with failing heart, you strip the luxuries from life. But the sorrow
which oppresses you is not the selfish sorrow which the lone man feels:
it is far nobler; its chiefest mourning is over the despoiled home.
Frank must give up his promised travel; Madge must lose her favorite
pony; Nelly must be denied her little _fête_ upon the lawn. The home
itself, endeared by so many scenes of happiness and by so many of
suffering, must be given up. It is hard, very hard, to tear away your
wife from the flowers, the birds, the luxuries, that she has made so
dear.
Now she is far stronger than you. She contrives new joys; she wears a
holy calm; she cheers by a new hopefulness; she buries even the memory
of luxury in the riches of the humble home that her wealth of heart
endows. Her soul, catching radiance from that heavenly world where her
hope lives, kindles amid the growing shadows, and sheds balm upon the
little griefs,--like the serene moon, slanting the dead sun's life, upon
the night!
Courage wakes in the presence of those dependent on your toil. Love arms
your hand and quickens your brain. Resolutions break large from the
swelling soul. Energy leaps into your action like light. Gradually you
bring back into your humble home a few traces of the luxury that once
adorned it. That wife, whom it is your greatest pleasure to win to
smiles, wears a half-sad look as she meets these proofs of love; she
fears that you are perilling too much for her pleasure.
----For the first time in life you deceive her. You have won wealth
again; you now step firmly upon your new-gained sandals of gold. But you
conceal it from her. You contrive a little scheme of surprise, with
Frank alone in the secret.
You purchase again the old home; you stock it, as far as may be, with
the old luxuries; a new harp is in the place of that one which beguiled
so many hours of joy; new and cherished flowers bloom again upon the
windows; her birds hang, and warble their melody where they warbled it
before. A pony--like as possible to the old--is there for Madge; a fête
is secretly contrived upon the lawn. You even place the old, familiar
books upon the parlor-table.
The birthday of your own Madge is approaching,--a _fête_ you never pass
by without home rejoicings. You drive over with her upon that morning
for another look at the old place; a cloud touches her brow,--but she
yields to your wish. An old servant--whom you had known in better
days--throws open the gates.
----"It is too, too sad," says Madge. "Let us go back, Clarence, to our
own home;--we are happy there."
----"A little farther, Madge."
The wife steps slowly over what seems the sepulchre of so many
pleasures; the children gambol as of old, and pick flowers. But the
mother checks them.
"They are not ours now, my children!"
You stroll to the very door; the goldfinches are hanging upon the wall;
the mignonette is in the window. You feel the hand of Madge trembling
upon your arm; she is struggling with her weakness.
A tidy waiting-woman shows you into the old parlor:--there is a harp;
and there, too, such books as we loved to read.
Madge is overcome; now she entreats:--"Let us go away, Clarence!" and
she hides her face.
----"Never, dear Madge, never! it is yours--all yours!"
She looks up in your face; she sees your look of triumph; she catches
sight of Frank bursting in at the old hall-door all radiant with joy.
----"Frank!--Clarence!"--the tears forbid any more.
"God bless you, Madge! God bless you!"
* * * * *
And thus in peace and in joy MANHOOD passes on into the third
season of our life--even as golden AUTUMN sinks slowly into the
tomb of WINTER.
_WINTER_;
OR,
_THE DREAMS OF AGE_
_DREAMS OF AGE._
_Winter._
Slowly, thickly, fastly, fall the snow-flakes,--like the seasons upon
the life of man. At the first they lose themselves in the brown mat of
herbage, or gently melt, as they fall upon the broad stepping-stone at
the door. But as hour after hour passes, the feathery flakes stretch
their white cloak plainly on the meadow, and chilling the doorstep with
their multitude, cover it with a mat of pearl.
The dried grass-tips pierce the mantle of white, like so many serried
spears; but as the storm goes softly on, they sink one by one to their
snowy tomb, and presently show nothing of all their army, save one or
two straggling banners of blackened and shrunken daisies.
Across the wide meadow that stretches from my window, I can see nothing
of those hills which were so green in summer; between me and them lie
only the soft, slow-moving masses, filling the air with whiteness I
catch only a glimpse of one gaunt and bare-armed oak, looming through
the feathery multitude like a tall ship's spars breaking through fog.
