pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that
bathes the landscape of an August day. Hope rides high in the heavens,
as when the summer sun mounts nearest to the zenith. Youth feels the
fulness of maturity before the second season of life is ended; yet is it
a vain maturity, and all the glow is deceitful. Those fruits that ripen
in summer do not last. They are sweet; they are glowing with gold; but
they melt with a luscious sweetness upon the lip. They do not give that
strength and nutriment which will bear a man bravely through the coming
chills of winter.
* * * * *
The last scene of summer changes now to the cobwebbed ceiling of an
attorney's office. Books of law, scattered ingloriously at your elbow,
speak dully to the flush of your vanities. You are seated at your
side-desk, where you have wrought at those heavy, mechanic labors of
drafting which go before a knowledge of your craft.
A letter is by you, which you regard with strange feelings: it is yet
unopened. It comes from Laura. It is in reply to one which has cost you
very much of exquisite elaboration. You have made your avowal of feeling
as much like a poem as your education would admit. Indeed it was a
pretty letter,--promising not so much the trustful love of an earnest
and devoted heart, as the fervor of a passion which consumed you, and
glowed like a furnace through the lines of your letter. It was a
confession in which your vanity of intellect had taken very entertaining
part, and in which your judgment was too cool to appear at all.
She must needs break out into raptures at such a letter; and her own
will doubtless be tempered with even greater passion.
It is well to shift your chair somewhat, so that the clerks of the
office may not see your emotion as you read. It would be silly to
manifest your exuberance in a dismal, dark office of your instructing
attorney. One sighs rather for woods, and brooks, and sunshine, in whose
company the hopes of youth stretch into fulfilment.
We will look only at a closing passage:--
* * * * *
----"My friend Clarence will, I trust, believe me, when I say that his
letter was a surprise to me. To say that it was very grateful, would be
what my womanly vanity could not fail to claim. I only wish that I was
equal to the flattering portrait which he has drawn. I even half fancy
that he is joking me, and can hardly believe that my matronly air should
have quite won his youthful heart. At least I shall try not to believe
it; and when I welcome him one day, the husband of some fairy who is
worthy of his love, we will smile together at the old lady who once
played the Circe to his senses. Seriously, my friend Clarence, I know
your impulse of heart has carried you away, and that in a year's time,
you will smile with me at your old _penchant_ for one so much your
senior, and so ill-suited to your years, as your true friend,
LAURA."
* * * * *
----Magnificent Miss Dalton!
Read it again. Stick your knife in the desk:--tut!--you will break the
blade! Fold up the letter carefully, and toss it upon your pile of
papers. Open Chitty again;--pleasant reading is Chitty! Lean upon your
hand--your two hands, so that no one will catch sight of your face.
Chitty is very interesting,--how sparkling and imaginative!--what a
depth and flow of passion in Chitty!
The office is a capital place--so quiet and sunny. Law is a delightful
study--so captivating, and such stores of romance! And then those trips
to the Hall offer such relief and variety,--especially just now. It
would be well not to betray your eagerness to go. You can brush your hat
a round or two, and take a peep into the broken bit of looking-glass
over the wash-stand.
You lengthen your walk, as you sometimes do, by a stroll upon the
Battery,--though rarely upon such a blustering November day. You put
your hands in your pockets, and look out upon the tossing sea.
It is a fine sight--very fine. There are few finer bays in the world
than New York Bay,--either to look at, or, for that matter, to sleep in.
The ships ride up thickly, dashing about the cold spray delightfully;
the little cutters gleam in the November sunshine like white flowers
shivering in the wind.
The sky is rich--all mottled with cold, gray streaks of cloud. The old
apple-women, with their noses frostbitten, look cheerful and blue. The
ragged immigrants, in short trousers and bell-crowned hats, stalk about
with a very happy expression, and very short-stemmed pipes; their
yellow-haired babies look comfortably red and glowing. And the trees
with their scant, pinched foliage have a charming, summer-like effect!
Amid it all the thoughts of the boudoir, and harpsichord, and
goldfinches, and Axminster carpets, and sunshine, and Laura, are so
very, very pleasant! How delighted you would be to see her married to
the stout man in the red cravat, who gave her bouquets, and strolled
with her on the deck of the steamer upon the St. Lawrence! What a
jaunty, self-satisfied air he wore; and with what considerate
forbearance he treated you--calling you once or twice Master Clarence!
