BLESSED be letters—they are the monitors, they are also the comforters,
and they are the only true heart-talkers! Your speech, and their
speeches, are conventional; they are molded by circumstance; they are
suggested by the observation, remark, and influence of the parties to
whom the speaking is addressed, or by whom it may be overheard.
Your truest thought is modified half through its utterance by a look, a
sign, a smile, or a sneer. It is not individual; it is not integral: it
is social and mixed—half of you, and half of others. It bends, it sways,
it multiplies, it retires, and it advances, as the talk of others
presses, relaxes, or quickens.
But it is not so of letters—there you are, with only the soulless pen,
and the snow-white, virgin paper. Your soul is measuring itself by
itself, and saying its own sayings; there are no sneers to modify its
utterance—no scowl to scare—nothing is present but you, and your
thought.
Utter it then freely—write it down—stamp it—burn it in the ink!—There it
is, a true soul-print!
Oh, the glory, the freedom, the passion of a letter! It is worth all the
lip-talk in the world. Do you say, it is studied, made up, acted,
rehearsed, contrived, artistic?
Let me see it, then; let me run it over; tell me age, sex, circumstance,
and I will tell you if it be studied or real—if it be the merest
lip-slang put into words, or heart-talk blazing on the paper.
[Illustration]
I have a little packet, not very large, tied up with narrow, crimson
ribbon, now soiled with frequent handling, which far into some winter’s
night, I take down from its nook upon my shelf, and untie, and open, and
run over, with such sorrow, and such joy—such tears and such smiles, as
I am sure make me for weeks after, a kinder and holier man.
There are in this little packet, letters in the familiar hand of a
mother—what gentle admonition—what tender affection!—God have mercy on
him who outlives the tears that such admonitions, and such affection
call up to the eye! There are others in the budget, in the delicate, and
unformed hand of a loved, and lost sister—written when she, and you were
full of glee, and the best mirth of youthfulness; does it harm you to
recall that mirthfulness? or to trace again, for the hundredth time,
that scrawling postscript at the bottom, with its _i’s_ so carefully
dotted, and its gigantic _t’s_ so carefully crossed, by the childish
hand of a little brother?
I have added latterly to that packet of letters; I almost need a new and
longer ribbon; the old one is getting too short. Not a few of these new
and cherished letters, a former reverie[1] has brought to me; not
letters of cold praise, saying it was well done, artfully executed,
prettily imagined—no such thing: but letters of sympathy—of sympathy
which means sympathy—the παθημί and the συν.
Footnote 1:
The first reverie—_Smoke, Flame and Ashes_—was published some months
previous to this, in the _Southern Literary Messenger_.
It would be cold and dastardly work to copy them; I am too selfish for
that. It is enough to say that they, the kind writers, have seen a heart
in the reverie—have felt that it was real, true. They know it; a secret
influence has told it. What matters it, pray, if, literally, there was
no wife, and no dead child, and no coffin in the house? Is not feeling,
feeling; and heart, heart? Are not these fancies thronging on my brain,
bringing tears to my eyes, bringing joy to my soul, as living, as
anything human can be living? What if they have no material type—no
objective form? All that is crude—a mere reduction of ideality to
sense—a transformation of the spiritual to the earthy—a leveling of soul
to matter.
Are we not creatures of thought and passion? Is anything about us more
earnest than that same thought and passion? Is there anything more
real—more characteristic of that great and dim destiny to which we are
born, and which may be written down in that terrible word—Forever?
Let those who will then, sneer at what in their wisdom they call
untruth—at what is false, because it has no material presence: this does
not create falsity; would to Heaven that it did!
And yet if there was actual, material truth, superadded to reverie,
would such objectors sympathize the more? No! a thousand times, no; the
heart that has no sympathy with thoughts and feelings that scorch the
soul, is dead also—whatever its mocking tears, and gestures may say—to a
coffin or a grave!
Let them pass, and we will come back to these cherished letters.
A mother, who has lost a child, has, she says, shed a tear—not one, but
many—over the dead boy’s coldness. And another, who has not lost, but
who trembles lest she lose, has found the words failing as she read, and
a dim, sorrow-borne mist spreading over the page.
Another, yet rejoicing in all those family ties, that make life a charm,
has listened nervously to careful reading, until the husband is called
home, and the coffin is in the house—“Stop!”—she says; and a gush of
tears tells the rest.
Yet the cold critic will say—“It was artfully done.” A curse on him!—it
was not art: it was nature.
Another, a young, fresh, healthful girl-mind, has seen something in the
love-picture—albeit so weak—of truth; and has kindly believed that it
must be earnest. Ay, indeed is it, fair, and generous one—earnest as
life and hope! Who, indeed, with a heart at all, that has not yet
slipped away irreparably and forever from the shores of youth—from that
fairyland which young enthusiasm creates, and over which bright dreams
hover—but knows it to be real? And so such things will be read, till
hopes are dashed, and death is come.
Another, a father, has laid down the book in tears.
—God bless them all! How far better this, than the cold praise of
newspaper paragraphs, or the critically contrived approval of colder
friends!
Let me gather up these letters, carefully—to be read when the heart is
faint, and sick of all that there is unreal, and selfish in the world.
Let me tie them together, with a new and longer bit of ribbon—not by a
love-knot, that is too hard—but by an easy-slipping knot, that so I may
get at them the better. And now, they are all together, a snug packet,
and we will label them, not sentimentally (I pity the one who thinks
it!), but earnestly, and in the best meaning of the term—SOUVENIRS DU
COEUR.
Thanks to my first reverie, which has added to such a treasure!
And now to my SECOND REVERIE.
