Dreams | Page 7

have regularly every year when I was a young man, and things were different.
It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days; and as I wandered through the waking land, and saw the dawning of the coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old mother trees, dandling their myriad baby buds upon their strong fond arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of the woods, and saw the new flush of the field and saw the new light on the hills, and heard the new-found gladness of the birds, and heard from copse and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little new-born things, wondering to find themselves alive, and smelt the freshness of the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a strong hand in the wind, my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange new hope I, too, was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and blossoms were unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and gratitude were opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my limbs. New blood was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and nobler longings were throbbing through my brain.
As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world and myself, and the ways of God seemed clearer.
It seemed to me a pity that all the beautiful and precious thoughts and ideas that were crowding in upon me should be lost to my fellow-men, and so I pitched my tent at a little cottage, and set to work to write them down then and there as they came to me.
"It has been complained of me," I said to myself, "that I do not write literary and high class work--at least, not work that is exceptionally literary and high-class. This reproach shall be removed. I will write an article that shall be a classic. I have worked for the ordinary, every-day reader. It is right that I should do something now to improve the literature of my beloved country."
And I wrote a grand essay--though I say it who should not, though I don't see why I shouldn't--all about spring, and the way it made you feel, and what it made you think. It was simply crowded with elevated thoughts and high-class ideas and cultured wit, was that essay. There was only one fault about that essay: it was too brilliant. I wanted commonplace relief. It would have exhausted the average reader; so much cleverness would have wearied him.
I wish I could remember some of the beautiful things in that essay, and here set them down; because then you would be able to see what they were like for yourselves, and that would be so much more simpler than my explaining to you how beautiful they were. Unfortunately, however, I cannot now call to mind any of them.
I was very proud of this essay, and when I got back to town I called on a very superior friend of mine, a critic, and read it to him. I do not care for him to see any of my usual work, because he really is a very superior person indeed, and the perusal of it appears to give him pains inside. But this article, I thought, would do him good.
"What do you think of it?" I asked, when I had finished.
"Splendid," he replied, "excellently arranged. I never knew you were so well acquainted with the works of the old writers. Why, there is scarcely a classic of any note that you have not quoted from. But where--where," he added, musing, "did you get that last idea but two from? It's the only one I don't seem to remember. It isn't a bit of your own, is it?"
He said that, if so, he should advise me to leave it out. Not that it was altogether bad, but that the interpolation of a modern thought among so unique a collection of passages from the ancients seemed to spoil the scheme.
And he enumerated the various dead-and-buried gentlemen from whom he appeared to think I had collated my article.
"But," I replied, when I had recovered my astonishment sufficiently to speak, "it isn't a collection at all. It is all original. I wrote the thoughts down as they came to me. I have never read any of these people you mention, except Shakespeare."
Of course Shakespeare was bound to be among them. I am getting to dislike that man so. He is always being held up