It never occurred to you before, how much you must be indebted to that
pleasant, stout man.
You try sadly to be cheerful; you smile oddly; your pride comes strongly
to your help, but yet helps you very little. It is not so much a broken
heart that you have to mourn over, as a broken dream. You seem to see in
a hundred ways, that had never occurred to you before, the marks of her
superior age. Above all it is manifest in the cool and unimpassioned
tone of her letter. Yet how kindly withal! It would be a relief to be
angry.
New visions come to you, wakened by the broken fancy which has just now
eluded your grasp. You will make yourself, if not old, at least gifted
with the force and dignity of age. You will be a man, and build no more
castles until you can people them with men! In an excess of pride you
even take umbrage at the sex; they can have little appreciation of that
engrossing tenderness of which you feel yourself to be capable. Love
shall henceforth be dead, and you will live boldly without it.
----Just so, when some dark, eastern cloud-bank shrouds for a morning
the sun of later August, we say in our shivering pride--the winter is
come early! But God manages the seasons better than we; and in a day, or
an hour perhaps, the cloud will pass, and the heavens glow again upon
our ungrateful heads.
* * * * *
Well it is even so, that the passionate dreams of youth break up and
wither. Vanity becomes tempered with wholesome pride; and passion yields
to the riper judgment of manhood,--even as the August heats pass on,
and over, into the genial glow of a September sun. There is a strong
growth in the struggles against mortified pride; and then only does the
youth get an ennobling consciousness of that manhood which is dawning in
him, when he has fairly surmounted those puny vexations which a wounded
vanity creates.
Now your heart is driven home; and that cherished place, where so little
while ago you wore your vanities with an air that mocked even your
grief, and that subdued your better nature, seems to stretch toward you
over long miles of distance its wings of love, and to welcome back to
the sister's and the father's heart, not the self-sufficient and
vaunting youth, but the brother and son--the schoolboy Clarence. Like a
thirsty child, you stray in thought to that fountain of cheer, and live
again--your vanity crushed, your wild hope broken--in the warm and
natural affections of the boyish home.
Clouds weave the SUMMER into the season of AUTUMN; and
YOUTH rises from dashed hopes into the stature of a
MAN.
_AUTUMN;_
OR,
_THE DREAMS OF MANHOOD._
_DREAMS OF MANHOOD._
_Autumn._
There are those who shudder at the approach of Autumn, and who feel a
light grief stealing over their spirits, like an October haze, as the
evening shadows slant sooner, and longer, over the face of an ending
August day.
But is not Autumn the Manhood of the year? Is it not the ripest of the
seasons? Do not proud flowers blossom,--the golden-rod, the orchis, the
dahlia, and the bloody cardinal of the swamp-lands?
The fruits too are golden, hanging heavy from the tasked trees. The
fields of maize show weeping spindles, and broad rustling leaves, and
ears half glowing with the crowded corn; the September wind whistles
over their thick-set ranks with whispers of plenty. The staggering
stalks of the buckwheat grow red with ripeness, and tip their tops with
clustering tricornered kernels.
The cattle, loosed from the summer's yoke, grow strong upon the meadows
new-starting from the scythe. The lambs of April, rounded into fulness
of limb, and gaining day by day their woolly cloak, bite at the nodding
clover-heads; or, with their noses to the ground, they stand in solemn,
circular conclave under the pasture oaks, while the noon-sun beats with
the lingering passion of July.
The Bob-o'-Lincolns have come back from their Southern rambles among the
rice, all speckled with gray; and, singing no longer as they did in
spring, they quietly feed upon the ripened reeds that straggle along the
borders of the walls. The larks, with their black and yellow
breastplates, and lifted heads, stand tall upon the close-mown meadow,
and at your first motion of approach spring up, and soar away, and light
again, and with their lifted heads renew the watch. The quails, in
half-grown coveys, saunter hidden through the underbrush that skirts the
wood, and only when you are close upon them, whir away, and drop
scattered under the coverts of the forest.