I am no longer in the country. The fields, the trees, the brooks are far
away from me, and yet they are very present. A letter from my tenant—how
different from those other letters!—lies upon my table, telling me what
fields he has broken up for the autumn grain, and how many beeves he is
fattening, and how the potatoes are turning out.
But I am in a garret of the city. From my window I look over a mass of
crowded house-tops—moralizing often upon the scene, but in a strain too
long and somber to be set down here. In place of the wide country
chimney, with its iron fire-dogs, is a snug grate, where the maid makes
me a fire in the morning, and rekindles it in the afternoon.
I am usually fairly seated in my chair—a cozily stuffed office chair—by
five or six o’clock of the evening. The fire has been newly made,
perhaps an hour before: first, the maid drops a withe of paper in the
bottom of the grate, then a stick or two of pine-wood, and after it a
hod of Liverpool coal; so that by the time I am seated for the evening,
the sea-coal is fairly in a blaze.
When this has sunk to a level with the second bar of the grate, the maid
replenishes it with a hod of anthracite; and I sit musing and reading,
while the new coal warms and kindles—not leaving my place, until it has
sunk to the third bar of the grate, which marks my bedtime.
I love these accidental measures of the hours, which belong to you, and
your life, and not to the world. A watch is no more the measure of your
time, than of the time of your neighbors; a church clock is as public
and vulgar as a church-warden. I would as soon think of hiring the
parish sexton to make my bed, as to regulate my time by the parish
clock.
A shadow that the sun casts upon your carpet, or a streak of light on
the slated roof yonder, or the burning of your fire, are pleasant
time-keepers full of presence, full of companionship, and full of the
warning—time is passing!
In the summer season I have even measured my reading, and my
night-watch, by the burning of a taper; and I have scratched upon the
handle to the little bronze taper-holder, that meaning passage of the
New Testament—Νυξ γαρ ερχεται—the night cometh!
But I must get upon my reverie; it was a drizzly evening; I had worked
hard during the day, and had drawn my boots—thrust my feet into
slippers—thrown on a Turkish loose dress, and Greek cap—souvenirs to me
of other times, and other places, and sat watching the lively, uncertain
yellow play of the bituminous flame.
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
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[Illustration]
I
SEA-COAL
IT is like a flirt—mused I; lively, uncertain, bright-colored, waving
here and there, melting the coal into black shapeless mass, making foul,
sooty smoke, and pasty, trashy residuum! Yet withal—pleasantly
sparkling, dancing, prettily waving, and leaping like a roebuck from
point to point.
How like a flirt! And yet is not this tossing caprice of girlhood, to
which I liken my sea-coal flame, a native play of life, and belonging by
nature to the playtime of life? Is it not a sort of essential
fire-kindling to the weightier and truer passions—even as Jenny puts the
soft coal first, the better to kindle the anthracite? Is it not a sort
of necessary consumption of young vapors, which float in the soul, and
which is left thereafter the purer? Is there not a stage somewhere in
every man’s youth, for just such waving, idle, heart-blaze, which means
nothing, yet which must be got over?
Lamartine says, somewhere, very prettily, that there is more of quick
running sap, and floating shade in a young tree; but more of fire in the
heart of a sturdy oak—_Il y a plus de sève folle et d’ombre flottante
dans les jeunes plants de la forêt; il y a plus de feu dans le vieux
cœur du chêne_.
Is Lamartine playing off his prettiness of expression, dressing up with
his poetry—making a good conscience against the ghost of some accusing
Graziella, or is there truth in the matter?
A man who has seen sixty years, whether widower or bachelor, may well
put such sentiment into words: it feeds his wasted heart with hope; it
renews the exultation of youth by the pleasantest of equivocation, and
the most charming of self-confidence. But after all, is it not true? Is
not the heart like new blossoming field-plants, whose first flowers are
half-formed, one-sided perhaps, but by and by, in maturity of season,
putting out wholesome, well-formed blossoms that will hold their leaves
long and bravely?
Bulwer in his story of _The Caxtons_, has counted first heart-flights
mere fancy-passages—a dalliance with the breezes of love, which pass,
and leave healthful heart appetite. Half the reading world has read the
story of Trevanion and Pisistratus. But Bulwer is—past; his heart-life
is used up—_épuisé_. Such a man can very safely rant about the cool
judgment of after years.
Where does Shakespeare put the unripe heart-age? All of it before the
ambition, that alone makes the hero-soul. The Shakespeare man “sighs
like a furnace,” before he stretches his arm to achieve the “bauble,
reputation.”
Yet Shakespeare has meted a soul-love, mature and ripe, without any
young furnace sighs to Desdemona and Othello. Cordelia, the sweetest of
his play creations, loves without any of the mawkish matter, which makes
the whining love of a Juliet. And Florizel in the _Winter’s Tale_, says
to Perdita in the true spirit of a most sound heart:
My desires
Run not before mine honor, nor my wishes
Burn hotter than my faith.
How is it with Hector and Andromache? no sea-coal blaze, but one that is
constant, enduring, pervading: a pair of hearts full of esteem, and best
love—good, honest, and sound.
Look now at Adam and Eve, in God’s presence, with Milton for showman.
Shall we quote by this sparkling blaze, a gem from the _Paradise Lost_?
We will hum it to ourselves—what Raphael sings to Adam—a classic song.
——Him, serve and fear!
Of other creatures, as Him pleases best
Wherever placed, let Him dispose; joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve!
And again:
——Love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges; hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious: is the scale
By which to Heavenly love thou may’st ascend!
None of the playing sparkle in this love, which belongs to the flame of
my sea-coal fire that is now dancing, lively as a cricket. But on
looking about my garret chamber, I can see nothing that resembles the
archangel Raphael, or “thy fair Eve.”
