made up, acted, rehearsed, contrived,
artistic?

Let me see it then; let me run it over; tell me
age, sex, circumstance, and I will tell you if it be
studied or real;—if it be the merest lip-slang put
into words, or heart-talk blazing on the paper.

I have a little pacquet, not very large, tied up with
narrow crimson ribbon, now soiled with frequent
handling, which far into some winter's night, I take
down from its nook upon my shelf, and untie, and
open, and run over, with such sorrow, and such joy,—
such tears and such smiles, as I am sure make me for
weeks after, a kinder, and holier man.

There are in this little pacquet, letters in the
familiar hand of a mother—what gentle admonition;—what
tender affection!—God have mercy on
him who outlives the tears that such admonitions, and

such affection call up to the eye! There are others
in the budget, in the delicate, and unformed hand of
a loved, and lost sister;—written when she, and you
were full of glee, and the best mirth of youthfulness;
does it harm you to recall that mirthfulness? or to
trace again, for the hundredth time, that scrawling
postscript at the bottom, with its i's so carefully
dotted, and its gigantic t's so carefully crossed, by the
childish hand of a little brother?

I have added latterly to that pacquet of letters; I
almost need a new and longer ribbon; the old one is
getting too short. Not a few of these new, and
cherished letters, a former Reverie[1] has brought to
me; not letters of cold praise, saying it was well
done, artfully executed, prettily imagined—no such
thing: but letters of sympathy—of sympathy which
means sympathy—the παθήμί and the συν

It would be cold, and dastardly work to copy
them; I am too selfish for that. It is enough to say
that they, the kind writers, have seen a heart in the
Reverie—have felt that it was real, true. They
know it; a secret influence has told it. What
matters it pray, if literally, there was no wife, and no
dead child, and no coffin in the house? Is not

feeling, feeling; and heart, heart? Are not these
fancies thronging on my brain, bringing tears to my
eyes, bringing joy to my soul, as living, as anything
human can be living? What if they have no material
type—no objective form? All that is crude,—a
mere reduction of ideality to sense,—a transformation
of the spiritual to the earthy,—a levelling of soul to
matter.

Are we not creatures of thought and passion? Is
any thing about us more earnest than that same
thought and passion? Is there any thing more
real,—more characteristic of that great and dim
destiny to which we are born, and which may be
written down in that terrible word—Forever?

Let those who will then, sneer at what in their
wisdom they call untruth—at what is false, because
it has no material presence: this does not create
falsity; would to Heaven that it did!

And yet, if there was actual, material truth
superadded to Reverie, would such objectors sympathize
the more? No!—a thousand times, no; the
heart that has no sympathy with thoughts and
feelings that scorch the soul, is dead also—whatever
its mocking tears, and gestures may say—to a coffin,
or a grave!

Let them pass, and we will come back to these
cherished letters.

A mother, who has lost a child, has, she says, shed
a tear—not one, but many—over the dead boy's
coldness. And another, who has not lost, but who
trembles lest she lose, has found the words failing as
she read, and a dim, sorrow-borne mist, spreading
over the page.

Another, yet rejoicing in all those family ties, that
make life a charm, has listened nervously to careful
reading, until the husband is called home, and the
coffin is in the house.—“Stop!”—she says; and a
gush of tears tells the rest.

Yet the cold critic will say—“it was artfully
done.” A curse on him!—it was not art: it was
nature.

Another, a young, fresh, healthful girl-mind, has
seen something in the love-picture—albeit so weak—
of truth; and has kindly believed that it must be
earnest. Aye, indeed is it, fair, and generous one,—
earnest as life and hope! Who indeed with a heart
at all, that has not yet slipped away irreparably, and
forever from the shores of youth—from that fairy land
which young enthusiasm creates, and over which
bright dreams hover—but knows it to be real? And
so such things will be real, till hopes are dashed, and
Death is come.

Another, a father, has laid down the book in
tears.

—God bless them all! How far better this, than
the cold praise of newspaper paragraphs, or the
critically contrived approval of colder friends!

Let me gather up these letters, carefully,—to be
read when the heart is faint, and sick of all that there
is unreal, and selfish in the world. Let me tie them
together, with a new, and longer bit of ribbon—not
by a love knot, that is too hard—but by an easy
slipping knot, that so I may get at them the better.
And now, they are all together, a snug pacquet, and
we will label them, not sentimentally, (I pity the one
who thinks it!) but earnestly, and in the best meaning
of the term—Souvenirs du Cœur.

Thanks to my first Reverie, which has added to
such a treasure!

—And now to my Second Reverie.

I am no longer in the country. The fields, the
trees, the brooks are far away from me, and yet they
are very present. A letter from my tenant—how
different from those other letters!—lies upon my
table, telling me what fields he has broken up for the
autumn grain, and how many beeves he is fattening,
and how the potatoes are turning out.

But I am in a garret of the city. From my
window I look over a mass of crowded house-tops—
moralizing often upon the scene, but in a strain too
long, and sombre to be set down here. In place of

the wide country chimney, with its iron fire-dogs, is a
snug grate, where the maid makes me a fire in the
morning, and rekindles it in the afternoon.

I am usually fairly seated in my chair—a cozily
stuffed office chair—by five or six o'clock of the
evening. The fire has been newly made, perhaps an
hour before: first, the maid drops a withe of paper
in the bottom of the grate, then a stick or two of pine-wood,
and after it a hod of Liverpool coal; so that by
the time I am seated for the evening, the sea-coal is
fairly in a blaze.

