Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion’s hourly change
It all things else repairs.
In vain I look for change abroad,
And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
Illumes my inmost mind.
What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
With its unchanging ray?
Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
Upon a winter’s morn,
Where’er his silent beams intrude,
The murky night is gone.
How could the patient pine have known
The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
The insect’s noonday hum,—
Till the new light with morning cheer
From far streamed through the aisles,
And nimbly told the forest trees
For many stretching miles?
I’ve heard within my inmost soul
Such cheerful morning news,
In the horizon of my mind
Have seen such orient hues,
As in the twilight of the dawn,
When the first birds awake,
Are heard within some silent wood,
Where they the small twigs break,
Or in the eastern skies are seen,
Before the sun appears,
The harbingers of summer heats
Which from afar he bears.
Whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in thin volumes
like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm morning, perchance, I
see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the swamp, and I float as
high above the fields with it. I can recall to mind the stillest summer
hours, in which the grasshopper sings over the mulleins, and there is a
valor in that time the bare memory of which is armor that can laugh at
any blow of fortune. For our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard
to swell and die alternately, and death is but “the pause when the
blast is recollecting itself.”
We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brook, in
the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was pitched, and
there was a sort of human interest in its story, which ceases not in
freshet or in drought the livelong summer, and the profounder lapse of
the river was quite drowned by its din. But the rill, whose
“Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,”
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier streams, on
whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with sunken rocks and the
ruins of forests, from whose surface comes up no murmur, are strangers
to the icy fetters which bind fast a thousand contributary rills.
I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before. It was
a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give me pain,
though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice
was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that
compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was
unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams
we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have
the authority of a final judgment.
We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some
waking thoughts. Donne sings of one
“Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely less
afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct in a dream,
than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our grief, which is
our atonement, measures the degree by which this is separated from an
actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but act a part which must have
been learned and rehearsed in our waking hours, and no doubt could
discover some waking consent thereto. If this meanness had not its
foundation in us, why are we grieved at it? In dreams we see ourselves
naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see
others awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even
its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its ever-wakeful
authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly, we should never have
_dreamed_ of such a thing. Our truest life is when we are in dreams
awake.
“And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,
A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
And ever-drizzling raine upon the loft,
Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
No other noyse, nor people’s troublous cryes,
As still are wont t’ annoy the walled towne,
Might there be heard; but careless Quiet lyes
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.”