Bohemian Society | Page 7

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 so clearly distinguish the melancholy vibration of a single string touched by the finger--a mournful sobbing sound. Ah this is indeed human life! where in the rushing noisy crowd, and sounds of gladness, and a thousand mingling emotions, distinctly audible to the ear of thought, are the pulsations of some melancholy string of the heart, touched by