When this has sunk to a level with the second bar
of the grate, the maid replenishes it with a hod of
Anthracite; and I sit musing and reading, while the
new coal warms and kindles—not leaving my place,
until it has sunk to the third bar of the grate, which
marks my bed-time.

I love these accidental measures of the hours, which
belong to you, and your life, and not to the world.
A watch is no more the measure of your time, than
of the time of your neighbors; a church clock is as
public, and vulgar as a church-warden. I would as
soon think of hiring the parish sexton to make my
bed, as to regulate my time by the parish clock.

A shadow that the sun casts upon your carpet, or
a streak of light on a slated roof yonder, or the
burning of your fire, are pleasant time-keepers,—full

of presence, full of companionship, and full of the
warning—time is passing!

In the summer season I have even measured my
reading, and my night-watch, by the burning of a
taper; and I have scratched upon the handle to the
little bronze taper-holder, that meaning passage of the
New Testament,—Νυξ γαζ εζχεται—the night
cometh!

But I must get upon my Reverie:—it was a
drizzly evening; I had worked hard during the day,
and had drawn my boots—thrust my feet into
slippers—thrown on a Turkish loose dress, and Greek
cap—souvenirs to me of other times, and other
places—and sat watching the lively, uncertain, yellow
play of the bituminous flame.

1. I.
Sea-Coal.

IT is like a flirt—mused I;—lively, uncertain,
bright-colored, waving here and there, melting
the coal into black shapeless mass, making foul, sooty
smoke, and pasty, trashy residuum! Yet withal,—
pleasantly sparkling, dancing, prettily waving, and
leaping like a roebuck from point to point.

How like a flirt! And yet is not this tossing
caprice of girlhood, to which I liken my sea-coal
flame, a native play of life, and belonging by nature
to the play-time of life? Is it not a sort of essential
fire-kindling to the weightier and truer passions—even
as Jenny puts the soft coal first, the better to kindle
the anthracite? Is it not a sort of necessary consumption

of young vapors, which float in the soul,
and which is left thereafter the purer? Is there not
a stage somewhere in every man's youth, for just
such waving, idle heart-blaze, which means nothing,
yet which must be got over?

Lamartine says somewhere, very prettily, that
there is more of quick running sap, and floating
shade in a young tree; but more of fire in the heart
of a sturdy oak:—Il y a plus de séve folle et d'ombre
flottante dans les jeunes plants de la forèt; il y a
plus de feu dans le vieux cœur du chene.

Is Lamartine playing off his prettiness of expression,
dressing up with his poetry,—making a good
conscience against the ghost of some accusing
Graziella, or is there truth in the matter?

A man who has seen sixty years, whether widower
or bachelor, may well put such sentiment into words:
it feeds his wasted heart with hope; it renews the
exultation of youth by the pleasantest of equivocation,
and the most charming of self-confidence. But
after all, is it not true? Is not the heart like new
blossoming field-plants, whose first flowers are half
formed, one-sided perhaps, but by-and-by, in maturity
of season, putting out wholesome, well-formed
blossoms, that will hold their leaves long and bravely?

Bulwer in his story of the Caxtons, has counted
first heart-flights mere fancy-passages—a dalliance

with the breezes of love—which pass, and leave
healthful heart appetite. Half the reading world has
read the story of Trevanion and Pisistratus. But
Bulwer is—past; his heart-life is used up—épuisé.
Such a man can very safely rant about the cool
judgment of after years.

Where does Shakspeare put the unripe heart-age?—All
of it before the ambition, that alone makes
the hero-soul. The Shakspeare man `sighs like a
furnace,' before he stretches his arm to achieve the
`bauble, reputation.'

Yet Shakspeare has meted a soul-love, mature and
ripe, without any young furnace sighs to Desdemona
and Othello. Cordelia, the sweetest of his play
creations, loves without any of the mawkish matter,
which makes the whining love of a Juliet. And
Florizel in the Winter's Tale, says to Perdita, in the
true spirit of a most sound heart—

How is it with Hector and Andromache?—no sea-coal
blaze, but one that is constant, enduring, pervading:
a pair of hearts full of esteem, and best love,—
good, honest, and sound.

Look now at Adam and Eve, in God's presence,
with Milton for showman. Shall we quote by this
sparkling blaze, a gem from the Paradise Lost? We
will hum it to ourselves—what Raphael sings to
Adam—a classic song.

And again:

None of the playing sparkle in this love, which
belongs to the flame of my sea-coal fire, that is now
dancing, lively as a cricket. But on looking about
my garret chamber, I can see nothing that resembles
the archangel Raphael, or `thy fair Eve.'

There is a degree of moisture about the sea-coal
flame, which with the most earnest of my musing, I
find it impossible to attach to that idea of a waving,
sparkling heart which my fire suggests. A damp

heart must be a foul thing to be sure! But whoever
heard of one?

Wordsworth somewhere in the Excursion, says:—

What, in the name of Rydal Mount, is a dry
heart? A dusty one, I can conceive of: a bachelor's
heart must be somewhat dusty, as he nears the
sixtieth summer of his pilgrimage;—and hung over
with cobwebs, in which sit such watchful gray old
spiders as Avarice, and Selfishness, forever on the
look out for such bottle-green flies as Lust.

“I will never”—said I—griping at the elbows
of my chair,—“live a bachelor till sixty:—never, so
surely as there is hope in man, or charity in woman,
or faith in both!”

And with that thought, my heart leaped about in
playful coruscations, even like the flame of the sea-coal;—rising,
and wrapping round old and tender
memories, and images that were present to me,—
trying to cling, and yet no sooner fastened, than off—
dancing again, riotous in its exultation—a succession
of heart-sparkles, blazing, and going out!

