Dream life :: :: University of Virginia Library

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!