There is a degree of moisture about the sea-coal flame, which with the
most earnest of my musing, I find it impossible to attach to that idea
of a waving sparkling heart which my fire suggests. A damp heart must be
a foul thing to be sure. But whoever heard of one?
Wordsworth somewhere in the _Excursion_ says:
The good die first,
And they whose hearts are _dry_ as summer dust
Burn to the socket!
What, in the name of Rydal Mount, is a dry heart? A dusty one, I can
conceive of: a bachelor’s heart must be somewhat dusty, as he nears the
sixtieth summer of his pilgrimage—and hung over with cobwebs, in which
sit such watchful gray old spiders as avarice, and selfishness, forever
on the lookout for such bottle-green flies as lust.
“I will never”—said I—gripping at the elbows of my chair—“live a
bachelor till sixty—never, so surely as there is hope in man, or charity
in woman, or faith in both!”
And with that thought my heart leaped about in playful coruscations,
even like the flame of the sea-coal—rising, and wrapping round old and
tender memories and images that were present to me—trying to cling, and
yet no sooner fastened than off—dancing again, riotous in its
exultation—a succession of heart-sparkles, blazing, and going out!
—And is there not—mused I—a portion of this world forever blazing in
just such lively sparkles, waving here and there as the air-currents fan
them?
Take, for instance, your heart of sentiment, and quick sensibility, a
weak, warm-working heart, flying off in tangents of unhappy influence,
unguided by prudence, and perhaps virtue. There is a paper by Mackenzie,
in the _Mirror_ for April, 1780, which sets this untoward sensibility in
a strong light.
And the more it is indulged, the more strong and binding such a habit of
sensibility becomes. Poor Mackenzie himself must have suffered thus; you
can not read his books without feeling it; your eye, in spite of you,
runs over with his sensitive griefs, while you are half-ashamed of his
success at picture-making. It is a terrible inheritance; and one that a
strong man or woman will study to subdue: it is a vain sea-coal
sparkling, which will count no good. The world is made of much hard,
flinty substance, against which your better and holier thoughts will be
striking fire—see to it that the sparks do not burn you!
But what a happy, careless life belongs to this bachelorhood in which
you may strike out boldly right and left! Your heart is not bound to
another which may be full of only sickly vapors of feeling; nor is it
frozen to a cold, man’s heart under a silk bodice—knowing nothing of
tenderness but the name, to prate of; and nothing of soul-confidence but
clumsy confession. And if in your careless outgoings of feeling you get
here only a little lip vapidity in return, be sure that you will find,
elsewhere, a true heart utterance. This last you will cherish in your
inner soul—a nucleus for a new group of affections; and the other will
pass with a whiff of your cigar.
Or if your feelings are touched, struck, hurt, who is the wiser, or the
worse, but you only? And have you not the whole skein of your heart-life
in your own fingers to wind, or unwind, in what shape you please? Shake
it, or twine it, or tangle it, by the light of your fire, as you fancy
best. He is a weak man who can not twist and weave the threads of his
feeling—however fine, however tangled, however strained, or however
strong—into the great cable of purpose, by which he lies moored to his
life of action.
Reading is a great and happy disentangler of all those knotted
snarls—those extravagant vagaries, which belong to a heart sparkling
with sensibility; but the reading must be cautiously directed. There is
old, placid Burton, when your soul is weak, and its digestion of life’s
humors is bad; there is Cowper, when your spirit runs into kindly,
half-sad, religious musing; there is Crabbe, when you would shake off
vagary, by a little handling of sharp actualities. There is Voltaire, a
homeopathic doctor, whom you can read when you want to make a play of
life, and crack jokes at nature, and be witty with destiny; there is
Rousseau, when you want to lose yourself in a mental dreamland, and be
beguiled by the harmony of soul-music and soul-culture.
And when you would shake off this, and be sturdiest among the battlers
for hard, world-success, and be forewarned of rocks against which you
must surely smite—read Bolingbroke—run over the letters of Lyttleton;
read, and think of what you read, in the cracking lines of
Rochefoucauld. How he sums us up in his stinging words!—how he puts the
scalpel between the nerves—yet he never hurts; for he is dissecting dead
matter.
If you are in a genial, careless mood, who is better than such
extemporizers of feeling and nature—good-hearted fellows—as Sterne and
Fielding?
And then, again, there are Milton and Isaiah, to lift up one’s soul
until it touches cloud-land, and you wander with their guidance, on
swift feet, to the very gates of heaven.
But this sparkling sensibility to one struggling under infirmity, or
with grief or poverty, is very dreadful. The soul is too nicely and
keenly hinged to be wrenched without mischief. How it shrinks, like a
hurt child, from all that is vulgar, harsh and crude! Alas, for such a
man!—he will be buffeted, from beginning to end; his life will be a sea
of troubles. The poor victim of his own quick spirit he wanders with a
great shield of doubt hung before him, so that none, not even friends,
can see the goodness of such kindly qualities as belong to him. Poverty,
if it comes upon him, he wrestles with in secret, with strong, frenzied
struggles. He wraps his scant clothes about him to keep him from the
cold; and eyes the world, as if every creature in it was breathing chill
blasts at him, from every opened mouth. He threads the crowded ways of
the city, proud in his griefs, vain in his weakness, not stopping to do
good. Bulwer, in the _New Timon_, has painted in a pair of stinging
Pope-like lines, this feeling in a woman:
Her vengeful pride, a kind of madness grown,
She hugged her wrongs, her sorrow was her throne!
Cold picture! yet the heart was sparkling under it, like my sea-coal
fire; lifting and blazing, and lighting and falling—but with no object;
and only such little heat as begins and ends within.
