Donald Grant Mitchell

“ Your dreams are now faint, flickering shadows, that play like fire-flies in the coppices of leafy June. They have no rule but the rule of infantile desire; they have no joys to promise greater than the joys that belong to your passing life; they have no terrors but such terrors as the darkness of a Spring night makes. They do not take hold on your soul as the dreams of youth and manhood will do.
Your highest hope is shadowed in a cheerful, boyish home. You wish no friends but the friends of boyhood; no sister but your fond Nelly; none to love better than the playful Madge. ”

“ You draw out Nelly to speak of Madge: Nelly is very prudent. "Madge is a dear girl," she says. Does Nelly even distrust you? It is a sad thing to be too much a man of the world!
You go back again to noisy, ambitious life: you try to drown old memories in its blaze and its vanities. Your lot seems cast beyond all change, and you task yourself with its noisy fulfilment. But amid the silence and the toil of your office-hours, a strange desire broods over your spirit,—a desire for more of manliness,—that manliness which feels itself a protector of loving and trustful innocence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The old craving of the office silence comes back,—not with the proud wish only of being a protector, but—of being protected. And whatever may be the trust in that beneficent Power who "chasteneth whom he loveth," there is yet an earnest, human yearning toward some one, whose love—most, and whose duty—least, would call her to your side; whose soft hands would cool the fever of yours, whose step would wake a throb of joy, whose voice would tie you to life, and whose presence would make the worst of Death—an Adieu!
As you gain strength once more, you go back to Nelly's home. ”

“ Your name and blood will live after you; nor do you once think (what father can?) but that it will live honorably and well.
With what a new air you walk the streets! With what a triumph you speak, in your letter to Nelly, of "your family!" Who, that has not felt it, knows what it is to be "a man of family!"
How weak now seem all the imaginations of your single life; what bare, dry skeletons of the reality they furnished! You pity the poor fellows who have no wives or children—from your soul; you count their smiles as empty smiles, put on to cover the lack that is in them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Is it love, or is it madness, when you catch her eye as it beams more of eloquence than lies in all your moonlight poetry, and feel an exultant gush of the heart that makes you proud as a man, and yet timid as a boy, beside her?
Has Dalton, with that calm, placid, nonchalant look of his, any inkling of the raptures which his elegant sister is exciting? Has the stout, elderly gentleman, who is so prodigal of his bouquets and attentions, any idea of the formidable rival that he has found? Has Laura herself—you dream—any conception of that intensity of admiration with which you worship? ”

“ As you recall those tones, so full of brilliancy and pride, the quiet virtues fade, like the soft haze upon a spring landscape driven westward by a swift, sea-born storm. The pulse bounds; the eyes flash; the heart trembles with its sharp springs. Hope dilates, like the eye, fed with swift blood leaping to the brain.
Again the image of Miss Dalton, so fine, so noble, so womanly, fills and bounds the Future. The lingering tears of grief drop away from your eye, as the lingering loves of boyhood drop from your scalding passion, or drip into clouds of vapor. ”

“ Your home, when it is entered, is just what it should be,—quiet, small,—with everything she wishes, and nothing more than she wishes. The sun strikes it in the happiest possible way; the piano is the sweetest-toned in the world; the library is stocked to a charm;—and Madge, that blessed wife, is there, adorning and giving life to it all. To think even of her possible death is a suffering you class with the infernal tortures of the Inquisition. You grow twin of heart and of purpose. Smiles seem made for marriage; and you wonder how you ever wore them before! ”

