Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart

“Because once you told me so; and because you pick flowers for me that I can not reach; and because you let me take your rod, when you have a fish upon it.”

I missed, too, the old preacher, whom we all feared so much, and in place of him was a jaunty-looking man, whom I thought I would not be at all afraid to speak to, or, if need b...

* * * “It is not easy for me to write, but I must tell you that I have just found out who your Carry is. Years ago, when you were away from home, I was at school with her. We we...

Now the first torchlight under us shines plainly on faces in the windows and on the kneeling women in the street. First come old retainers of the dead one, bearing long blazing...

And the daughter came, her light-brown hair falling carelessly over her shoulders, her rich, hazel eye twinkling and full of life, the color coming and going upon her transparen...

Cares can not come into the dreamland 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,...

We gave three loud hurrahs “for the old school,” as the coach started; and upon the top of the hill that overlooks the village, we gave another round—and still another for the c...

The days approach, when you can call her yours. For she has said it, and her mother has said it; and the kind old gentleman, who says he will still be her father, has said it, t...

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...

But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties; and it is a pretty promoter of intelligence, since it mult...

How quickly you throw off the marks of your struggle, and put on the boldest air of boyhood; and what a dextrous handling to your knife, and what a wonderful keenness to the edg...

—If now in that chair yonder, not the one your feet lie upon, but the other, beside you—closer yet—were seated a sweet-faced girl, with a pretty little foot lying out upon the h...

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?

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And after your return Jamie will insist that you should go with him to the brook, and sit down with him upon a tuft of the brake, to fling off a line into the eddies, though onl...