—And is there not—mused I,—a portion of this

world, forever blazing in just such lively sparkles;
waving here and there as the air-currents fan them?

Take for instance your heart of sentiment, and
quick sensibility, a weak, warm-working heart, flying
off in tangents of unhappy influence, unguided by
prudence, and perhaps virtue. There is a paper by
Mackenzie in the Mirror for April, 1780, which sets
this untoward sensibility in a strong light.

And the more it is indulged, the more strong and
binding such a habit of sensibility becomes. Poor
Mackenzie himself must have suffered thus; you
cannot read his books without feeling it; your eye,
in spite of you, runs over with his sensitive griefs,
while you are half-ashamed of his success at picture-making.
It is a terrible inheritance; and one that a
strong man or woman will study to subdue: it is a
vain sea-coal sparkling, which will count no good.
The world is made of much hard, flinty substance,
against which your better, and holier thoughts will be
striking fire;—see to it, that the sparks do not burn
you!

But what a happy, careless life belongs to this
Bachelorhood, in which you may strike out boldly
right and left! Your heart is not bound to another
which may be full of only sickly vapors of feeling;
nor is it frozen to a cold, man's heart under a silk
boddice—knowing nothing of tenderness but the

name, to prate of; and nothing of soul-confidence,
but clumsy confession. And if in your careless
out-goings of feeling, you get here, only a little lip
vapidity in return; be sure that you will find, elsewhere,
a true heart utterance. This last you will
cherish in your inner soul—a nucleus for a new
group of affections; and the other will pass with a
whiff of your eigar.

Or if your feelings are touched, struck, hurt, who
is the wiser, or the worse, but you only? And have
you not the whole skein of your heart-life in your
own fingers to wind, or unwind, in what shape you
please? Shake it, or twine it, or tangle it, by the
light of your fire, as you fancy best. He is a weak
man who cannot twist and weave the threads of his
feeling—however fine, however tangled, however
strained, or however strong—into the great cable of
Purpose, by which he lies moored to his life of
Action.

Reading is a great, and happy disentangler of all
those knotted snarls—those extravagant vagaries,
which belong to a heart sparkling with sensibility;
but the reading must be cautiously directed. There
is old, placid Burton when your soul is weak, and its
digestion of life's humors is bad; there is Cowper
when your spirit runs into kindly, half-sad, religious
musing; there is Crabbe when you would shake off

vagary, by a little handling of sharp actualities.
There is Voltaire, a homeopathic doctor, whom you
can read when you want to make a play of life, and
crack jokes at Nature, and be witty with Destiny;
there is Rousseau, when you want to lose yourself in
a mental dream-land, and be beguiled by the harmony
of soul-music and soul-culture.

And when you would shake off this, and be
sturdiest among the battlers for hard, world-success,
and be forewarned of rocks against which you must
surely smite—read Bolingbroke;—run over the
letters of Lyttleton; read, and think of what you
read, in the cracking lines of Rochefoucauld. How
he sums us up in his stinging words!—how he puts
the scalpel between the nerves—yet he never hurts;
for he is dissecting dead matter.

If you are in a genial careless mood; who is better
than such extemporizers of feeling and nature—good-hearted
fellows—as Sterne and Fielding?

And then again, there are Milton and Isaiah, to
lift up one's soul until it touches cloud-land, and you
wander with their guidance, on swift feet, to the very
gates of Heaven.

But this sparkling sensibility to one struggling
under infirmity, or with grief or poverty, is very
dreadful. The soul is too nicely and keenly hinged
to be wrenched without mischief. How it shrinks,

like a hurt child, from all that is vulgar, harsh, and
crude! Alas, for such a man!—he will be buffeted,
from beginning to end; his life will be a sea of
troubles. The poor victim of his own quick spirit
he wanders with a great shield of doubt hung before
him, so that none, not even friends can see the goodness
of such kindly qualities as belong to him.
Poverty, if it comes upon him, he wrestles with in
secret, with strong, frenzied struggles. He wraps
his scant clothes about him to keep him from the
cold; and eyes the world, as if every creature in it
was breathing chill blasts at him, from every opened
mouth. He threads the crowded ways of the city,
proud in his griefs, vain in his weakness, not stopping
to do good. Bulwer, in the New Timon, has painted
in a pair of stinging Pope-like lines, this feeling in a
woman:—

Cold picture! yet the heart was sparkling under
it, like my sea-coal fire; lifting and blazing, and
lighting and falling,—but with no object; and only
such little heat as begins and ends within.

Those fine sensibilities, ever active, are chasing

and observing all; they catch a hue from what the
dull and callons pass by unnoticed,—because unknown.
They blunder at the great variety of the world's
opinions; they see tokens of belief, where others see
none. That delicate organization is a curse to a
man; and yet poor fool, he does not see where his
cure lies; he wonders at his griefs, and has never
reckoned with himself their source. He studies
others, without studying himself. He eats the leaves
that sicken, and never plucks up the root that will
cure.

With a woman it is worse; with her, this delicate
susceptibility is like a frail flower, that quivers at every
rough blast of heaven; her own delicacy wounds her;
her highest charm is perverted to a curse.

She listens with fear; she reads with trembling;
she looks with dread. Her sympathies give a tone,
like the harp of Eolus, to the slightest breath. Her
sensibility lights up, and quivers and falls, like the
flame of a sea-coal fire.

