Chapter 2

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 fulness. 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 lifetime, 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 buttercups, 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 trustworthy. 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 rarefy 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.

_SPRING;_

OR,

_DREAMS OF BOYHOOD._

_DREAMS OF BOYHOOD._

_Spring._

The old chroniclers made the year begin in the season of frosts; and they have launched us upon the current of the months from the snowy banks of January. I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight.

Bernardin de St. Pierre, in his sweet story of Virginia, makes the bloom of the cocoa-tree, or the growth of the banana, a yearly and a loved monitor of the passage of her life. How cold and cheerless in the comparison would be the icy chronology of the North;--So many years have I seen the lakes locked, and the foliage die!

The budding and blooming of spring seem to belong properly to the opening of the months. It is the season of the quickest expansion, of the warmest blood, of the readiest growth; it is the boy-age of the year. The birds sing in chorus in the spring--just as children prattle; the brooks run full--like the overflow of young hearts; the showers drop easily--as young tears flow; and the whole sky is as capricious as the mind of a boy.

Between tears and smiles, the year, like the child, struggles into the warmth of life. The old year--say what the chronologists will--lingers upon the very lap of spring, and is only fairly gone when the blossoms of April have strown their pall of glory upon his tomb, and the bluebirds have chanted his requiem.

It always seems to me as if an access of life came with the melting of the winter's snows, and as if every rootlet of grass, that lifted its first green blade from the matted _débris_ of the old year's decay, bore my spirit upon it, nearer to the largess of Heaven.

I love to trace the break of spring step by step: I love even those long rain-storms, that sap the icy fortresses of the lingering winter,--that melt the snows upon the hills, and swell the mountain-brooks,--that make the pools heave up their glassy cerements of ice, and hurry down the crashing fragments into the wastes of ocean.

I love the gentle thaws that you can trace, day by day, by the stained snow-banks, shrinking from the grass; and by the gentle drip of the cottage-eaves. I love to search out the sunny slopes by a southern wall, where the reflected sun does double duty to the earth and where the frail anemone, or the faint blush of the arbutus, in the midst of the bleak March atmosphere, will touch your heart, like a hope of Heaven in a field of graves! Later come those soft, smoky days, when the patches of winter grain show green under the shelter of leafless woods, and the last snow-drifts, reduced to shrunken skeletons of ice, lie upon the slope of northern hills, leaking away their life.

Then the grass at your door grows into the color of the sprouting grain, and the buds upon the lilacs swell and burst. The peaches bloom upon the wall, and the plums wear bodices of white. The sparkling oriole picks string for his hammock on the sycamore, and the sparrows twitter in pairs. The old elms throw down their dingy flowers, and color their spray with green; and the brooks, where you throw your worm or the minnow, float down whole fleets of the crimson blossoms of the maple. Finally the oaks step into the opening quadrille of spring, with grayish tufts of a modest verdure, which by-and-by will be long and glossy leaves. The dogwood pitches his broad, white tent in the edge of the forest; the dandelions lie along the hillocks, like stars in a sky of green; and the wild cherry, growing in all the hedge-rows, without other culture than God's, lifts up to Him thankfully its tremulous white fingers.

Amid all this come the rich rains of spring. The affections of a boy grow up with tears to water them; and the year blooms with showers. But the clouds hover over an April sky timidly, like shadows upon innocence. The showers come gently, and drop daintily to the earth,--with now and then a glimpse of sunshine to make the drops bright--like so many tears of joy.

The rain of winter is cold, and it comes in bitter scuds that blind you; but the rain of April steals upon you coyly, half reluctantly,--yet lovingly--like the steps of a bride to the Altar.

It does not gather like the storm-clouds of winter, gray and heavy along the horizon, and creep with subtle and insensible approaches (like age) to the very zenith; but there are a score of white-winged swimmers afloat, that your eye has chased as you lay fatigued with the delicious languor of an April sun;--nor have you scarce noticed that a little bevy of those floating clouds had grouped together in a sombre company. But presently you see across the fields the dark gray streaks, stretching like lines of mists from the green bosom of the valley to that spot of sky where the company of clouds is loitering; and with an easy shifting of the helm the fleet of swimmers come drifting over you, and drop their burden into the dancing pools, and make the flowers glisten, and the eaves drip with their crystal bounty.

The cattle linger still, cropping the new-come grass; and childhood laughs joyously at the warm rain, or under the cottage-roof catches with eager ear the patter of its fall.

----And with that patter on the roof,--so like to the patter of childish feet,--my story of boyish dreams shall begin.

