Bohemian Society | Page 7

or the spirit
of the dead babe has come with the flowers, to take the hand of the sick
child and lead it "across the river."
* * * * *
* * * * *
I hear the voice of the Pessimist.
Pessimism is increasing daily. Any person who takes time to think on
the subject can not fail to see that human misery is increasing. With all
the boasted advantages of civilization, it has failed to bring happiness
into the lives of the people. The more enlightened people become, the
more they will recognize the fact that knowledge does not bring
happiness. Scientific discoveries do not tend to lighten the load of

human misery. Since
"Man's disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal
taste Brought death into the world--and all our woe."
sin has gone on increasing, consequently there has been more
unhappiness. People are asking themselves daily, "is life worth living,"
and most persons answer in the negative. Are there any who grasp the
prize for which they have struggled? If there are a few who succeed in
reaching to the height to which they aspire, they find happiness is just
as much beyond their reach as when they first started in their career. In
the middle ages the magicians who created monsters were haunted by
them forever after. We are all haunted by dreams and shadows. The
dreams of happiness and the shadows of disappointments. Looking
back upon our past and taking a retrospective glance at years gone by
we find our lives have been made up not of great events--but of a
succession of disappointments. Each one is haunted by a phantom or
ideal which they are vainly striving to reach but seldom attain. The
garden of hope seems to bear well; we put forth our hands to reach the
fruit and we find we have only the ashes of Dead Hopes.
As Shelly says:
"First our pleasures, die--and then Our hopes, and then our fears--and
when These are dead, the debt is due Dust claims dust--and we die
too."
It is bitter mockery to say that the man who struggles for daily bread is
happy. He may do his work uncomplainingly, but he cannot be happy.
He gets to be but little better that a machine and does his work
mechanically, perhaps never looking into his own heart, to ask the
question, "Is this a happy life?" Some writer has said that there are two
classes of people, those who are driven to death and those who are
bored to death. There can be no sympathy between the rich and poor.
There is an impassible gulf that can never be crossed. The man who has
never known the want of money cannot know the sorrows and struggles
of the poor. Each must go his own way, the poor man to his pallet of
straw; the rich man to his bed of down.

In the world of dreams all are equal. It is an unreal world, true, but to
many it is the happiest. In it there are no distinctions. The woman who
is old and wrinkled and gray, who has known nothing but hard work
and sorrow in this world, in the land of dreams finds pleasure she has
never known. In spirit, she is in pleasant places, carried back perhaps to
scenes she loved in childhood, to the old home; sees pleasant faces of
the almost forgotten dead, is carried above and beyond the world of
reality into the dim shadowy land of dreams. Then comes the waking,
and with the waking the regret of what "might have been."
In this land of dreams the rich may travel with the poor, may revisit the
same old scenes, see the same faces of the dead, leave all that is "earth
earthy," and the spirit or soul wander abroad, over land and seas and in
dreams kneel again at a mother's knee repeating the prayer she taught
and which has long since been forgotten, to awake with regret to the
cares which riches bring.
There is one more journey which the rich and the poor take together
and that is down and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
It is a curious study to watch the faces one meets in a large city or town.
Every face has a history, every life a story, if we but take the trouble to
read. The face is but an index of the heart, and even in the heart of the
happiest the "muffled drums are beating."
As Longfellow so beautifully expresses it in "Hyperion" "and then
mark! how amid the chorus of a hundred voices and a hundred
instruments--of flutes and drums, and trumpets--this unreal shout and
whirlwind of the vexed air, you can