If she loves—(and may not a Bachelor reason on
this daintiest of topics)—her love is a gushing, wavy
flame, lit up with hope, that has only a little kindling
matter to light it; and this soon burns out. Yet
intense sensibility will persuade her that the flame
still scorches. She will mistake the annoyance of
affection unrequited for the sting of a passion, that

she fancies still burns. She does not look deep
enough to see that the passion is gone, and the
shocked sensitiveness emits only faint, yellowish
sparkles in its place; her high-wrought organization
makes those sparks seem a veritable flame.

With her, judgment, prudence, and discretion are
cold measured terms, which have no meaning, except
as they attach to the actions of others. Of her own
acts, she never predicates them; feeling is much too
high, to allow her to submit to any such obtrusive
guides of conduct. She needs disappointment to
teach her truth;—to teach that all is not gold that
glitters—to teach that all warmth does not blaze.
But let her beware how she sinks under any fancied
disappointments: she who sinks under real disappointment,
lacks philosophy; but she who sinks under a
fancied one, lacks purpose. Let her flee as the
plague, such brooding thoughts as she will love to
cherish; let her spurn dark fancies as the visitants of
hell; let the soul rise with the blaze of new-kindled,
active, and world-wide emotions, and so brighten into
steady and constant flame. Let her adjure such
poets as Cowper, or Byron, or even Wordsworth; and
if she must poetize, let her lay her mind to such
manly verse as Pope's, or to such sound and ringing
organry as Comus.

My fire was getting dull, and I thrust in the poker:

it started up on the instant into a hundred little
angry tongues of flame.

—Just so—thought I—the over-sensitive heart
once cruelly disturbed, will fling out a score of
flaming passions, darting here, and darting there,—
half-smoke, half-flame—love and hate—canker and
joy—wild in its madness, not knowing whither its
sparks are flying. Once break roughly upon the
affections, or even the fancied affections of such a
soul, and you breed a tornado of maddened action—
a whirlwind of fire that hisses, and sends out jets of
wild, impulsive combustion, that make the bystanders,—even
those most friendly—stand aloof, until the
storm is past.

But this is not all that the dashing flame of my
sea-coal suggests.

—How like a flirt!—mused I again, recurring to
my first thought—so lively, yet uncertain; so bright,
yet so flickering! Your true flirt plays with sparkles;
her heart, much as there is of it, spends itself
in sparkles; she measures it to sparkle, and habit
grows into nature, so that anon, it can only sparkle.
How carefully she cramps it, if the flames show too
great a heat; how dexterously she flings its blaze here
and there; how coyly she subdues it; how winningly
she lights it!

All this is the entire reverse of the unpremeditated

dartings of the soul at which I have been looking;
sensibility scorns heart-curbings, and heart-teachings;
sensibility enquires not—how much? but only—
where?

Your true flirt has a coarse-grained soul; well
modulated and well tutored, but there is no fineness
in it. All its native fineness is made coarse, by
coarse efforts of the will. True feeling is a rustic
vulgarity, the flirt does not tolerate; she counts its
healthiest and most honest manifestation, all sentiment.
Yet she will play you off a pretty string of sentiment,
which she has gathered from the poets; she adjusts
it prettily as a Ghobelin weaver adjusts the colors in
his tapis. She shades it off delightfully; there are
no bold contrasts, but a most artistic mellow of
nuances.

She smiles like a wizzard, and jingles it with a
laugh, such as tolled the poor home-bound Ulysses
to the Circean bower. She has a cast of the head,
apt and artful as the most dexterous cast of the best
trout-killing rod. Her words sparkle, and flow
hurriedly, and with the prettiest doubleness of meaning.
Naturalness she copies, and she scorns. She accuses
herself of a single expression or regard, which nature
prompts. She prides herself on her schooling. She
measures her wit by the triumphs of her art; she
chuckles over her own falsity to herself. And if by

chance her soul—such germ as is left of it—betrays
her into untoward confidence, she condemns herself,
as if she had committed crime.

She is always gay, because she has no depth of
feeling to be stirred. The brook that runs shallow
over hard pebbly bottom always rustles. She is
light-hearted, because her heart floats in sparkles—
like my sea-coal fire. She counts on marriage, not
as the great absorbent of a heart's-love, and life, but
as a happy, feasible, and orderly conventionality, to
be played with, and kept at distance, and finally to be
accepted as a cover for the faint and tawdry sparkles
of an old and cherished heartlessness.

She will not pine under any regrets, because she
has no appreciation of any loss: she will not chafe at
indifference, because it is her art; she will not be
worried with jealousies, because she is ignorant of
love. With no conception of the soul in its strength
and fulness, she sees no lack of its demands. A
thrill, she does not know; a passion, she cannot
imagine; joy is a name; grief is another; and Life
with its crowding scenes of love, and bitterness, is a
play upon the stage.

I think it is Madame Dudevant who says, in something
like the same connection:—Les hiboux ne
connaissant pas le chemin par où les aigles vont au
soliel

—Poor Ned!—mused I, looking at the play of
the fire—was a victim and a conqueror. He was a
man of a full, strong nature—not a little impulsive—
with action too full of earnestness for most of men to
see its drift. He had known little of what is called
the world; he was frosh in feeling and high of hope;
he had been encircled always by friends who loved
him, and who, may be, flattered him. Scarce had he
entered upon the tangled life of the city, before he met
with a sparkling face and an airy step, that stirred
something in poor Ned, that he had never felt before.
With him, to feel was to act. He was not one to be
despised; for notwithstanding he wore a country air,
and the awkwardness of a man who has yet the biensèance
of social life before him, he had the soul, the
courage, and the talent of a strong man. Little
gifted in the knowledge of face-play, he easily
mistook those coy manœuvres of a sparkling heart,
for something kindred to his own true emotions.

