Dream Life | Page 4

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 farmland, 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 whither
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,