The roof of the barn is covered; and the leaking eaves show dark stains
of water that trickle down the weather-beaten boards. The pear-trees,
that wore such weight of greenness in the leafy June, now stretch their
bare arms to the snowy blast, and carry upon each tiny bough a narrow
burden of winter.
The old house-dog marches stately through the strange covering of earth,
and seems to ponder on the welcome he will show,--and shakes the flakes
from his long ears, and with a vain snap at a floating feather he stalks
again to his dry covert in the shed. The lambs that belonged to the
meadow flock, with their feeding-ground all covered, seem to wonder at
their losses; but take courage from the quiet air of the veteran sheep,
and gambol after them, as they move sedately toward the shelter of the
barn.
The cat, driven from the kitchen-door, beats a coy retreat, with long
reaches of her foot, upon the yielding surface. The matronly hens
saunter out at a little lifting of the storm, and eye curiously, with
heads half turned, their sinking steps, and then fall back, with a quiet
cluck of satisfaction, to the wholesome gravel by the stable-door.
By-and-by the snow-flakes pile more leisurely: they grow large and
scattered, and come more slowly than before. The hills, that were brown,
heave into sight--great, rounded billows of white. The gray woods look
shrunken to half their height, and stand waving in the storm. The wind
freshens, and scatters the light flakes that crown the burden of the
snow; and as the day droops, a clear, bright sky of steel color cleaves
the land and clouds, and sends down a chilling wind to bank the walls
and to freeze the storm. The moon rises full and round, and plays with a
joyous chill over the glistening raiment of the land.
I pile my fire with the clean-cleft hickory; and musing over some sweet
story of the olden time, I wander into a rich realm of thought, until my
eyes grow dim, and dreaming of battle and of prince, I fall to sleep in
my old farm-chamber.
At morning I find my dreams all written on the window in crystals of
fairy shape. The cattle, one by one, with ears frost-tipped, and with
frosted noses, wend their way to the watering-place in the meadow. One
by one they drink, and crop at the stunted herbage which the warm spring
keeps green and bare.
A hound bays in the distance; the smoke of cottages rises straight
toward heaven; a lazy jingle of sleigh-bells wakens the quiet of the
high-road; and upon the hills the leafless woods stand low, like
crouching armies, with guns and spears in rest; and among them the
scattered spiral pines rise like bannermen, uttering with their thousand
tongues of green the proud war-cry--"God is with us!"
But the sky of winter is as capricious as the sky of spring, even as the
old wander in thought, like the vagaries of a boy.
Before noon the heavens are mantled with a leaden gray; the eaves, that
leaked in the glow of the sun, now tell their tale of morning's warmth
in crystal ranks of icicles. The cattle seek their shelter; the few
lingering leaves of the white-oaks rustle dismally; the pines breathe
sighs of mourning. As the night darkens, and deepens the storm, the
house-dog bays; the children crouch in the wide chimney-corners; the
sleety rain comes in sharp gusts. And as I sit by the light leaping
blaze in my chamber, the scattered hail-drops beat upon my window, like
the tappings of an OLD MAN'S cane.
I.
_What is Gone._
Gone! Did it ever strike you, my reader, how much meaning lies in that
little monosyllable--gone?
Say it to yourself at nightfall, when the sun has sunk under the hills,
and the crickets chirp,--"gone." Say it to yourself when the night is
far over, and you wake with some sudden start from pleasant
dreams,--"gone." Say it to yourself in some country churchyard, where
your father, or your mother, sleeps under the blooming violets of
spring,--"gone." Say it in your sobbing prayer to Heaven, as you cling
lovingly, but oh, how vainly, to the hand of your sweet wife,--"gone!"
Ay, is there not meaning in it? And now, what is gone,--or rather what
is not gone? Childhood is gone, with all its blushes and fairness,--with
all its health and wantoning,--with all its smiles like glimpses of
heaven, and all its tears which were but the suffusion of joy.
Youth is gone,--bright, hopeful youth, when you counted the years with
jewelled numbers, and hung lamps of ambition on your path, which lighted
the palace of renown; when the days were woven into weeks of blithe
labor, and the weeks were rolled into harvest months of triumph, and the
months were bound into golden sheaves of years,--all gone!