“ The old man totters, though he leans heavily upon his cane; and he pants as he seats himself upon a mossy rock that crowns the summit of the slope. As he recovers breath, he draws the hand of the lady in his, and with a trembling eagerness he points out an old mansion that lies below under the shadow of tall sycamores; and he says,—feebly and brokenly,—"That is it, Maggie,—the old home—the sycamores—the garret—Charlie—Nelly"—
The old man wipes his eyes. Then his hand shifts: he seems groping in darkness; but soon it rests upon a little cottage below, heavily overshadowed. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But the years roll on, in the which your extravagant fancies die into the earnest maturity of a father's love. You struggle gayly with the cares that life brings to your door. You feel the strength of three beings in your single arm; and feel your heart warming toward God and man with the added warmth of two other loving and trustful beings.
How eagerly you watch the first tottering step of that boy; how you riot in the joy and pride that swell in that mother's eyes, as they follow his feeble, staggering motions! Can God bless his creatures more than he has blessed that dear Madge and you? ”

“ A collegian wears the honors of a stranger, and the country bucks stand but poor chance in contrast with your wonderful attainments in cravats and verses. But this fresh dream, odorous with its memories of sleigh-rides or lilac-blossoms, slips by, and yields again to the more ambitious dreams of the cloister.
In the prouder moments that come when you are more a man and less a boy,—with more of strategy and less of faith,—your thought of woman runs loftily; not loftily in the realm of virtue or goodness, but loftily on your new world-scale. ”

“ You think the involuntary fear, that makes your little prayer full of sobs, is a holy feeling;—and so it is a holy feeling,—the same feeling which makes a stricken child yearn for the embrace and the protection of a Parent. But you will find there are those canting ones trying to persuade you, at a later day, that it is a mere animal fear, and not to be cherished.
You feel an access of goodness growing out of your boyish grief; you feel right-minded; it seems as if your little brother in going to Heaven had opened a path-way thither, down which goodness comes streaming over your soul. ”

“ You feel calmer as the night deepens. The darkness softens you; it hangs—like the pall that shrouds your mother's corpse—low and heavily to your heart. It helps your inward grief with some outward show. It makes the earth a mourner; it makes the flashing water-drops so many attendant mourners. It makes the Great Fall itself a mourner, and its roar a requiem!
The pleasure of travel is cut short. To one person of the little company of fellow-voyagers you bid adieu with regret; pride, love, and hope point toward her, while all the gentler affections stray back to the broken home. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Do you not know—in spite of your worldliness—that the man or the woman, who condescends to love, never loves in earnest?
But again Madge is possessed of a purity, a delicacy, and a dignity that lift her far above you,—that make you feel your weakness and your unworthiness; and it is the deep and the mortifying sense of this unworthiness that makes you bolster yourself upon your pride. You know that you do yourself honor in loving such grace and goodness; you know that you would be honored tenfold more than you deserve in being loved by so much grace and goodness. ”

“ Your pride is piqued. She has known—she must know your history; but it does not tame her. There is no marked and submissive appreciation of your gifts as a man of the world.
She meets your happiest compliments with a very easy indifference; she receives your elegant civilities with a very assured brow. She neither courts your society, nor avoids it. She does not seek to provoke any special attention. And only when your old self glows in some casual kindness to Nelly, does her look beam with a flush of sympathy.
This look touches you. It makes you ponder on the noble heart that lives in Madge. ”

“ A single affection may indeed be true, earnest, and absorbing; but such an one, after all, is but a type—and if the object be worthy, a glorious type—of the great book of feeling: it is only the vapor from the caldron of the heart, and bears no deeper relation to its exhaustless sources than the letter, which my pen makes, bears to the thought that inspires it,—or than a single morning strain of your orioles and thrushes bears to that wide bird-chorus which is making every sunrise a worship, and every grove a temple! ”

“ 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? ”

“ Dalton is learned in those arts which make of action, not a duty, but a conquest; and sense of duty has expired in you with those romantic hopes to which you bound it, not as much through sympathy as ignorance. It is a cold and a bitterly selfish work that lies before you,—to be covered over with such borrowed show of smiles as men call affability. The heart wears a stout, brazen screen; its inclinations grow to the habit of your ambitious projects.
In such mood come swift dreams of wealth,—not of mere accumulation, but of the splendor and parade which in our Western world are, alas! ”

