Dream Life | Page 5

indeed, has a higher truth in it than circumstance. It appeals to
a larger jury for acquittal; it is approved or condemned by a better
judge. And if I can catch this bolder and richer truth of feeling, I will
not mind if the types of it are all fabrications.

If I run over some sweet experience of love, (my Aunt Tabithy
brightened a little,) must I make good the fact that the loved one lives,
and expose her name and qualities to make your sympathy sound? Or
shall I not rather be working upon higher and holier ground, if I take
the passion for itself, and so weave it into words, that you and every
willing sufferer may recognize the fervor, and forget the personality?
Life, after all, is but a bundle of hints, each suggesting actual and
positive development, but rarely reaching it. And as I recall these hints,
and in fancy trace them to their issues, I am as truly dealing with life as
if my life had dealt them all to me.
This is what I would be doing in the present book. I would catch up
here and there the shreds of feeling which the brambles and
roughnesses of the world have left tangling on my heart, and weave
them out into those soft and perfect tissues which, if the world had been
only a little less rough, might now perhaps enclose my heart altogether.
"Ah," said my Aunt Tabithy, as she smoothed the stocking-leg again,
with a sigh, "there is, after all, but one youth-time; and if you put down
its memories once, you can find no second growth."
My Aunt Tabithy was wrong. There is as much growth in the thoughts
and feelings that run behind us as in those that run before us. You may
make a rich, full picture of your childhood to-day; but let the hour go
by, and the darkness stoop to your pillow with its million shapes of the
past, and my word for it, you shall have some flash of childhood
lighten upon you, that was unknown to your busiest thought of the
morning.
Let a week go by, and in some interval of care, as you recall the smile
of a mother, or some pale sister who is dead, a new crowd of memories
will rush upon your soul, and leave their traces in such tears as will
make you kinder and better for days and weeks. Or you shall assist at
some neighbor funeral, where the little dead one (like one you have
seen before) shall hold in its tiny grasp (as you have taught little dead
hands to do) fresh flowers, laughing flowers, lying lightly on the white
robe of the dear child,--all pale, cold, silent--

I had touched my Aunt Tabithy: she had dropped a stitch in her knitting.
I believe she was weeping.
--Aye, this brain of ours is a master-worker, whose appliances we do
not one half know; and this heart of ours is a rare storehouse, furnishing
the brain with new material every hour of our lives; and their limits we
shall not know, until they shall end--together.
Nor is there, as many faint-hearts imagine, but one phase of earnestness
in our life of feeling. One train of deep emotion cannot fill up the heart:
it radiates like a star, God-ward and earth-ward. It spends and reflects
all ways. Its force is to be reckoned not so much by token as by
capacity. Facts are the poorest and most slumberous evidences of
passion or of affection. True feeling is ranging everywhere; whereas
your actual attachments are too apt to be tied to sense.
A single affection may indeed be true, earnest, and absorbing; but such
an one, after all, is but a type--and if the object be worthy, a glorious
type--of the great book of feeling: it is only the vapor from the caldron
of the heart, and bears no deeper relation to its exhaustless sources than
the letter, which my pen makes, bears to the thought that inspires it,--or
than a single morning strain of your orioles and thrushes bears to that
wide bird-chorus which is making every sunrise a worship, and every
grove a temple!
My Aunt Tabithy nodded.
Nor is this a mere bachelor fling against constancy. I can believe,
Heaven knows, in an unalterable and unflinching affection, which
neither desires nor admits the prospect of any other. But when one is
tasking his brain to talk for his heart,--when he is not writing positive
history, but only making mention, as it were, of the heart's
capacities,--who shall say that he has reached the fulness, that he has
exhausted the stock of its feeling, or that he has touched its highest
notes? It is true, there is but one