The strength and pride of manhood is gone; your heart and soul have
stamped their deepest dye; the time of power is past; your manliness has
told its tale henceforth your career is _down_;--hitherto you have
journeyed _up_. You look back upon a decade as you once looked upon a
half score of months; a year has become to your slackened memory, and to
your dull perceptions, like a week of childhood. Suddenly and swiftly
come past you great whirls of gone-by thought, and wrecks of vain labor,
eddying upon the stream that rushes to the grave. The sweeping outlines
of life, that lay once before the vision,--rolling into wide billows of
years, like easy lifts of a broad mountain-range,--now seem close-packed
together as with a Titan hand, and you see only crowded, craggy
heights,--like Alpine fastnesses,--parted with glaciers of grief, and
leaking abundant tears!
Your friends are gone; they who counselled and advised you, and who
protected your weakness, will guard it no more forever. One by one they
have dropped away as you have journeyed on; and yet your journey does
not seem a long one. Life at the longest is but a bubble that bursts so
soon as it is rounded.
Nelly--your sweet sister, to whom your heart clung so fondly in the
young days, and to whom it has clung ever since in the strongest bonds
of companionship--is gone--with the rest!
Your thought--wayward now, and flickering--runs over the old days with
quick and fevered step; it brings back, faintly as it may, the noisy
joys, and the safety, that belonged to the old garret-roof; it figures
again the image of that calm-faced father,--long since sleeping beside
your mother; it rests like a shadow upon the night when Charlie died; it
grasps the old figures of the schoolroom, and kindles again (how strange
is memory) the fire that shed its lustre upon the curtains, and the
ceiling, as you lay groaning with your first hours of sickness.
Your flitting recollection brings back with gushes of exultation the
figure of that little, blue-eyed hoiden,--Madge,--as she came with her
work to pass the long evenings with Nelly; it calls again the shy
glances that you cast upon her, and your _naïve_ ignorance of all the
little counter-play that might well have passed between Frank and Nelly.
Your mother's form too, clear and distinct, comes upon the wave of your
rocking thought; her smile touches you now in age as it never touched
you in boyhood.
The image of that fair Miss Dalton, who led your fancy into such mad
captivity, glides across your vision like the fragment of a crazy dream
long gone by. The country home, where lived the grandfather of Frank,
gleams kindly in the sunlight of your memory; and still,--poor, blind
Fanny--long since gathered to that rest where her closed eyes will open
upon visions of joy--draws forth a sigh of pity.
Then comes up that sweetest and brightest vision of love, and the doubt
and care which ran before it,--when your hope groped eagerly through
your pride and worldliness toward the sainted purity of her whom you
know to be--all too good,--when you trembled at the thought of your own
vices and blackness in the presence of her who seemed virtue's self. And
even now your old heart bounds with joy as you recall the first timid
assurance that you were blessed in the possession of her love, and that
you might live in her smiles.
Your thought runs like floating melody over the calm joy that followed
you through so many years,--to the prattling children, who were there to
bless your path. How poor seem now your transports, as you met their
childish embraces, and mingled in their childish employ; how utterly
weak the actual, when compared with that glow of affection which memory
lends to the scene!
Yet all this is gone; and the anxieties are gone, which knit your heart
so strongly to those children, and to her--the mother,--anxieties which
distressed you,--which you would eagerly have shunned, yet whose memory
you would not now bargain away for a king's ransom! What were the
sunlight worth, if clouds did not sometimes hide its brightness; what
were the spring, or the summer, if the lessons of the chilling winter
did not teach us the story of their warmth?
The days are gone too, in which you may have lingered under the sweet
suns of Italy,--with the cherished one beside you, and the eager
children, learning new prattle in the soft language of those Eastern
lands. The evenings are gone, in which you loitered under the trees with
those dear ones under the light of a harvest-moon, and talked of your
blooming hopes, and of the stirring plans of your manhood. There are no
more ambitious hopes, no more sturdy plans! Life's work has rounded into
the evening that shortens labor.
And as you loiter in dreams over the wide waste of what is gone,--a
mingled array of griefs and of joys, of failures and of triumphs,--you
bless God that there has been so much of joy belonging to your shattered
life; and you pray God, with the vain fondness that belongs to a
parent's heart, that more of joy, and less of toil, may come near to the
cherished ones who bear up your hope and name.
