University of Virginia Library

VIII.
A Broken Hope.

YOUTHFUL passion is a giant. It overleaps
all the dreams, and all the resolves of our
better and quieter nature; and drives madly toward
some wild issue, that lives only in its frenzy. How
little account does passion take of goodness! It is not
within the cycle of its revolution: it is below: it is
tamer: it is older: it wears no wings.

And your proud heart flashing back to the memory
of that sparkling eye, which lighted your hope—full-fed
upon the vanities of cloister learning, drives your soberer
visions to the wind. As you recal those tones, so full
of brilliancy and pride, the quiet virtues fade, like the
soft haze upon a spring landscape, driven westward by
a swift, sea-born storm. The pulse bounds: the eyes

flash: the heart trembles with its sharp springs. Hope
dilates, like the eye,—fed with swift blood, leaping to
the brain.

Again the image of Miss Dalton, so fine, so noble, so
womanly, fills, and bounds the Future. The lingering
tears of grief drop away from your eye, as the lingering
loves of boyhood drop from your scalding passion, or
drift into clouds of vapor.

You listen to the calm, thoughtful advice of the
father, with a deep consciousness of something stronger
than his counsels, seething in your bosom. The words
of caution, of instruction, of guidance, fall upon your
heated imagination, like the night-dews upon the crater
of an Etna. They are beneficent, and healthful for the
straggling herbage upon the surface of the mountain;
but they do not reach, or temper the inner fires, that
are rolling their billows of flame, beneath!

You drop hints from time to time to those with
whom you are most familiar, of some prospective
change of condition. There is a new and cheerful
interest in the building plans of your neighbors:—a
new, and cheerful study of the principles of domestic
architecture;—in which, very elegant boudoirs, adorned
with harps, hold prominent place; and libraries with
gilt-bound books, very rich in lyrical, and dramatic
poetry;—fine views from bay windows;—graceful pots
of flowers;—sleek looking Italian grey-hounds;—

cheerful sunlight;—musical goldfinches chattering on
the wall;—superb pictures of Princesses in peasant
dresses;—soft Axminster carpets;—easy-acting bell-pulls;—gigantic
candelabras;—porcelain vases of classic
shape;—neat waiters in white aprons;—luxurious
lounges; and, to crown them all with the very height
of your pride,—the elegant Laura, the mistress, and the
guardian of your soul—moving amid the scene, like a
new Duchess of Vallière!

You catch chance sights here and there, of the
blue-eyed Madge: you see her, in her mother's household,
the earnest, and devoted daughter,—gliding
gracefully about her mother's cottage, the very type of
gentleness, and of duty. Yet withal, there are sparks
of spirit in her, that pique your pride,—lofty as it is.
You offer flowers, which she accepts with a kind
smile;—not of coquetry—but of simplest thankfulness.
She is not the girl to gratify your vanity with any
half-show of tenderness. And if there lived ever in
her heart an old girlish liking for the school-boy
Clarence, it is all gone before the romantic lover of the
elegant Laura; or at most, it lies in some obscure
corner of her soul, never to be brought to light.

You enter upon the new pursuits, which your father
has advised, with a lofty consciousness,—not only of the
strength of your mind, but of your heart. You relieve
your opening professional study, with long letters to

Miss Dalton, full of Shakespearean compliments, and
touched off with very dainty elaboration. And you
receive pleasant, gossipping notes in answer,—full of
quotations, but meaning very little.

Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of
ending summer; and pleasant dreams thrall your spirit,
like the smoky atmosphere that bathes the landscape of
an August day. Hope rides high in the Heavens, as
when the summer sun mounts nearest to the zenith.
Youth feels the fullness of maturity, before the second
season of life is ended: yet is it a vain maturity, and
all the glow is deceitful. Those fruits that ripen in
summer do not last. They are sweet; they are
glowing with gold; but they melt with a luscious
sweetness upon the lip. They do not give that
strength, and nutriment, which will bear a man bravely
through the coming chills of winter.

The last scene of summer changes now to the
cobwebbed ceiling of an attorney's office. Books of
law, scattered ingloriously at your elbow, speak dully to
the flush of your vanities. You are seated at your side
desk, where you have wrought at those heavy, mechanic
labors of drafting, which go before a knowledge of
your craft.

A letter is by you, which you regard with strange
feelings: it is yet unopened. It comes from Laura. It

is in reply to one which has cost you very much of
exquisite elaboration. You have made your avowal
of feeling, as much like a poem, as your education
would admit. Indeed, it was a pretty letter,—promising,
not so much the trustful love of an earnest, and
devoted heart,—as the fervor of a passion which
consumed you, and glowed like a furnace through the
lines of your letter. It was a confession, in which your
vanity of intellect had taken very entertaining part; and
in which, your judgment was too cool to appear at all.