Those fine sensibilities, ever active, are chasing and observing all;
they catch a hue from what the dull and callous pass by
unnoticed—because unknown. They blunder at the great variety of the
world’s opinions; they see tokens of belief where others see none. That
delicate organization is a curse to a man: and yet, poor fool, he does
not see where his cure lies; he wonders at his griefs, and has never
reckoned with himself their source. He studies others, without studying
himself. He eats the leaves that sicken, and never plucks up the root
that will cure.
With a woman it is worse; with her, this delicate susceptibility is like
a frail flower, that quivers at every rough blast of heaven; her own
delicacy wounds her; her highest charm is perverted to a curse.
She listens with fear; she reads with trembling; she looks with dread.
Her sympathies give a tone, like the harp of Æolus, to the slightest
breath. Her sensibility lights up, and quivers and falls like the flame
of a sea-coal fire.
If she loves (and may not a bachelor reason on this daintiest of
topics), her love is a gushing, wavy flame, lit up with hope that has
only a little kindling matter to light it; and this soon burns out. Yet
intense sensibility will persuade her that the flame still scorches. She
will mistake the annoyance of affection unrequited for the sting of a
passion that she fancies still burns. She does not look deep enough to
see that the passion is gone, and the shocked sensitiveness emits only
faint, yellowish sparkles in its place; her high-wrought organization
makes those sparks seem a veritable flame.
With her, judgment, prudence and discretion are cold measured terms,
which have no meaning, except as they attach to the actions of others.
Of her own acts she never predicates them; feeling is much too high to
allow her to submit to any such obtrusive guides of conduct. She needs
disappointment to teach her truth; to teach that all is not gold that
glitters—to teach that all warmth does not blaze. But let her beware how
she sinks under any fancied disappointments: she who sinks under real
disappointment, lacks philosophy; but she who sinks under a fancied one,
lacks purpose. Let her flee as the plague such brooding thoughts as she
will love to cherish; let her spurn dark fancies as visitants of hell;
let the soul rise with the blaze of new-kindled, active and world-wide
emotions, and so brighten into steady and constant flame. Let her abjure
such poets as Cowper, or Byron, or even Wordsworth; and if she must
poetize, let her lay her mind to such manly verse as Pope’s, or to such
sound and ringing organry as _Comus_.
My fire was getting dull, and I thrust in the poker: it started up on
the instant into a hundred little angry tongues of flame.
[Illustration]
—Just so—thought I—the oversensitive heart once cruelly disturbed, will
fling out a score of flaming passions, darting here and darting
there—half-smoke, half-flame—love and hate—canker and joy—wild in its
madness, not knowing whither its sparks are flying. Once break roughly
upon the affections, or even the fancied affections of such a soul, and
you breed a tornado of maddened action—a whirlwind of fire that hisses
and sends out jets of wild, impulsive combustion that make the
bystanders—even those most friendly—stand aloof until the storm is past.
But this is not all the dashing flame of my sea-coal suggests.
—How like a flirt! mused I again, recurring to my first thought—so
lively, yet uncertain; so bright yet so flickering! Your true flirt
plays with sparkles; her heart, much as there is of it, spends itself in
sparkles; she measures it to sparkle, and habit grows into nature, so
that anon, it can only sparkle. How carefully she cramps it, if the
flames show too great a heat; how dexterously she flings its blaze here
and there; how coyly she subdues it; how winningly she lights it!
All this is the entire reverse of the unpremeditated dartings of the
soul at which I have been looking; sensibility scorns heart-curbings and
heart-teachings; sensibility inquires not—how much! but only—where?
Your true flirt has a coarse-grained soul; well modulated and well
tutored, but there is no fineness in it. All its native fineness is made
coarse by coarse efforts of the will. True feeling is a rustic
vulgarity, the flirt does not tolerate; she counts its healthiest and
most honest manifestation, all sentiment. Yet she will play you off a
pretty string of sentiment, which she has gathered from the poets; she
adjusts it prettily as a Gobelin weaver adjusts the colors in his
_tapis_. She shades it off delightfully; there are no bold contrasts,
but a most artistic mellowing of _nuances_.
She smiles like a wizard, and jingles it with a laugh, such as tolled
the poor home-bound Ulysses to the Circean bower. She has a cast of the
head, apt and artful as the most dexterous cast of the best
trout-killing rod. Her words sparkle and flow hurriedly, and with the
prettiest doubleness of meaning. Naturalness she copies and she scorns.
She accuses herself of a single expression or regard, which nature
prompts. She prides herself on her schooling. She measures her wit by
the triumphs of her art; she chuckles over her own falsity to herself.
And if by chance her soul—such germ as is left of it—betrays her into
untoward confidence, she condemns herself, as if she had committed
crime.
She is always gay, because she has no depth of feeling to be stirred.
The brook that runs shallow over hard pebbly bottom always rustles. She
is light-hearted, because her heart floats in sparkles—like my sea-coal
fire. She counts on marriage, not as the great absorbent of a heart’s
love and life, but as a happy, feasible, and orderly conventionality, to
be played with, and kept at distance, and finally to be accepted as a
cover for the faint and tawdry sparkles of an old and cherished
heartlessness.
She will not pine under any regrets, because she has no appreciation of
any loss: she will not chafe at indifference, because it is her art; she
will not be worried with jealousies, because she is ignorant of love.
With no conception of the soul in its strength and fullness, she sees no
lack of its demands. A thrill, she does not know; a passion, she can not
imagine; joy is a name; grief is another; and life, with its crowding
scenes of love and bitterness, is a play upon the stage.
I think it is Madame Dudevant who says, in something like the same
connection: _Les hiboux ne connaissent pas le chemin par où les aigles
vont au soleil_.