The robins, long ago deserting the garden neighborhood, feed at eventide
in flocks upon the bloody berries of the sumac; and the soft-eyed
pigeons dispute possession of the feast. The squirrels chatter at
sunrise, and gnaw off the full-grown burrs of the chestnuts. The lazy
blackbirds skip after the loitering cow, watchful of the crickets that
her slow steps start to danger. The crows in companies caw aloft, and
hang high over the carcass of some slaughtered sheep lying ragged upon
the hills.
The ash-trees grow crimson in color, and lose their summer life in great
gouts of blood. The birches touch their frail spray with yellow; the
chestnuts drop down their leaves in brown, twirling showers. The
beeches, crimped with the frost, guard their foliage until each leaf
whistles white in the November gales. The bittersweet hangs its bare and
leafless tendrils from rock to tree, and sways with the weight of its
brazen berries. The sturdy oaks, unyielding to the winds and to the
frosts, struggle long against the approaches of the winter, and in their
struggles wear faces of orange, of scarlet, of crimson, and of brown;
and finally, yielding to swift winds, as youth's pride yields to manly
duty, strew the ground with the scattered glories of their summer
strength, and warm and feed the earth with the _débris_ of their leafy
honors.
The maple in the lowlands turns suddenly its silvery greenness into
orange scarlet, and in the coming chilliness of the autumn eventide
seems to catch the glories of the sunset, and to wear them--as a sign of
God's old promise in Egypt--like a pillar of cloud by day, and of fire
by night.
And when all these are done,--and in the paved and noisy aisles of the
city the ailantus, with all its greenness gone, lifts up its skeleton
fingers to the God of Autumn and of storms,--the dogwood still guards
its crown; and the branches, which stretched their white canvas in
April, now bear up a spire of bloody tongues, that lie against the
leafless woods like a tree on fire!
Autumn brings to the home the cheerful glow of "first fires." It
withdraws the thoughts from the wide and joyous landscape of summer, and
fixes them upon those objects which bloom and rejoice within the
household. The old hearth, that has rioted the summer through with
boughs and blossoms, gives up its withered tenantry. The fire-dogs gleam
kindly upon the evening hours; and the blaze wakens those sweet hopes
and prayers which cluster around the fireside of home.
The wantoning and the riot of the season gone are softened in memory,
and supply joys to the season to come,--just as youth's audacity and
pride give a glow to the recollections of our manhood.
At mid-day the air is mild and soft; a warm, blue smoke lies in the
mountain gaps; the tracery of distant woods upon the upland hangs in the
haze with a dreamy gorgeousness of coloring. The river runs low with
August drought, and frets upon the pebbly bottom with a soft, low
murmur, as of joyousness gone by. The hemlocks of the river-bank rise in
tapering sheens, and tell tales of Spring.
As the sun sinks, doubling his disk in the October smoke, the low
south-wind creeps over the withered tree-tops, and drips the leaves upon
the land. The windows, that were wide open at noon, are closed; and a
bright blaze--to drive off the easterly dampness that promises a
storm--flashes lightly and kindly over the book-shelves and busts upon
my wall.
As the sun sinks lower and lower, his red beams die in a sea of great
gray clouds. Slowly and quietly they creep up over the night-sky. Venus
is shrouded. The western stars blink faintly, then fade in the mounting
vapors. The vane points east of south. The constellations in the zenith
struggle to be seen, but presently give over, and hide their shining.
By late lamp-light the sky is all gray and dark; the vane has turned two
points nearer east. The clouds spit fine rain-drops, that you only feel
with your face turned to the heavens. But soon they grow thicker and
heavier; and as I sit, watching the blaze, and--dreaming--they patter
thick and fast under the driving wind upon the window, like the swift
tread of an army of Men!
I.
_Pride of Manliness._
And has manhood no dreams? Does the soul wither at that Rubicon which
lies between the Gallic country of youth and the Rome of manliness? Does
not fancy still love to cheat the heart, and weave gorgeous tissues to
hang upon that horizon which lies along the years that are to come? Is
happiness so exhausted that no new forms of it lie in the mines of
imagination, for busy hopes to drag up to day?
Where then would live the motives to an upward looking of the eye and of
the soul; where the beckonings that bid us ever onward?