She must needs break out into raptures at such a
letter; and her own, will doubtless be tempered with
even greater passion.

It is well to shift your chair somewhat, so that
the clerks of the office may not see your emotion as
you read. It would be silly to manifest your exuberance
in a dismal, dark office of your instructing attorney.
One sighs rather for woods, and brooks, and sunshine,
in whose company, the hopes of youth stretch into
fulfillment.

We will look only at a closing passage:—

—Magnificent Miss Dalton!

Read it again. Stick your knife in the desk:—tut!
—you will break the blade! Fold up the letter carefully,
and toss it upon your pile of papers. Open
Chitty again;—pleasant reading is Chitty! Lean upon
your hand—your two hands;—so that no one will
catch sight of your face. Chitty is very interesting;—
how sparkling and imaginative!—what a depth and
flow of passion in Chitty!

The office is a capital place—so quiet and sunny.
Law is a delightful study—so captivating, and such
stores of romance! And then those trips to the Hall
offer such relief and variety;—especially just now.
It would be well not to betray your eagerness to go.
You can brush your hat a round or two, and take a

peep into the broken bit of looking-glass, over the
wash-stand.

You lengthen your walk, as you sometimes do, by a
stroll upon the Battery—though rarely, upon such
a blustering November day. You put your hands
in your pockets, and look out upon the tossing sea.

It is a fine sight—very fine. There are few finer
bays in the world than New York bay; either to look
at, or—for that matter—to sleep in. The ships ride
up thickly, dashing about the cold spray delightfully;
the little cutters gleam in the November sunshine, like
white flowers shivering in the wind.

The sky is rich—all mottled with cold, gray streaks
of cloud. The old apple-women, with their noses frost-bitten,
look cheerful, and blue. The ragged immigrants
in short-trowsers, and bell-crowned hats, stalk
about with a very happy expression, and very short
stemmed pipes; their yellow-haired babies look comfortably
red, and glowing. And the trees with their
scant, pinched foliage, have a charming, summer-like
effect!

Amid it all, the thoughts of the boudoir, and
harpsichord, and gold-finches, and Axminster carpets,
and sunshine, and Laura, are so very—very pleasant!
How delighted you would be to see her married to the
stout man in the red cravat, who gave her bouquets,
and strolled with her on the deck of the steamer upon

the St. Lawrence! What a jaunty, self-satisfied air he
wore; and with what considerate forbearance he treated
you—calling you once or twice—Master Clarence!
It never occurred to you before, how much you must
be indebted to that pleasant, stout man.

You try sadly to be cheerful; you smile oddly;
your pride comes strongly to your help, but yet helps
you very little. It is not so much a broken heart, that
you have to mourn over, as a broken dream. You
seem to see in a hundred ways that had never occurred
to you before, the marks of her superior age. Above
all, it is manifest in the cool, and unimpassioned tone
of her letter. Yet, how kindly, withal! It would be
a relief to be angry.

New visions come to you, wakened by the broken
fancy which has just now eluded your grasp. You
will make yourself, if not old,—at least, gifted with the
force and dignity of age. You will be a man; and
build no more castles, until you can people them with
men! In an excess of pride, you even take umbrage
at the sex; they can have little appreciation of that
engrossing tenderness, of which you feel yourself to be
capable. Love shall henceforth be dead, and you
will live boldly without it.

—Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank
shrouds for a morning, the sun of later August, we say
in our shivering pride—the winter is come early!

But God manages the seasons better than we; and
in a day, or an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and
the heavens glow again upon our ungrateful heads.

Well, it is even so, that the passionate dreams
of youth break up, and wither. Vanity becomes
tempered with wholesome pride; and passion yields to
the riper judgment of manhood;—even as the August
heats pass on, and over, into the genial glow of a
September sun. There is a strong growth in the
struggles against mortified pride; and then only, does
the youth get an ennobling consciousness of that
manhood which is dawning in him, when he has fairly
surmounted those puny vexations, which a wounded
vanity creates.

Now, your heart is driven home;—and that cherished
place, where, so little while ago, you wore your vanities
with an air, that mocked even your grief, and that
subdued your better nature, seems to stretch toward
you, over long miles of distance,—its wings of love;
and to welcome back to the sister's, and the father's
heart—not the self-sufficient, and vaunting youth,—
but the brother and son,—the school-boy, Clarence.
Like a thirsty child, you stray in thought, to that
fountain of cheer; and live again,—your vanity crushed,
your wild hope broken,—in the warm, and natural
affections of the boyish home.

Clouds weave the Summer into the season of
Autumn: and Youth rises from dashed hopes, into
the stature of a Man.