“ It is a soft autumn evening, and the harvest-moon is red and round over the eastern skirt of woods. You are attending Madge to that little cottage-home where lives that gentle and doting mother, who, in the midst of comparative poverty, cherishes that refined delicacy which never comes to a child but by inheritance.
Madge has been passing the day with Nelly. Something—it may be the soft autumn air, wafting toward you the freshness of young days—moves you to speak as you have not ventured to speak, as your vanity has not allowed you to speak before. ”

“ And from all the tramp and bustle of the world into which fortune has led me in these latter years of my life, I delight to steal away for days, and for weeks together, and bathe my spirit in the freedom of the old woods; and to grow young again, lying upon the brook-side, and counting the white clouds that sail along the sky softly and tranquilly—even as holy memories go stealing over the vault of life.
I am deeply thankful that I could never find it in my heart so to pervert truth as to call the smart villages with the tricksy shadow of their maple avenues—the Country. ”

“ And she pushes her ventures with a bold hand; she makes timidity strong, and weakness valiant.
The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him,—coming from above, and from around;—but a way foreshadowed is not a way made. And the making of a man's way comes only from that quickening of resolve which we call Ambition. It is the spur that makes man struggle with Destiny: it is Heaven's own incentive, to make Purpose great, and Achievement greater.
It would be strange if you, in that cloister life of a college, did not sometimes feel a dawning of new resolves. ”

“ Grief has a strange power in opening the hearts of those who sorrow in common. The father, who has seemed to you, not so much neglectful, as careless of your aims and purposes,—toward whom there have been in your younger years yearnings of affection which his chilliness of manner has seemed to repress, now grows under the sad light of the broken household into a friend. The heart feels a joy it cannot express, in its freedom to love and to cherish. ”

“ It scarce seems to you possible; it is a joy too great to be hoped for; and in the doubt of its attainment your old, worldly vanity comes in, and tells you to—beware; and to live on in the splendor of your dissipation and in the lusts of your selfish habit. Yet still underneath all there is a deep, low, heart-voice,—quickened from above,—which assures you that you are capable of better things; that you are not wholly lost; that a mine of unstarted tenderness still lies smouldering in your soul. ”

“ It is a holy and a placid grief that comes over you,—not crushing, but bringing to life from the grave of boyhood all its better and nobler instincts. In their light your wild plans of youth look sadly misshapen and in the impulse of the hour you abandon them; holy resolutions beam again upon your soul like sunlight, your purposes seem bathed in goodness. There is an effervescence of the spirit that carries away all foul matter, and leaves you in a state of calm that seems kindred to the land and to the life whither the sainted mother has gone. ”

“ Anxieties indeed overtake you, but they are those anxieties which only the selfish would avoid,—anxieties that better the heart with a great weight of tenderness. It may be that your mischievous Frank runs wild with the swift blood of boyhood, and that the hours are long which wait his coming. It may be that your heart echoes in silence the mother's sobs, as she watches his fits of waywardness, and showers upon his very neglect excess of love.
Danger perhaps creeps upon little, joyous Nelly, which makes you tremble for her life; the mother's tears are checked that she may not deepen your grief ”

“ You would have liked Virginia, you know you would; but you perfectly hate the beldame aunt who sent for her to come to France; you think she must have been like the old schoolmistress, who occasionally boxes your ears with the cover of the spelling-book, or makes you wear one of the girls' bonnets, that smells strongly of pasteboard and calico.
As for black Domingue, you think he was a capital old fellow; and you think more of him and his bananas than you do of the bursting, throbbing heart of poor Paul. As yet Dream-life does not take hold on love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nor are dreams without their variety, whatever your character may be. I care not how much in the pride of your practical judgment, or in your learned fancies, you may sneer at any dream of love, and reckon it all a poet's fiction: there are times when such dreams come over you like a summer-cloud, and almost stifle you with their warmth.
Seek as you will for increase of lands or moneys, and there are moments when a spark of some giant mind will flash over your cravings, and wake your soul suddenly to a quick and yearning sense of that influence which is begotten of intellect ”

