Donald Grant Mitchell

“ To blaze anew, it is essential that the old fire be utterly gone; and can any truly-lighted soul ever grow cold, except the grave cover it? The poets all say no: Othello, had he lived a thousand years, would not have loved again—nor Desdemona—nor Andromache—nor Medea—nor Ulysses—nor Hamlet. But in the cool wreaths of the pleasant smoke let us see what truth is in the poets.
—What is love—mused I—at the first, but a mere fancy? There is a prettiness that your soul cleaves to, as your eye to a pleasant flower, or your ear to a soft melody. ”

“ In the spring twilight we wander upon those heights which lie between Frascati and Albano, and looking westward, see that glorious view of the Campagna, which can never be forgotten. But beyond the Campagna, and beyond the huge hulk of St. Peter’s, heaving into the sky from the middle waste, we see, or fancy we see, a glimpse of the sea, which stretches out and on to the land we love, better than Rome. And in fancy we build up that home, which shall belong to us on the return—a home that has slumbered long in the future, and which, now that the future has come, lies fairly before me. ”

“ His boyish prattle, his rosy smiles, his artless talk, are lost to us forever!
I will not tell how nor when we found him, nor will I tell of our desolate home, and of her grief—the first crushing grief of her life.
The cottage is still. The servants glide noiseless, as if they might startle the poor little sleeper. The house seems cold—very cold. Yet it is summer weather; and the south breeze plays softly along the meadow and softly over the murderous eddies of the brook.
Then comes the hush of burial. The kind mourners are there; it is easy for them to mourn! ”

“ How it makes you think earth nothing but a spot to dig graves upon!
—It is more: she, she says, will be a sister; and the waving curls as she leans upon your shoulder, touch your cheek, and your wet eyes turn to meet those other eyes—God has sent his angel, surely!
Your mother, alas for it, she is gone! Is there any bitterness to a youth, alone, and homeless, like this!
But you are not homeless; you are not alone; she is there—her tears softening yours, her smile lighting yours, her grief killing yours; and you live again, to assuage that kind sorrow of hers. ”

“ It does not burn so easily, perhaps, as at first: it wants warming before it will catch; but presently it is in a broad, full glow that throws light into the corners of my room.
—Just so—thought I—the love of youth, which succeeds the crackling blaze of boyhood, makes a broader flame, though it may not be so easily kindled. A mere dainty step, or a curling lock, or a soft blue eye are not enough; but in her, who has quickened the new blaze, there is a blending of all these, with a certain sweetness of soul that finds expression in whatever feature or motion you look upon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They may not indeed rise so high as the dizzy pinnacles that ambition loves to rear; but they lie like fragrant islands in a sea whose ripple is a continuous melody.
And as I muse now, looking toward the Evening, which is already begun—tossed as I am with the toils of the past, and bewildered with the vexations of the present, my affections are the architect that build up the future refuge. And, in fancy at least, I will build it boldly—saddened, it may be, by the chance shadows of evening; but through all I will hope for a sunset, when the day ends, glorious with crimson and gold. ”

“ Life is calling for earnestness, and not for regrets. So the months and the years slip by; your bachelor habit grows easy and light with wearing; you have mourned enough to smile at the violent mourning of others, and you have enjoyed enough to sigh over their little eddies of delight. Dark shades and delicious streaks of crimson and gold color lie upon your life. Your heart, with all its weight of ashes, can yet sparkle at the sound of a fairy step, and your face can yet open into a round of joyous smiles that are almost hopes—in the presence of some bright-eyed girl. ”

“ Bella cries; and I shrink out; and am not easy until I have run to bury my head in my mother’s bosom. Alas! pride can not always find such covert! There will be times when it will harass you strangely; when it will peril friendships—will sever old, standing intimacy; and then—no resource but to feed on its own bitterness. Hateful pride!—to be conquered, as a man would conquer an enemy, or it will make whirlpools in the current of your affections—nay, turn the whole tide of the heart into rough, and unaccustomed channels.
But boyhood has its Grief, too, apart from Pride. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ASHES—SIGNIFYING DESOLATION After all, thought I, ashes follow blaze inevitably as death follows life. Misery treads on the heels of joy; anguish rides swift after pleasure.
“Come to me again, Carlo,” said I to my dog; and I patted him fondly once more, but now only by the light of the dying embers.
It is very little pleasure one takes in fondling brute favorites; but it is a pleasure that when it passes, leaves no void. It is only a little alleviating redundance in your solitary heart-life which, if lost, another can be supplied. ”