And with your silent prayer come back the old teachings, and vagaries of
the boyish heart in its reaches toward Heaven. You recall the old
church-reckoning of your goodness: is there much more of it now than
then? Is not Heaven just as high, and the world as sadly broad?
Alas, for the poor tale of goodness which age brings to the memory!
There may be crowning acts of benevolence, shining here and there; but
the margin of what has not been done is very broad. How weak and
insignificant seems the story of life's goodness and profit, when Death
begins to slant his shadow upon our souls! How infinite in the
comparison seems that Eternal goodness which is crowned with mercy. How
self vanishes, like a blasted thing, and only lives--if it lives at
all--in the glow of that redeeming light which radiates from the
CROSS and the THRONE!
II.
_What is Left._
But much as there is gone of life, and of its joys, very much
remains,--very much in earnest, and very much more in hope. Still you
see visions, and you dream dreams, of the times that are to come.
Your home and heart are left; within that home, the old Bible holds its
wonted place, which was the monitor of your boyhood; and now, more than
ever, it prompts those reverent reaches of the spirit, which go beyond
even the track of dreams.
That cherished Madge, the partner of your life and joy, still lingers,
though her step is feeble, and her eyes are dimmed;--not as once
attracting you by any outward show of beauty; your heart, glowing
through the memory of a life of joy, needs no such stimulant to the
affections. Your hearts are knit together by a habit of growth, and a
unanimity of desire. There is less to remind of the vanities of earth,
and more to quicken the hopes of a time when body yields to spirit.
Your own poor, battered hulk wants no jaunty-trimmed craft for consort;
but twin of heart and soul, as you are twin of years, you float
tranquilly toward that haven which lies before us all.
Your children, now almost verging on maturity, bless your hearth and
home. Not one is gone. Frank indeed--that wild fellow of a youth, who
has wrought your heart into perplexing anxieties again and again, as you
have seen the wayward dashes of his young blood--is often away. But his
heart yet centres where yours centres; and his absence is only a nearer
and bolder strife with that fierce world whose circumstances every man
of force and energy is born to conquer.
His return from time to time with that proud figure of opening
manliness, and that full flush of health, speaks to your affections as
you could never have believed it would. It is not for a man, who is the
father of a man, to show any weakness of the heart, or any
over-sensitiveness, in those ties which bind him to his kin. And
yet--yet, as you sit by your fireside, with your clear, gray eye
feasting in its feebleness on that proud figure of a man who calls you
"father,"--and as you see his fond and loving attentions to that one who
has been your partner in all anxieties and joys, there _is_ a throbbing
within your bosom that makes you almost wish him young again,--that you
might embrace him now, as when he warbled in your rejoicing ear those
first words of love!--Ah, how little does a son know the secret and
craving tenderness of a parent,--how little conception has he of those
silent bursts of fondness and of joy which attend his coming, and which
crown his parting!
There is young Madge too,--dark-eyed, tall, with a pensive shadow
resting on her face,--the very image of refinement and of delicacy. She
is thoughtful;--not breaking out, like the hoiden, flax-haired Nelly,
into bursts of joy and singing,--but stealing upon your heart with a
gentle and quiet tenderness that diffuses itself throughout the
household like a soft zephyr of summer.
There are friends too yet left, who come in upon your evening hours, and
light up the loitering time with dreamy story of the years that are
gone. How eagerly you listen to some gossiping veteran friend, who with
his deft words calls up the thread of some by-gone years of life; and
with what a careless, yet grateful recognition you lapse, as it were,
into the current of the past, and live over again by your hospitable
blaze the stir, the joy, and the pride of your lost manhood.
The children of friends too have grown upon your march, and come to
welcome you with that reverent deference which always touches the heart
of age. That wild boy Will,--the son of a dear friend,--who but a little
while ago was worrying you with his boyish pranks, has now shot up into
tall and graceful youth, and evening after evening finds him making
part of your little household group.
----Does the fond old man think that _he_ is all the attraction!
It may be that in your dreamy speculations about the future of your
children, (for still you dream,) you think that Will may possibly become
the husband of the sedate and kindly Madge. It worries you to find Nelly
teasing him as she does; that mad hoiden will never be quiet; she
provokes you excessively: and yet she is a dear creature; there is no
meeting those laughing blue eyes of hers without a smile and an embrace!