I.

_Rain in the Garret._

It is an old garret with big brown rafters; and the boards between are stained darkly with the rain-storms of fifty years. And as the sportive April shower quickens its flood, it seems as if its torrents would come dashing through the shingles upon you, and upon your play. But it will not; for you know that the old roof is strong, and that it has kept you, and all that love you, for long years from the rain and from the cold; you know that the hardest storms of winter will only make a little oozing leak, that trickles down the brown stains--like tears.

You love that old garret-roof; and you nestle down under its slope with a sense of its protecting power that no castle-walls can give to your maturer years. Aye, your heart clings in boyhood to the roof-tree of the old family garret with a grateful affection and an earnest confidence, that the after-years--whatever may be their successes, or their honors--can never re-create. Under the roof-tree of his home the boy feels SAFE: and where in the whole realm of life, with its bitter toils and its bitterer temptations, will he feel _safe_ again?

But this you do not know. It seems only a grand old place; and it is capital fun to search in its corners, and drag out some bit of quaint old furniture, with a leg broken, and lay a cushion across it, and fix your reins upon the lion's claws of the feet, and then--gallop away! And you offer sister Nelly a chance, if she will be good; and throw out very patronizing words to little Charlie, who is mounted upon a much humbler horse,--to wit, a decrepit nursery-chair,--as he of right should be, since he is three years your junior.

I know no nobler forage-ground for a romantic, venturesome, mischievous boy, than the garret of an old family mansion on a day of storm. It is a perfect field of chivalry. The heavy rafters, the dashing rain, the piles of spare mattresses to carouse upon, the big trunks to hide in, the old white coats and hats hanging in obscure corners, like ghosts,--are great! And it is so far away from the old lady who keeps rule in the nursery, that there is no possible risk of a scolding for twisting off the fringe of the rug. There is no baby in the garret to wake up. There is no "company" in the garret to be disturbed by the noise. There is no crotchety old Uncle, or Grand-Ma, with their everlasting "Boys, boys!" and then a look of such horror!

There is great fun in groping through a tall barrel of books and pamphlets, on the look-out for startling pictures; and there are chestnuts in the garret drying, which you have discovered on a ledge of the chimney; and you slide a few into your pocket, and munch them quietly,--giving now and then one to Nelly, and begging her to keep silent,--for you have a great fear of its being forbidden fruit.

Old family garrets have their stock, as I said, of castaway clothes of twenty years gone by; and it is rare sport to put them on; buttoning in a pillow or two for the sake of good fulness; and then to trick out Nelly in some strange-shaped head-gear, and old-fashioned brocade petticoat caught up with pins; and in such guise to steal cautiously down-stairs, and creep slyly into the sitting-room,--half afraid of a scolding, and very sure of good fun,--trying to look very sober, and yet almost ready to die with the laugh that you know you will make. And your mother tries to look harshly at little Nelly for putting on her grandmother's best bonnet; but Nelly's laughing eyes forbid it utterly; and the mother spoils all her scolding with a perfect shower of kisses.

After this you go, marching very stately, into the nursery, and utterly amaze the old nurse; and make a deal of wonderment for the staring, half-frightened baby, who drops his rattle, and makes a bob at you as if he would jump into your waistcoat-pocket.

But you grow tired of this; you tire even of the swing, and of the pranks of Charlie; and you glide away into a corner with an old, dog's-eared copy of "Robinson Crusoe." And you grow heart and soul into the story, until you tremble for the poor fellow with his guns behind the palisade; and are yourself half dead with fright when you peep cautiously over the hill with your glass, and see the cannibals at their orgies around the fire.

Yet, after all, you think the old fellow must have had a capital time with a whole island to himself; and you think you would like such a time yourself, if only Nelly and Charlie could be there with you. But this thought does not come till afterward; for the time you are nothing but Crusoe; you are living in his cave with Poll the parrot, and are looking out for your goats and man Friday.

You dream what a nice thing it would be for you to slip away some pleasant morning,--not to York, as young Crusoe did, but to New York,--and take passage as a sailor; and how, if they knew you were going, there would be such a world of good-byes; and how, if they did not know it, there would be such a world of wonder!

And then the sailor's dress would be altogether such a jaunty affair; and it would be such rare sport to lie off upon the yards far aloft, as you have seen sailors in pictures, looking out upon the blue and tumbling sea. No thought now, in your boyish dreams, of sleety storms, and cables stiffened with ice, and crashing spars, and great icebergs towering fearfully around you!