But these later dreams are not the dreams of fond boyhood, whose eye
sees rarely below the surface of things; nor yet the delicious hopes of
sparkling-blooded youth: they are dreams of sober trustfulness, of
practical results, of hard-wrought world-success, and, maybe, of Love
and of Joy.
Ambitious forays do not rest where they rested once: hitherto the
balance of youth has given you, in all that you have dreamed of
accomplishment, a strong vantage against age; hitherto in all your
estimates you have been able to multiply them by that access of thought
and of strength which manhood would bring to you. Now this is forever
ended.
There is a great meaning in that word--manhood. It covers all human
growth. It supposes no extensions or increase; it is integral, fixed,
perfect,--the whole. There is no getting beyond manhood; it is much to
live up to it; but once reached, you are all that a man was made to be
in this world.
It is a strong thought--that a man is perfected, so far as strength
goes; that he will never be abler to do his work than under the very sun
which is now shining on him. There is a seriousness that few call to
mind in the reflection that whatever you do in this age of manhood is an
unalterable type of your whole bigness. You may qualify particulars of
your character by refinements, by special studies, and practice; but,
once a man, and there is no more manliness to be lived for!
This thought kindles your soul to new and swifter dreams of ambition
than belonged to youth. They were toys; these are weapons. They were
fancies; these are motives. The soul begins to struggle with the dust,
the sloth, the circumstance, that beleaguer humanity, and to stagger
into the van of action.
Perception, whose limits lay along a narrow horizon, now tops that
horizon, and spreads, and reaches toward the heaven of the Infinite.
The mind feels its birth, and struggles toward the great birth-master.
The heart glows; its humanities even yield and crimple under the fierce
heat of mental pride. Vows leap upward, and pile rampart upon rampart to
scale all the degrees of human power.
Are there not times in every man's life when there flashes on him a
feeling--nay, more, an absolute conviction--that this soul is but a
spark belonging to some upper fire; and that, by as much as we draw near
by effort, by resolve, by intensity of endeavor, to that upper fire, by
so much we draw nearer to our home, and mate ourselves with angels? Is
there not a ringing desire in many minds to seize hold of what floats
above us in the universe of thought, and drag down what shreds we can to
scatter to the world? Is it not belonging to greatness to catch
lightning from the plains where lightning lives, and curb it for the
handling of men?
Resolve is what makes a man manliest;--not puny resolve, not crude
determination, not errant purpose, but that strong and indefatigable
will which treads down difficulties and danger as a boy treads down the
heaving frost-lands of winter,--which kindles his eye and brain with a
proud pulse-beat toward the unattainable. Will makes men giants. It made
Napoleon an emperor of kings, Bacon a fathomer of nature, Byron a tutor
of passion, and the martyrs masters of Death!
In this age of manhood you look back upon the dreams of the years that
are past: they glide to the vision in pompous procession; they seem
bloated with infancy. They are without sinew or bone. They do not bear
the hard touches of the man's hand.
It is not long, to be sure, since the summer of life ended with that
broken hope; but the few years that lie between have given long steps
upward. The little grief that threw its shadow, and the broken vision
that deluded you, have made the passing years long in such feeling as
ripens manhood. Nothing lays the brown of autumn upon the green of
summer so quick as storms.
There have been changes too in the home scenes; these graft age upon a
man. Nelly--your sweet Nelly of childhood, your affectionate sister of
youth--has grown out of the old brotherly companionship into the new
dignity of a household.
The fire flames and flashes upon the accustomed hearth. The father's
chair is there in the wonted corner; he himself--we must call him the
old man now, though his head shows few white honors--wears a calmness
and a trust that light the failing eye. Nelly is not away; Nelly is a
wife; and the husband yonder, as you may have dreamed,--your old friend
Frank.
Her eye is joyous; her kindness to you is unabated; her care for you is
quicker and wiser. But yet the old unity of the household seems broken;
nor can all her winning attentions bring back the feeling which lived in
Spring under the garret-roof.
The isolation, the unity, the integrity of manhood make a strong prop
for the mind, but a weak one for the heart. Dignity can but poorly fill
up that chasm of the soul which the home affections once occupied.
Life's duties and honors press hard upon the bosom that once throbbed at
a mother's tones, and that bounded in a mother's smiles.