She was proud of the attentions of a man who
carried a mind in his brain; and flattered poor Ned
almost into servility. Ned had no friends to counsel
him; or if he had them, his impulses would have
blinded him. Never was dodger more artful at the
Olympic Games than the Peggy of Ned's heart-affection.
He was charmed, beguiled, entranced.

When Ned spoke of love, she staved it off with

the prettiest of sly looks that only bewildered him the
more. A charming creature to be sure; coy as a
dove!

So he went on, poor fool, until one day—he told
me of it with the blood mounting to his temples, and
his eye shooting flame—he suffered his feelings to run
out in passionate avowal,—entreaty,—everything.
She gave a pleasant, noisy laugh, and manifested—
such pretty surprise!

He was looking for the intense glow of passion;
and lo, there was nothing but the shifting sparkle of
a sea-coal flame.

I wrote him a letter of condolence—for I was his
senior by a year;—“my dear fellow,” said I, “diet
yourself; you can find greens at the up-town market;
eat a little fish with your dinner; abstain from heating
drinks: don't put too much butter to your
cauliflower; read one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons,
and translate all the quotations at sight; run carefully
over that exquisite picture of Geo. Dandin in
your Moliere, and my word for it, in a week you will
be a sound man.”

He was too angry to reply; but eighteen months
thereafter I got a thick, three-sheeted letter, with a
dove upon the seal, telling me that he was as happy
as a king: he said he had married a good-hearted,
domestic, loving wife, who was as lovely as a June

day, and that their baby, not three months old, was
as bright as a spot of June day sunshine on the grass.

—What a tender, delicate, loving wife—mused I—
such flashing, flaming flirt must in the end make;—
the prostitute of fashion; the bauble of fifty hearts
idle as hers; the shifting make-piece of a stage scene;
the actress, now in peasant, and now in princely
petticoats! How it would cheer an honest soul to
call her—his! What a culmination of his heart-life;
what a rich dream-land to be realized!

—Bah! and I thrust the poker into the clotted
mass of fading coal—just such, and so worthless is the
used heart of a city flirt; just so the incessant sparkle
of her life, and frittering passions, fuses all that is
sound and combustible, into black, sooty, shapeless
residuum.

When I marry a flirt, I will buy second-hand
clothes of the Jews.

—Still—mused I—as the flame danced again—
there is a distinction between coquetry and flirtation.

A coquette sparkles, but it is more the sparkle of a
harmless and pretty vanity, than of calculation. It
is the play of humors in the blood, and not the play
of purpose at the heart. It will flicker around a true
soul like the blaze around an omelette au rhum, leaving
the kernel sounder and warmer.

Coquetry, with all its pranks and teasings, makes
the spice to your dinner—the mulled wine to your
supper. It will drive you to desperation, only to
bring you back hotter to the fray. Who would
boast a victory that cost no strategy, and no careful
disposition of the forces? Who would bulletin such
success as my Uncle Toby's, in a back-garden, with
only the Corporal Trim for assailant? But let a man
be very sure that the city is worth the siege!

Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves
it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose—
easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is
like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to
handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in
slimy waters.

And so, with my eye clinging to the flickering
blaze, I see in my reverie, a bright one dancing before
me, with sparkling, coquettish smile, teasing me with
the prettiest graces in the world;—and I grow
maddened between hope and fear, and still watch with
my whole soul in my eyes; and see her features by
and by relax to pity, as a gleam of sensibility comes
stealing over her spirit;—and then to a kindly, feeling
regard: presently she approaches,—a coy and doubtful
approach—and throws back the ringlets that lie
over her cheek, and lays her hand—a little bit of
white hand—timidly upon my strong fingers,—and

turns her head daintily to one side,—and looks up in
my eyes, as they rest on the playing blaze; and my
fingers close fast and passionately over that little
hand, like a swift night-cloud shrouding the pale tips
of Dian;—and my eyes draw nearer and nearer to
those blue, laughing, pitying, teasing eyes, and my
arm clasps round that shadowy form,—and my lips
feel a warm breath—growing warmer and warmer—

Just here the maid comes in, and throws upon the
fire a pan-ful of Anthracite, and my sparkling sea-coal
reverie is ended.

2. II.
Anthracite.

It does not burn freely, so I put on the blower.
Quaint and good-natured Xavier de Maistre[2]
would have made, I dare say, a pretty epilogue about
a sheet-iron blower; but I cannot.

I try to bring back the image that belonged to the
lingering bituminous flame, but with my eyes on that
dark blower,—how can I?

It is the black curtain of destiny which drops down
before our brightest dreams. How often the phantoms
of joy regale us, and dance before us—golden-winged,
angel-faced, heart-warming, and make an
Elysium in which the dreaming soul bathes, and feels
translated to another existence; and then—sudden as

night, or a cloud—a word, a step, a thought, a memory
will chase them away, like scared deer vanishing
over a gray horizon of moor-land!

I know not justly, if it be a weakness or a sin to
create these phantoms that we love, and to group them
into a paradise—soul-created. But if it is a sin, it is
a sweet and enchanting sin; and if it is a weakness,
it is a strong and stirring weakness. If this heart is
sick of the falsities that meet it at every hand, and is
eager to spend that power which nature has ribbed it
with, on some object worthy of its fulness and depth,—
shall it not feel a rich relief,—nay more, an exercise
in keeping with its end, if it flow out—strong as a
tempest, wild as a rushing river, upon those ideal
creations, which imagination invents, and which are
tempered by our best sense of beauty, purity, and
grace?