—Poor Ned! mused I, looking at the play of the fire—was a victim and a
conqueror. He was a man of a full, strong nature—not a little
impulsive—with action too full of earnestness for most of men to see its
drift. He had known little of what is called the world; he was fresh in
feeling and high of hope; he had been encircled always by friends who
loved him, and who, maybe, flattered him. Scarce had he entered upon the
tangled life of the city before he met with a sparkling face and an airy
step that stirred something in poor Ned that he had never felt before.
With him, to feel was to act. He was not one to be despised; for,
notwithstanding he wore a country air, and the awkwardness of a man who
has yet the _bienséance_ of social life before him, he had the soul, the
courage, and the talent of a strong man. Little gifted in the knowledge
of face-play, he easily mistook those coy manœuvers of a sparkling heart
for something kindred to his own true emotions.
She was proud of the attentions of a man who carried a mind in his
brain; and flattered poor Ned almost into servility. Ned had no friends
to counsel him; or, if he had them, his impulses would have blinded him.
Never was dodger more artful at the Olympic Games than the Peggy of
Ned’s heart-affection. He was charmed, beguiled, entranced.
When Ned spoke of love, she staved it off with the prettiest of sly
looks that only bewildered him the more. A charming creature to be sure;
coy as a dove!
So he went on, poor fool, until one day—he told me of it with the blood
mounting to his temples, and his eye shooting flame—he suffered his
feelings to run out in passionate avowal—entreaty—everything. She gave a
pleasant, noisy laugh, and manifested—such pretty surprise!
He was looking for the intense glow of passion; and lo, there was
nothing but the shifting sparkle of a sea-coal flame.
I wrote him a letter of condolence—for I was his senior by a year; “My
dear fellow,” said I, “diet yourself; you can find greens at the uptown
market; eat a little fish with your dinner; abstain from heating drinks;
don’t put too much butter to your cauliflower; read one of Jeremy
Taylor’s sermons, and translate all the quotations at sight; run
carefully over that exquisite picture of George Dandin in your Molière,
and my word for it, in a week you will be a sound man.”
He was too angry to reply; but eighteen months thereafter I got a thick,
three-sheeted letter, with a dove upon the seal, telling me that he was
as happy as a king: he said he had married a good-hearted, domestic,
loving wife, who was as lovely as a June day, and that their baby, not
three months old, was as bright as a spot of June day sunshine on the
grass.
—What a tender, delicate, loving wife—mused I—such flashing, flaming
flirt must in the end make; the prostitute of fashion; the bauble of
fifty hearts idle as hers; the shifting make-piece of a stage scene; the
actress, now in peasant, and now in princely petticoats! How it would
cheer an honest soul to call her—his! What a culmination of his
heart-life; what a rich dreamland to be realized!
—Bah! and I thrust the poker into the clotted mass of fading coal—just
such, and so worthless is the used heart of a city flirt; just so the
incessant sparkle of her life, and frittering passions, fuses all that
is sound and combustible into black, sooty, shapeless residuum.
When I marry a flirt, I will buy second-hand clothes of the Jews.
—Still—mused I—as the flame danced again—there is a distinction between
coquetry and flirtation.
A coquette sparkles, but it is more the sparkle of a harmless and pretty
vanity than of calculation. It is the play of humors in the blood, and
not the play of purpose at the heart. It will flicker around a true soul
like the blaze around an _omelette au rhum_, leaving the kernel sounder
and warmer.
Coquetry, with all its pranks and teasings, makes the spice to your
dinner—the mulled wine to your supper. It will drive you to desperation,
only to bring you back hotter to the fray. Who would boast a victory
that cost no strategy, and no careful disposition of the forces? Who
would bulletin such success as my Uncle Toby’s, in the back garden, with
only the Corporal Trim for assailant? But let a man be very sure that
the city is worth the siege!
Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the
thorn that guards the rose—easily trimmed off when once plucked.
Flirtation is like the slime on water plants, making them hard to
handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters.
And so, with my eye clinging to the flickering blaze, I see in my
reverie, a bright one dancing before me, with sparkling, coquettish
smile, teasing me with the prettiest graces in the world—and I grow
maddened between hope and fear, and still watch with my whole soul in my
eyes; and see her features by and by relax to pity, as a gleam of
sensibility comes stealing over her spirit—and then to a kindly, feeling
regard: presently she approaches—a coy and doubtful approach—and throws
back the ringlets that lie over her cheek, and lays her hand—a little
bit of white hand—timidly upon my strong fingers—and turns her head
daintily to one side—and looks up in my eyes as they rest on the playing
blaze; and my fingers close fast and passionately over that little hand
like a swift night-cloud shrouding the pale tips of Dian—and my eyes
draw nearer and nearer to those blue, laughing, pitying, teasing eyes,
and my arm clasps round that shadowy form—and my lips feel a warm
breath—growing warmer and warmer—
Just here the maid comes in, throws upon the fire a panful of
anthracite, and my sparkling sea-coal reverie is ended.
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[Illustration]
II
ANTHRACITE
IT DOES not burn freely, so I put on the blower. Quaint and good-natured
Xavier de Maistre[2] would have made, I dare say, a pretty epilogue
about a sheet-iron blower; but I can not.
Footnote 2:
_Voyage autour de Ma Chambre._
I try to bring back the image that belonged to the lingering bituminous
flame, but with my eyes on that dark blower—how can I?
It is the black curtain of destiny which drops down before our brightest
dreams. How often the phantoms of joy regale us, and dance before
us—golden-winged, angel-faced, heart-warming, and make an Elysium in
which the dreaming soul bathes and feels translated to another
existence; and then—sudden as night, or a cloud—a word, a step, a
thought, a memory will chase them away like scared deer vanishing over a
gray horizon of moor-land!