It pleases you however to see the winning frankness with which Madge
always receives Will. And with a little of your old vanity of
observation you trace out the growth of their dawning attachment. It
provokes you to find Nelly breaking up their quiet _tête-à-têtes_ with
her provoking sallies, and drawing away Will to some saunter in the
garden, or to some mad gallop over the hills.
At length upon a certain summer's day Will asks to see you. He
approaches with a doubtful and disturbed look; you fear that wild Nell
has been teasing him with her pranks. Yet he wears not so much an
offended look as one of fear. You wonder if it ever happened to you to
carry your hat in just that timid manner, and to wear such a shifting
expression of the eye, as poor Will wears just now? You wonder if it
ever happened to you to begin to talk with an old friend of your
father's in just that abashed way? Will must have fallen into some sad
scrape.--Well, he is a good fellow, and you will help him out of it!
You look up as he goes on with his story;--you grow perplexed
yourself;--you scarce believe your own ears.
----"Nelly?"--Is Will talking of Nelly?
"Yes, sir,--Nelly."
----"What!--and you have told all this to Nelly--that you love her?"
"I have, sir."
"And she says"--
"That I must speak with you, sir."
"Bless my soul!--But she's a good girl;"--and the old man wipes his
eyes.
----"Nell!--are you there?"
And she comes,--blushing, lingering, yet smiling through it all.
----"And you could deceive your old father, Nell"--(very fondly.)
Nelly only clasps your hand in both of hers.
"And so you loved Will all the while?"
----Nelly only stoops to drop a little kiss of pleading on your
forehead.
----"Well, Nelly," (it is hard to speak roundly,) "give me your
hand;--here, Will,--take it:--she's a wild girl;--be kind to her, Will."
"God bless you, sir!"
And Nelly throws herself, sobbing, upon your bosom.
----"Not here,--not here now, Nell!--Will is yonder!"
----Sobbing, sobbing still! Nelly, Nelly,--who would have thought that
your merry face covered such a heart of tenderness!
III.
_Grief and Joy of Age._
The Winter has its piercing storms,--even as Autumn hath. Hoary age,
crowned with honor and with years, bears no immunity from suffering. It
is the common heritage of us all: if it come not in the spring or in the
summer of our day, it will surely find us in the autumn, or amid the
frosts of winter. It is the penalty humanity pays for pleasure; human
joys will have their balance. Nature never makes false weight. The east
wind is followed by a wind from the west; and every smile will have its
equivalent in a tear!
You have lived long and joyously with that dear one who has made your
life a holy pilgrimage. She has seemed to lead you into ways of
pleasantness, and has kindled in you--as the damps of the world came
near to extinguish them--those hopes and aspirations which rest not in
life, but soar to the realm of spirits.
You have sometimes shuddered with the thought of parting; you have
trembled even at the leave-taking of a year, or of months, and have
suffered bitterly as some danger threatened a parting forever. That
danger threatens now. Nor is it a sudden fear to startle you into a
paroxysm of dread: nothing of this. Nature is kinder,--or she is less
kind.
It is a slow and certain approach of danger which you read in the feeble
step,--in the wan eye, lighting up from time to time into a brightness,
that seems no longer of this world. You read it in the new and ceaseless
attentions of the fond child, who yet blesses your home, and who
conceals from you the bitterness of the coming grief.
Frank is away--over-seas; and as the mother mentions that name with a
tremor of love and of regret, that he is not now with you all,--you
recall that other death, when you too were not there. Then, you knew
little of a parent's feeling; now, its intensity is present!
Day after day, as summer passes, she is ripening for that world where
her faith and her hope have so long lived. Her pressure of your hand at
some casual parting for a day is full of a gentle warning, as if she
said,--prepare for a longer adieu!
Her language, too, without direct mention steeps your thought in the
bitter certainty that she foresees her approaching doom, and that she
dreads it only so far as she dreads the grief that will be left in her
broken home. Madge--the daughter--glides through the duties of that
household like an angel of mercy: she lingers at the sick-bed,--blessing,
and taking blessings.
* * * * *