In such home, the strength you boast of seems a weakness; manhood leans
into childish memories, and melts--as Autumn frosts yield to a soft
south-wind coming from a Tropic spring. You feel in a desert, where you
once felt at home,--in a bounded landscape, that was once the world!
The tall sycamores have dwindled to paltry trees; the hills that were so
large, and lay at such grand distance to the eye of childhood, are now
near by, and have fallen away to mere rolling waves of upland. The
garden-fence, that was so gigantic, is now only a simple paling; its
gate that was such a cumbrous affair--reminding you of Gaza--you might
easily lift from its hinges. The lofty dove-cote, which seemed to rise
like a monument of art before your boyish vision, is now only a flimsy
box upon a tall spar of hemlock.
The garret even, with its lofty beams, its dark stains, and its obscure
corners, where the white hats and coats hung ghost-like, is but a low
loft darkened by age,--hung over with cobwebs, dimly lighted with foul
windows,--its romping Charlie--its glee--its swing--its joy--its
mystery--all gone forever.
The old gallipots and retorts are not anywhere to be seen in the
second-story window of the brick schoolhouse. Dr. Bidlow is no more! The
trees that seemed so large, the gymnastic feats that were so
extraordinary, the boy that made a snapper of his handkerchief,--have
all lost their greatness and their dread. Even the springy usher, who
dressed his hair with the ferule, has become the middle-aged father of
five curly-headed boys, and has entered upon what once seemed the
gigantic commerce of "stationery and account-books."
The marvellous labyrinth of closets at the old mansion where you once
paid a visit--in a coach--is all dissipated. They have turned out to be
the merest cupboards in the wall. Nat, who had travelled and seen
London, is by no means so surprising a fellow to your manhood as he was
to the boy. He has grown spare, and wears spectacles. He is not so
famous as he was. You would hardly think of consulting him now about
your marriage, or even about the price of goats upon London Bridge.
As for Jenny,--your first, fond flame!--lively, romantic, black-eyed
Jenny,--the reader of "Thaddeus of Warsaw,"--who sighed and wore blue
ribbons on her bonnet,--who wrote love-notes,--who talked so tenderly of
broken hearts,--who used a glass seal with a Cupid and a dart,--dear
Jenny!--she is now the plump and thriving wife of the apothecary of the
town! She sweeps out every morning at seven the little entry of the
apothecary's house; she buys a "joint" twice a week from the butcher,
and is particular to have the "knuckle" thrown in for soups; she wears a
sky-blue calico gown, and dresses her hair in three little flat quirls
on either side of her head, each one pierced through with a two-pronged
hair-pin.
She does not read "Thaddeus of Warsaw" now.
II.
_Man of the World._
Few persons live through the first periods of manhood without strong
temptations to be counted "men of the world." The idea looms grandly
among those vanities that hedge a man's approach to maturity.
Clarence is in good training for the acceptance of this idea. The broken
hope, which clouded his closing youth, shoots over its influence upon
the dawn of manhood. Mortified pride had taught--as it always
teaches--not caution only, but doubt, distrust, indifference. A new
pride grows up on the ruins of the old, weak, and vain pride of youth.
Then it was a pride of learning, or of affection; now it is a pride of
indifference. Then the world proved bleak and cold, as contrasted with
his shining dreams; and now he accepts the proof, and wins from it what
he can.
The man of the world puts on the method and measure of the world: he
studies its humors. He gives up the boyish notion of a sincerity among
men like that of youth: he lives to seem. He conquers such annoyances as
the world may thrust upon him, in the shape of grief or losses, like a
practical athlete of the ring. He studies moral sparring.
With somewhat of this strange vanity growing on you, you do not suffer
the heart to wake into life except in such fanciful dreams as tempt you
back to the sunny slopes of childhood.
In this mood you fall in with Dalton, who has just returned from a year
passed in the French capital. There is an easy suavity and graceful
indifference in his manner that chimes admirably with your humor. He is
gracious, without needing to be kind. He is a friend, without any
challenge or proffer of sincerity. He is just one of those adepts in
world tactics which match him with all men, but which link him to none.
He has made it his art to be desired and admired, but rarely to be
trusted. You could not have a better teacher!