I know not justly, if it be a weakness or a sin to create these phantoms
that we love, and to group them into a paradise—soul-created. But if it
is a sin, it is a sweet and enchanting sin; and if it is a weakness, it
is a strong and stirring weakness. If this heart is sick of the
falsities that meet it at every hand, and is eager to spend that power
which nature has ribbed it with, on some object worthy of its fullness
and depth—shall it not feel a rich relief—nay more, an exercise in
keeping with its end, if it flow out—strong as a tempest, wild as a
rushing river, upon those ideal creations, which imagination invents,
and which are tempered by our best sense of beauty, purity and grace?
—Useless, do you say? Ay, it is as useless as the pleasure of looking,
hour upon hour, over bright landscapes; it is as useless as the rapt
enjoyment of listening with heart full and eyes brimming, to such music
as the Miserere, at Rome; it is as useless as the ecstasy of kindling
your soul into fervor and love, and madness, over pages that reek with
genius.
There are, indeed, base-molded souls who know nothing of this; they
laugh; they sneer; they even affect to pity. Just so the Huns, under the
avenging Attila, who had been used to foul cookery and steaks stewed
under their saddles, laughed brutally at the spiced banquets of an
Apicius!
—No, this phantom-making is no sin; or if it be, it is sinning with a
soul so full, so earnest, that it can cry to Heaven cheerily, and sure
of a gracious hearing—_peccavi_—_misericorde_!
But my fire is in a glow, a pleasant glow, throwing a tranquil, steady
light to the farthest corner of my garret. How unlike it is to the
flashing play of the sea-coal!—unlike as an unsteady, uncertain-working
heart to the true and earnest constancy of one cheerful and right.
After all, thought I, give me such a heart; not bent on vanities, not
blazing too sharp with sensibilities, not throwing out coquettish jets
of flame, not wavering, and meaningless with pretended warmth, but open,
glowing and strong. Its dark shades and angles it may have; for what is
a soul worth that does not take a slaty tinge from those griefs that
chill the blood. Yet still the fire is gleaming; you see it in the
crevices; and anon it will give radiance to the whole mass.
—It hurts the eyes, this fire; and I draw up a screen painted over with
rough but graceful figures.
The true heart wears always the veil of modesty (not of prudery, which
is a dingy, iron, repulsive screen). It will not allow itself to be
looked on too near—it might scorch; but through the veil you feel the
warmth; and through the pretty figures that modesty will robe itself in,
you can see all the while the golden outlines, and by that token, you
_know_ that it is glowing and burning with a pure and steady flame.
With such a heart the mind fuses naturally—a holy and heated fusion;
they work together like twins-born. With such a heart, as Raphael says
to Adam:
Love hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious.
But let me distinguish this heart from your clay-cold, lukewarm,
half-hearted soul; considerate, because ignorant; judicious, because
possessed of no latent fires that need a curb; prudish, because with no
warm blood to tempt. This sort of soul may pass scatheless through the
fiery furnace of life; strong, only in its weakness; pure, because of
its failings; and good, only by negation. It may triumph over love, and
sin, and death; but it will be a triumph of the beast, which has neither
passions to subdue, or energy to attack, or hope to quench.
Let us come back to the steady and earnest heart, glowing like my
anthracite coal.
I fancy I see such a one now; the eye is deep and reaches back to the
spirit; it is not the trading eye, weighing your purse; it is not the
worldly eye, weighing position; it is not the beastly eye, weighing your
appearance; it is the heart’s eye weighing your soul!
It is full of deep, tender, and earnest feeling. It is an eye, which
looked on once, you long to look on again; it is an eye which will haunt
your dreams—an eye which will give a color, in spite of you, to all your
reveries. It is an eye which lies before you in your future, like a star
in the mariner’s heaven; by it, unconsciously, and from force of deep
soul habit, you take all your observations. It is meek and quiet; but it
is full as a spring that gushes in flood; an Aphrodite and a Mercury—a
Vaucluse and a Clitumnus.
The face is an angel face; no matter for curious lines of beauty; no
matter for popular talk of prettiness; no matter for its angles, or its
proportions; no matter for its color or its form—the soul is there,
illuminating every feature, burnishing every point, hallowing every
surface. It tells of honesty, sincerity and worth; it tells of truth and
virtue—and you clasp the image to your heart as the received ideal of
your fondest dreams.
The figure may be this or that, it may be tall or short, it matters
nothing—the heart is there. The talk may be soft or low, serious or
piquant—a free and honest soul is warming and softening it all. As you
speak, it speaks back again; as you think, it thinks again (not in
conjunction, but in the same sign of the Zodiac); as you love, it loves
in return.
—It is the heart for a sister, and happy is the man who can claim such!
The warmth that lies in it is not only generous, but religious, genial,
devotional, tender, self-sacrificing, and looking heavenward.
A man without some sort of religion is, at best, a poor reprobate, the
football of destiny, with no tie linking him to infinity, and the
wondrous eternity that is begun with him; but a woman without it is even
worse—a flame without heat, a rainbow without color, a flower without
perfume!
A man may, in some sort, tie his frail hopes and honors with weak,
shifting ground-tackle to business, or to the world; but a woman without
that anchor which they call faith is adrift and a-wreck! A man may
clumsily contrive a kind of moral responsibility out of his relations to
mankind, but a woman in her comparatively isolated sphere, where
affection and not purpose is the controlling motive, can find no basis
for any system of right action, but that of spiritual faith.
A man may craze his thought and his brain, to trustfulness in such poor
harborage as fame and reputation may stretch before him; but a
woman—where can she put her hope in storms, if not in Heaven?