“ A single piercing thought of the vast and shadowy future, which is so near, tears off on the instant all the gewgaws of pride, strips away the vanity that doubles your bigness, and forces you down to the bare nakedness of what you truly are!
With one more yearning look at the gray hulks of building, you loiter away under the trees. The monster elms, which have bowered your proud steps through four years of proudest life, lift up to the night their rounded canopy of leaves with a quiet majesty that mocks you. They kiss the same calm sky which they wooed four years ago ”

“ The love that a delicate-minded girl will tell is a short-sighted and outside love; but the love that she cherishes without voice or token is a love that will mould her secret sympathies, and her deepest, fondest yearnings, either to a quiet world of joy, or to a world of placid sufferance. The true voice of her love she will keep back long and late, fearful ever of her most prized jewel,—fearful to strange sensitiveness; she will show kindness, but the opening of the real floodgates of the heart, and the utterance of those impassioned yearnings which belong to its nature, come far later. ”

“ Is your wife living, and yet—lost! Talk not to such a man of the woes of sickness, of poverty, of death; he will laugh at your mimicry of grief.
----All is blackness; whichever way you turn, it is the same; there is no light; your eye is put out; your soul is desolate forever! The heart by which you had grown up into the full stature of joy and blessing, is rooted out of you, and thrown like something loathsome, at which the carrion dogs of the world scent and snuffle! ”

“ You know each day of your return from the town, where first you will catch sight of that graceful figure flitting like a shadow of love beneath the trees; you know well where you will meet the joyous and noisy welcome of stout Frank, and of tottling Nelly. Day after day and week after week they fail not.
A friend sometimes attends you; and a friend to you is always a friend to Madge. In the city you fall in once more with your old acquaintance Dalton,—the graceful, winning, yet dissolute man that his youth promised. He wishes to see your cottage home. Your heart half hesitates ”

“ The fervor and the honesty of a glowing youth is swallowed up in the flash and splendor of the world. A half-regret chases over you at nightfall, when solitude pierces you with the swift dart of gone-by memories. But at morning the regret dies in the glitter of ambitious purposes.
The summer months linger; and still you linger with them. Madge is often with Nelly; and Madge is never less than Madge. You venture to point your attentions with a little more fervor; but she meets the fervor with no glow. She knows too well the habit of your life. ”

“ And over your brilliant career as man of the world, however lit up by a morbid vanity, or galvanized by a lascivious passion, there will come at times the consciousness of a better heart, struggling beneath your cankered action,—like the low Vesuvian fire, reeking vainly under rough beds of tufa and scoriated lava. And as you smile in loge or salon, with daring smiles, or press with villain fondness the hand of those lady-votaries of the same god you serve, there will gleam upon you over the waste of rolling years a memory that quickens again the nobler and bolder instincts of the heart. ”

“ It is some days after your return: you are strolling down a quiet, wooded lane,—a remembered place,—when you first open to her your heart. Your talk is of Laura Dalton. You describe her to Nelly with the extravagance of a glowing hope. You picture those qualities that have attracted you most; you dwell upon her beauty, her elegant figure, her grace of conversation, her accomplishments. You make a study that feeds your passion as you go on. You rise by the very glow of your speech into a frenzy of feeling that she has never excited before. ”

“ You could not have a better teacher!
Under such instruction you become disgusted for the time with any effort, or pulse of affection, which does not have immediate and practical bearing upon that success in life by which you measure your hopes. The dreams of love, of romantic adventure, of placid joy, have all gone out with the fantastic images to which your passionate youth had joined them. The world is now regarded as a tournament, where the gladiatorship of life is to be exhibited at your best endeavor. Its honors and joys lie in a brilliant pennon and a plaudit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”