— Useless, do you say? Aye, it is as useless as
the pleasure of looking hour upon hour, over bright
landscapes; it is as useless as the rapt enjoyment of
listening with heart full and eyes brimming, to such
music as the Miserere at Rome; it is as useless as the
ecstacy of kindling your soul into fervor and love, and
madness, over pages that reek with genius.

There are indeed base-moulded souls who know
nothing of this; they laugh; they sneer; they even
affect to pity. Just so the Huns under the avenging

Attila, who had been used to foul cookery and steaks
stewed under their saddles, laughed brutally at the
spiced banquets of an Apicius!

— No, this phantom-making is no sin; or if it
be, it is sinning with a soul so full, so earnest, that it
can cry to Heaven cheerily, and sure of a gracious
hearing—peccavi—misericorde!

But my fire is in a glow, a pleasant glow, throwing
a tranquil, steady light to the farthest corner of my
garret. How unlike it is, to the flashing play of the
sea-coal!—unlike as an unsteady, uncertain-working
heart to the true and earnest constancy of one cheerful
and right.

After all, thought I, give me such a heart; not bent
on vanities, not blazing too sharp with sensibility,
not throwing out coquettish jets of flame, not wavering,
and meaningless with pretended warmth, but
open, glowing and strong. Its dark shades and angles
it may have; for what is a soul worth that does not
take a slaty tinge from those griefs that chill the
blood? Yet still the fire is gleaming; you see it in
the crevices; and anon it will give radiance to the
whole mass.

—It hurts the eyes, this fire; and I draw up a
screen painted over with rough, but graceful figures.

The true heart wears always the veil of modesty—
(not of prudery, which is a dingy, iron, repulsive

screen.) It will not allow itself to be looked on too
near—it might scorch; but through the veil you feel
the warmth; and through the pretty figures that
modesty will robe itself in, you can see all the while
the golden outlines, and by that token, you know that
it is glowing and burning with a pure and steady
flame.

With such a heart the mind fuses naturally—a
holy and heated fusion; they work together like
twins-born. With such a heart, as Raphael says to
Adam,

But let me distinguish this heart from your clay-cold,
luke-warm, half-hearted soul;—considerate,
because ignorant; judicious, because possessed of no
latent fires that need a curb; prudish, because with
no warm blood to tempt. This sort of soul may pass
scatheless through the fiery furnace of life; strong,
only in its weakness; pure, because of its failings;
and good, only by negation. It may triumph over
love, and sin, and death; but it will be a triumph of
the beast, which has neither passions to subdue, or
energy to attack, or hope to quench.

Let us come back to the steady and earnest heart,
glowing like my anthracite coal.

I fancy I see such a one now:—the eye is deep
and reaches back to the spirit; it is not the trading
eye, weighing your purse; it is not the worldly eye,
weighing position; it is not the beastly eye, weighing
your appearance; it is the heart's eye, weighing
your soul!

It is full of deep, tender, and earnest feeling. It
is an eye, which looked on once, you long to look on
again; it is an eye which will haunt your dreams,—
an eye which will give a colour, in spite of you, to all
your reveries. It is an eye which lies before you in
your future, like a star in the mariner's heaven; by
it, unconsciously, and from force of deep soul-habit,
you take all your observations. It is meek and quiet;
but it is full, as a spring that gushes in flood; an
Aphrodite and a Mercury—a Vauclause and a Clitumnus!

The face is an angel face; no matter for curious
lines of beauty; no matter for popular talk of prettiness;
no matter for its angles, or its proportions;
no matter for its colour or its form—the soul is there,
illuminating every feature, burnishing every point,
hallowing every surface. It tells of honesty, sincerity
and worth; it tells of truth and virtue;—and you

clasp the image to your heart, as the received ideal
of your fondest dreams.

The figure may be this or that, it may be tall or
short, it matters nothing,—the heart is there. The
talk may be soft or low, serious or piquant—a free
and honest soul is warming and softening it all. As
you speak, it speaks back again; as you think, it
thinks again—(not in conjunction, but in the same
sign of the Zodiac;) as you love it loves in return.

—It is the heart for a sister, and happy is the
man who can claim such! The warmth that lies in
it is not only generous, but religious, genial, devotional,
tender, self-sacrificing, and looking heavenward.

A man without some sort of religion, is at best a
poor reprobate, the foot-ball of destiny, with no tie
linking him to infinity, and the wondrous eternity
that is begun with him; but a woman without it, is
even worse—a flame without heat, a rainbow without
colour, a flower without perfume!

A man may in some sort tie his frail hopes and
honors, with weak, shifting ground-tackle to business,
or to the world; but a woman without that anchor which
they call Faith, is adrift, and a-wreck! A man may
clumsily contrive a kind of moral responsibility, out
of his relations to mankind; but a woman in her
comparatively isolated sphere, where affection and not

purpose is the controlling motive, can find no basis
for any system of right action, but that of spiritual
faith. A man may craze his thought, and his brain,
to trustfulness in such poor harborage as Fame and
Reputation may stretch before him; but a woman—
where can she put her hope in storms, if not in
Heaven?

And that sweet trustfulness—that abiding love—
that enduring hope, mellowing every page and scene
of life, lighting them with pleasantest radiance, when
the world-storms break like an army with smoking
cannon—what can bestow it all, but a holy soul-tie to
what is above the storms, and to what is stronger
than an army with cannon? Who that has enjoyed
the counsel and the love of a Christian mother, but
will echo the thought with energy, and hallow it with
a tear?—et moi, je pleurs!