“ One may hide his warmer feelings—he may paint them dimly—he may crowd them out of his sailing chart, where he only sets down the harbors for traffic; yet in his secret heart he will map out upon the great country of the Future fairy islands of love and of joy. There he will be sure to wander when his soul is lost in those quiet and hallowed hopes which take hold on heaven.
Love, only, unlocks the door upon that futurity where the isles of the blessed lie like stars. Affection is the stepping-stone to God. The heart is our only measure of infinitude. The mind tires with greatness ”

“ That man who can grapple it, and measure it, and fill it with his purpose, is doing a man’s work; none can do more; but there are thousands who do less.
Short as it is, the present is great and strong—as much stronger than the past as fire than ashes, or as death than the grave. The noon sun will quicken vegetable life that in the morning was dead. It is hot and scorching; I feel it now upon my head; but it does not scorch and heat like the bewildering present. There are no oak leaves to interrupt the rays of the burning now. ”

“ Kind hands—none but hers—will smooth the hair upon your brow as the chill grows damp and heavy on it; and her fingers—none but hers—will lie in yours as the wasted flesh stiffens and hardens for the ground. Her tears—you could feel no others, if oceans fell—will warm your drooping features once more to life; once more your eye, lighted in joyous triumph, kindles in her smile, and then—
The fire fell upon the hearth; the blaze gave a last leap—a flicker—then another—caught a little remaining twig—blazed up—wavered—went out. ”

“ Never fear now to let them fall on his forehead, or his lip, lest you waken him! Clasp him—clasp him harder—you can not hurt, you can not waken him! Lay him down, gently or not, it is the same; he is stiff; he is stark and cold.
But courage and patience, faith and hope recovers itself easier, thought I, than these embers will get into blaze again.
But courage, and patience, faith, and hope have their limit. Blessed be the man who escapes such trial as will determine limit!
To a lone man it comes not near; for how can trial take hold where there is nothing by which to try? ”

“ Her color is as rich, her forehead as fair, her smile as sweet as they were before—only a little tinge of sadness floats upon her eye, like the haze upon a summer landscape. I grow bold to look upon her, and timid with looking. We talk of Bella; she speaks in a soft, low voice, and the shade of sadness on her face gathers—as when a summer mist obscures the sun. I talk in monosyllables; I can command no other. And there is a look of sympathy in her eye when I speak thus that binds my soul to her as no smiles could do. What can draw the heart into the fulness of love so quick as sympathy? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Jamie holds a buttercup under Carry’s chin, to find if she loves gold; and Paul, the rogue, teases them by sticking a thistle into sister’s curls.
The pony has hard work to do under Carry’s swift riding—but he is fed by her own hand, with the cold breakfast rolls. The nuts are gathered in time, and stored for long winter evenings, when the fire is burning bright and cheerily—a true, hickory blaze—which sends its waving gleams over eager, smiling faces, and over well-stored book shelves, and portraits of dear, lost ones. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ No cold comfortings of friend-watchers, merely come in to steal a word away from that outer world, which is pulling at their skirts; but, ever the sad, shaded brow of her, whose lightest sorrow for your sake is your greatest grief—if it were not a greater joy.
The blaze was leaping light and high, and the wood falling under the growing heat.
—So, continued I, this heart would be at length itself—striving with everything gross, even now as it clings to grossness. Love would make its strength native and progressive. Earth’s cares would fly. ”

“ Ben has grown almost to manhood; Lilly is living in a distant home; and Isabel is just blooming into that sweet age where womanly dignity waits her beauty; an age that sorely puzzles one who has grown up beside her—making him slow of tongue, but very quick of heart.
As for the rest—let us pass on.
The sea is around me. The last head-lands have gone down under the horizon, like the city steeples, as you lose yourself in the calm of the country, or like the great thoughts of genius, as you slip from the pages of poets into your own quiet reverie. ”

“ The pond is dark and cold; the paths are slippery; the great glacier of the Aar sends down icy breezes, and the echoes ring from rock to rock, as if the ice-god answered. And yet we neither suffer nor fear.
In the sweet valley of Meyringen, we part from Laurence: he goes northward, by Grindenwald, and Thun—thence to journey westward, and to make for the Roman girl a home beyond the ocean. Enrica bids me go on to Rome: she knows that Carry will love its soft warm air, its ruins, its pictures and temples, better than these cold valleys of Switzerland. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”