And that sweet trustfulness—that abiding love—that enduring hope,
mellowing every page and scene of life, lighting them with pleasantest
radiance, when the world-storms break like an army with smoking
cannon—what can bestow it all, but a holy soul-tie to what is above the
storms, and to what is stronger than an army with cannon? Who that has
enjoyed the counsel and the love of a Christian mother, but will echo
the thought with energy, and hallow it with a tear?—_et moi, je pleurs!_
My fire is now a mass of red-hot coal. The whole atmosphere of my room
is warm. The heat that with its glow can light up, and warm a garret
with loose casements and shattered roof, is capable of the best
love—domestic love. I draw farther off, and the images upon the screen
change. The warmth, the hour, the quiet, create a home feeling; and that
feeling, quick as lightning, has stolen from the world of fancy (a
Promethean theft), a home object, about which my musings go on to drape
themselves in luxurious reverie.
[Illustration]
—There she sits, by the corner of the fire, in a neat home dress, of
sober, yet most adorning color. A little bit of lace ruffle is gathered
about the neck, by a blue ribbon; and the ends of the ribbon are crossed
under the dimpling chin, and are fastened neatly by a simple,
unpretending brooch—your gift. The arm, a pretty taper arm, lies over
the carved elbow of the oaken chair; the hand, white and delicate,
sustains a little home volume that hangs from her fingers. The
forefinger is between the leaves, and the others lie in relief upon the
dark embossed cover. She repeats in a silver voice a line that has
attracted her fancy; and you listen—or, at any rate, you seem to
listen—with your eyes now on the lips, now on the forehead, and now on
the finger, where glitters like a star, the marriage ring—little gold
band, at which she does not chafe, that tells you—she is yours!
—Weak testimonial, if that were all that told it! The eye, the voice,
the look, the heart, tells you stronger and better, that she is yours.
And a feeling within, where it lies you know not, and whence it comes
you know not, but sweeping over heart and brain, like a fire-flood,
tells you, too, that you are hers! Irremediably bound as Massinger’s
Hortensio:
I am subject to another’s will and can
Nor speak, nor do, without permission from her!
The fire is warm as ever; what length of heat in this hard burning
anthracite! It has scarce sunk yet to the second bar of the grate,
though the clock upon the churchtower has tolled eleven.
—Aye—mused I, gayly—such a heart does not grow faint, it does not spend
itself in idle puffs of blaze, it does not become chilly with the
passing years; but it gains and grows in strength and heat until the
fire of life is covered over with the ashes of death. Strong or hot as
it may be at the first, it loses nothing. It may not, indeed, as time
advances, throw out, like the coal fire, when new-lit, jets of blue
sparkling flame; it may not continue to bubble and gush like a fountain
at its source, but it will become a strong river of flowing charities.
Clitumnus breaks from under the Tuscan mountains, almost a flood; on a
glorious spring day I leaned down and tasted the water, as it boiled
from its sources; the little temple of white marble—the mountain sides
gray with olive orchards—the white streak of road—the tall poplars of
the river margin were glistening in the bright Italian sunlight around
me. Later, I saw it when it had become a river—still clear and strong,
flowing serenely between its prairie banks, on which the white cattle of
the valley browsed; and still farther down I welcomed it, where it joins
the Arno—flowing slowly under wooded shores, skirting the fair Florence
and the bounteous fields of the bright Cascino; gathering strength and
volume, till between Pisa and Leghorn—in sight of the wondrous Leaning
Tower and the ship-masts of the Tuscan port—it gave its waters to its
life’s grave—the sea.
The recollection blended sweetly now with my musings, over my garret
grate, and offered a flowing image to bear along upon its bosom the
affections that were grouping in my reverie.
It is a strange force of the mind and of the fancy that can set the
objects which are closest to the heart far down the lapse of time. Even
now, as the fire fades slightly, and sinks slowly toward the bar, which
is the dial of my hours, I seem to see that image of love which has
played about the fire-glow of my grate—years hence. It still covers the
same warm, trustful, religious heart. Trials have tried it; afflictions
have weighed upon it; danger has scared it; and death is coming near to
subdue it; but still it is the same.
The fingers are thinner; the face has lines of care and sorrow crossing
each other in a web-work that makes the golden tissue of humanity. But
the heart is fond and steady; it is the same dear heart, the same
self-sacrificing heart, warming, like a fire, all around it. Affliction
has tempered joy; and joy adorned affliction. Life and all its troubles
have become distilled into an holy incense, rising ever from your
fireside—an offering to your household gods.
Your dreams of reputation, your swift determination, your impulsive
pride, your deep uttered vows to win a name, have all sobered into
affection—have all blended into that glow of feeling which finds its
center, and hope, and joy in HOME. From my soul I pity him whose soul
does not leap at the mere utterance of that name.
A home!—it is the bright, blessed, adorable phantom which sits highest
on the sunny horizon that girdeth life! When shall it be reached? When
shall it cease to be a glittering day-dream, and become fully and fairly
yours?
It is not the house, though that may have its charms; nor the fields
carefully tilled, and streaked with your own footpaths—nor the trees,
though their shadow be to you like that of a great rock in a weary
land—nor yet is it the fireside, with its sweet blaze-play—nor the
pictures which tell of loved ones, nor the cherished books—but more far
than all these—it is the PRESENCE. The Lares of your worship are there;
the altar of your confidence there; the end of your worldly faith is
there; and adorning it all, and sending your blood in passionate flow,
is the ecstasy of the conviction, that _there_ at least you are beloved;
that there you are understood; that there your errors will meet ever
with gentlest forgiveness; that there your troubles will be smiled away;
that there you may unburden your soul, fearless of harsh, unsympathizing
ears; and that there you may be entirely and joyfully—yourself!