My fire is now a mass of red-hot coal. The whole
atmosphere of my room is warm. The heart that
with its glow can light up, and warm a garret with
loose casements and shattered roof, is capable of the
best love—domestic love. I draw farther off, and the
images upon the screen change. The warmth, the
hour, the quiet, create a home feeling; and that feeling,
quick as lightning, has stolen from the world of
fancy (a Promethean theft,) a home object, about

which my musings go on to drape themselves in luxurious
reverie.

—There she sits, by the corner of the fire, in a
neat home dress, of sober, yet most adorning colour.
A little bit of lace ruffle is gathered about the neck,
by a blue ribbon; and the ends of the ribbon are
crossed under the dimpling chin, and are fastened
neatly by a simple, unpretending brooch—your gift.
The arm, a pretty taper arm, lies over the carved
elbow of the oaken chair; the hand, white and delicate,
sustains a little home volume that hungs from
her fingers. The forefinger is between the leaves,
and the others he in relief upon the dark embossed
cover. She repeats in a silver voice, a line that has
attracted her fancy; and you listen—or at any rate,
you seem to listen—with your eyes now on the lips,
now on the forehead, and now on the finger, where
glitters like a star, the marriage ring—little gold
band, at which she does not chafe, that tells you,—
she is yours!

—Weak testimonial, if that were all that told
it! The eye, the voice, the look, the heart, tells
you stronger and better, that she is yours. And a
feeling within, where it lies you know not, and
whence it comes you know not, but sweeping over
heart and brain, like a fire-flood, tells you too, that

you are hers! Irremediably bound as Massinger's
Hortensio:

The fire is warm as ever; what length of heat in
this hard burning anthracite! It has scarce sunk yet
to the second bar of the grate, though the clock upon
the church-tower has tolled eleven.

—Aye,—mused I, gaily—such heart does not
grow faint, it does not spend itself in idle puffs of
blaze, it does not become chilly with the passing
years; but it gains and grows in strength, and heat,
until the fire of life, is covered over with the ashes of
death. Strong or hot as it may be at the first, it
loses nothing. It may not indeed, as time advances,
throw out, like the coal-fire, when new-lit, jets of
blue sparkling flame; it may not continue to bubble,
and gush like a fountain at its source, but it will become
a strong river of flowing charities.

Clitumnus breaks from under the Tuscan mountains,
almost a flood; on a glorious spring day I
leaned down and tasted the water, as it boiled from
its sources;—the little temple of white marble,—the
mountain sides gray with olive orchards,—the white
streak of road,—the tall poplars of the river margin

were glistening in the bright Italian sunlight, around
me. Later, I saw it when it had become a river,—
still clear and strong, flowing serenely between its
prairie banks, on which the white cattle of the valley
browsed; and still farther down, I welcomed it,
where it joins the Arno,—flowing slowly under
wooded shores, skirting the fair Florence, and the
bounteous fields of the bright Cascino;—gathering
strength and volume, till between Pisa and Leghorn,
—in sight of the wondrous Leaning Tower, and the
ship-masts of the Tuscan port, it gave its waters to
its life's grave—the sea.

The recollection blended sweetly now with my
musings, over my garret grate, and offered a flowing
image, to bear along upon its bosom the affections
that were grouping in my Reverie.

It is a strange force of the mind and of the fancy,
that can set the objects which are closest to the heart
far down the lapse of time. Even now, as the fire
fades slightly, and sinks slowly towards the bar, which
is the dial of my hours, I seem to see that image of
love which has played about the fire-glow of my grate
—years hence. It still covers the same warm, trustful,
religious heart. Trials have tried it; afflictions
have weighed upon it; danger has scared it; and
death is coming near to subdue it; but still it is the
same.

The fingers are thinner; the face has lines of care,
and sorrow, crossing each other in a web-work, that
makes the golden tissue of humanity. But the heart
is fond, and steady; it is the same dear heart, the
same self-sacrificing heart, warming, like a fire, all
around it. Affliction has tempered joy; and joy
adorned affliction. Life and all its troubles have become
distilled into an holy incense, rising ever from
your fireside,—an offering to your household gods.

Your dreams of reputation, your swift determination,
your impulsive pride, your deep uttered vows to
win a name, have all sobered into affection—have all
blended into that glow of feeling, which finds its centre,
and hope, and joy in Home. From my soul I
pity him whose soul does not leap at the mere utterance
of that name.

A home!—it is the bright, blessed, adorable phantom
which sits highest on the sunny horizon that
girdeth Life! When shall it be reached? When
shall it cease to be a glittering day-dream, and become
fully and fairly yours?

It is not the house, though that may have its
charms; nor the fields carefully tilled, and streaked
with your own foot-paths;—nor the trees, though
their shadow be to you like that of a great rock in a
weary land;—nor yet is it the fireside, with its sweet
blaze-play;—nor the pictures which tell of loved

ones, nor the cherished books,—but more far than all
these—it is the Presence. The Lares of your worship
are there; the altar of your confidence there;
the end of your worldly faith is there; and adorning
it all, and sending your blood in passionate flow, is
the ecstasy of the conviction, that there at least you
are beloved; that there you are understood; that
there your errors will meet ever with gentlest forgiveness;
that there your troubles will be smiled away;
that there you may unburden your soul, fearless of
harsh, unsympathizing ears; and that there you may
be entirely and joyfully—yourself!

There may be those of coarse mould—and I have
seen such even in the disguise of women—who will
reckon these feelings puling sentiment. God pity
them!—as they have need of pity.