There may be those of coarse mold—and I have seen such even in the
disguise of women—who will reckon these feelings puling sentiment. God
pity them!—as they have need of pity.
—That image by the fireside, calm, loving, joyful, is there still; it
goes not, however my spirit tosses, because my wish, and every will,
keep it there, unerring.
The fire shows through the screen, yellow and warm as a harvest sun. It
is in its best age, and that age is ripeness.
A ripe heart!—now I know what Wordsworth meant when he said:
The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket!
The town clock is striking midnight. The cold of the night-wind is
urging its way in at the door and window-crevice; the fire has sunk
almost to the third bar of the grate. Still my dream tires not, but
wraps fondly round that image—now in the far-off, chilling mists of age,
growing sainted. Love has blended into reverence; passion has subsided
into joyous content.
—And what if age comes, said I, in a new flush of excitation—what else
proves the wine? What else gives inner strength, and knowledge, and a
steady pilot-hand, to steer your boat out boldly upon that shoreless
sea, where the river of life is running? Let the white ashes gather; let
the silver hair lie where lay the auburn; let the eye gleam farther
back, and dimmer; it is but retreating toward the pure sky-depths, an
usher to the land where you will follow after.
It is quite cold, and I take away the screen altogether; there is a
little glow yet, but presently the coal slips down below the third bar,
with a rumbling sound—like that of coarse gravel falling into a new-dug
grave.
—She is gone!
Well, the heart has burned fairly, evenly, generously, while there was
mortality to kindle it; eternity will surely kindle it better.
—Tears indeed; but they are tears of thanksgiving, of resignation, and
of hope!
And the eyes, full of those tears which ministering angels bestow, climb
with quick vision upon the angelic ladder, and open upon the futurity
where she has entered, and upon the country which she enjoys.
It is midnight, and the sounds of life are dead.
You are in the death chamber of life; but you are also in the death
chamber of care. The world seems sliding backward; and hope and you are
sliding forward. The clouds, the agonies, the vain expectancies, the
braggart noise, and fears, now vanish behind the curtain of the past,
and of the night. They roll from your soul like a load.
In the dimness of what seems the ending present, you reach out your
prayerful hands toward that boundless future, where God’s eye lifts over
the horizon, like sunrise on the ocean. Do you recognize it as an
earnest of something better? Aye, if the heart has been pure and
steady—burning like my fire—it has learned it without seeming to learn.
Faith has grown upon it, as the blossom grows upon the bud, or the
flower upon the slow-lifting stalk.
Cares can not come into the dreamland where I live. They sink with the
dying street noise, and vanish with the embers of my fire. Even
ambition, with its hot and shifting flame, is all gone out. The heart in
the dimness of the fading fire-glow is all itself. The memory of what
good things have come over it in the troubled youthlife, bear it up; and
hope and faith bear it on. There is no extravagant pulse-glow; there is
no mad fever of the brain; but only the soul, forgetting—for once—all,
save its destinies and its capacities for good. And it mounts higher and
higher on these wings of thought; and hope burns stronger and stronger
out of the ashes of decaying life, until the sharp edge of the grave
seems but a foot-scraper at the wicket of Elysium!
But what is paper; and what are words? Vain things! The soul leaves them
behind; the pen staggers like a starveling cripple; and your heart is
leaving it, a whole length of the life-course behind. The soul’s mortal
longings—its poor baffled hopes, are dim now in the light of those
infinite longings, which spread over it soft and holy as daydawn.
Eternity has stretched a corner of its mantle toward you, and the breath
of its waving fringe is like a gale of Araby.
A little rumbling, and a last plunge of the cinders within my grate,
startled me, and dragged back my fancy from my flower chase, beyond the
Phlegethon, to the white ashes that were now thick all over the darkened
coals.
—And this—mused I—is only a bachelor-dream about a pure and loving
heart! And to-morrow comes cankerous life again—is it wished for? Or if
not wished for, is the not wishing wicked?
Will dreams satisfy, reach high as they can? Are we not, after all, poor
groveling mortals, tied to earth, and to each other; are there not
sympathies, and hopes, and affections which can only find their issue
and blessing in fellow absorption? Does not the heart, steady and pure,
as it may be, and mounting on soul flights often as it dare, want a
human sympathy, perfectly indulged, to make it healthful? Is there not a
fount of love for this world as there is a fount of love for the other?
Is there not a certain store of tenderness cooped in this heart, which
must, and _will_ be lavished, before the end comes? Does it not plead
with the judgment, and make issue with prudence, year after year? Does
it not dog your steps all through your social pilgrimage, setting up its
claims in forms fresh and odorous as new-blown heath bells, saying—come
away from the heartless, the factitious, the vain, and measure your
heart not by its constraints, but by its fullness, and by its depth! Let
it run, and be joyous!
Is there no demon that comes to your harsh night-dreams, like a taunting
fiend, whispering—be satisfied; keep your heart from running over;
bridle those affections; there is nothing worth loving?
Does not some sweet being hover over your spirit of reverie like a
beckoning angel, crowned with halo, saying—hope on, hope ever; the heart
and I are kindred; our mission will be fulfilled; nature shall
accomplish its purpose; the soul shall have its paradise?
—I threw myself upon my bed: and as my thoughts ran over the definite,
sharp business of the morrow, my reverie, and its glowing images, that
made my heart bound, swept away like those fleecy rain clouds of August,
on which the sun paints rainbows-—driving southward, by the cool, rising
wind from the north.
—I wonder—thought I, as I dropped asleep—if a married man with his
sentiment made actual is, after all, as happy as we poor fellows, in our
dreams?
[Illustration]
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