—That image by the fireside, calm, loving, joyful,
is there still: it goes not, however my spirit tosses,
because my wish, and every will, keep it there,
unerring.

The fire shows through the screen, yellow and
warm, as a harvest sun. It is in its best age, and
that age is ripeness.

A ripe heart!—now I know what Wordsworth
meant, when he said,

The town clock is striking midnight. The cold of
the night-wind is urging its way in at the door and window-crevice;
the fire has sunk almost to the third
bar of the grate. Still my dream tires not, but
wraps fondly round that image,—now in the far off,
chilling mists of age, growing sainted. Love has
blended into reverence; passion has subsided into
joyous content.

—And what if age comes, said I, in a new flush
of excitation,—what else proves the wine? What
else gives inner strength, and knowledge, and a
steady pilot-hand, to steer your boat out boldly upon
that shoreless sea, where the river of life is running?
Let the white ashes gather; let the silver hair lie,
where lay the auburn; let the eye gleam farther
back, and dimmer; it is but retreating toward the
pure sky-depths, an usher to the land where you will
follow after.

It is quite cold, and I take away the screen altogether;
there is a little glow yet, but presently the
coal slips down below the third bar, with a rumbling
sound,—like that of coarse gravel falling into a new-dug
grave.

—She is gone!

Well, the heart has burned fairly, evenly, generously,
while there was mortality to kindle it; eternity
will surely kindle it better.

—Tears indeed; but they are tears of thanksgiving,
of resignation, and of hope!

And the eyes, full of those tears, which ministering
angels bestow, climb with quick vision, upon the
angelic ladder, and open upon the futurity where she
has entered, and upon the country, which she enjoys.

It is midnight, and the sounds of life are dead.

You are in the death chamber of life; but you are
also in the death chamber of care. The world seems
sliding backward; and hope and you are sliding forward.
The clouds, the agonies, the vain expectancies,
the braggart noise, the fears, now vanish behind
the curtain of the Past, and of the Night.
They roll from your soul like a load.

In the dimness of what seems the ending Present,
you reach out your prayerful hands toward that
boundless Future, where God's eye lifts over the
horizon, like sunrise on the ocean. Do you recognize
it as an earnest of something better? Aye, if
the heart has been pure, and steady,—burning like
my fire—it has learned it without seeming to learn.
Faith has grown upon it, as the blossom grows upon
the bud, or the flower upon the slow-lifting stalk.

Cares cannot come into the dream-land where I
live. They sink with the dying street noise, and
vanish with the embers of my fire. Even Ambition,
with its hot and shifting flame, is all gone out.
The heart in the dimness of the fading fire-glow is
all itself. The memory of what good things have
come over it in the troubled youth-life, bear it up;
and hope and faith bear it on. There is no extravagant
pulse-flow; there is no mad fever of the brain;
but only the soul; forgetting—for once—all, save its
destinies, and its capacities for good. And it mounts
higher and higher on these wings of thought; and
hope burns stronger and stronger out of the ashes of
decaying life, until the sharp edge of the grave
seems but a foot-scraper at the wicket of Elysium!

But what is paper; and what are words? Vain
things! The soul leaves them behind; the pen
staggers like a starveling cripple; and your heart is
leaving it, a whole length of the life-course behind.
The soul's mortal longings,—its poor baffled hopes,
are dim now in the light of those infinite longings,
which spread over it, soft and holy as day-dawn.
Eternity has stretched a corner of its mantle toward
you, and the breath of its waving fringe is like a gale
of Araby.

A little rumbling, and a last plunge of the cinders
within my grate, startled me, and dragged back my

faney from my flower chase, beyond the Phlegethon,
to the white ashes, that were now thick all over the
darkened coals.

—And this—mused I—is only a bachelor-dream
about a pure, and loving heart! And to-morrow
comes cankerous life again:—is it wished for?
Or if not wished for, is the not wishing, wicked?

Will dreams satisfy, reach high as they can? Are
we not after all poor grovelling mortals, tied to earth,
and to each other; are there not sympathies, and
hopes, and affections which can only find their issue,
and blessing, in fellow absorption? Does not the
heart, steady, and pure as it may be, and mounting
on soul flights often as it dare, want a human sympathy,
perfectly indulged, to make it healthful? Is
there not a fount of love for this world, as there is a
fount of love for the other? Is there not a certain
store of tenderness, cooped in this heart, which must,
and will be lavished, before the end comes? Does
it not plead with the judgment, and make issue
with prudence, year after year? Does it not dog
your steps all through your social pilgrimage, setting
up its claims in forms fresh, and odorous as new-blown
heath bells, saying,—come away from the
heartless, the factitious, the vain, and measure your
heart not by its constraints, but by its fulness, and
by its depth?—let it run, and be joyous!

Is there no demon that comes to your harsh night-dreams,
like a taunting fiend, whispering—be satisfied;
keep your heart from running over; bridle those
affections; there is nothing worth loving?

Does not some sweet being hover over your spirit of
reverie like a beckoning angel, crowned with halo,
saying—hope on, hope ever; the heart and I are
kindred; our mission will be fulfilled; nature shall accomplish
its purpose; the soul shall have its Paradise!

—I threw myself upon my bed: and as my
thoughts ran over the definite, sharp business of the
morrow, my Reverie, and its glowing images, that
made my heart bound, swept away, like those fleecy
rain clouds of August, on which the sun paints rainbows—driven
Southward, by a cool, rising wind from
the North.

—I wonder,—thought I, as I dropped asleep,—
if a married man with his sentiment made actual, is,
after all, as happy as we poor fellows, in our dreams?