What risks we run! famine and
fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate, - and
yet every man lives till he - dies. How did he manage that? Is
there no immediate danger? We wonder superfluously when we hear
of a somnambulist walking a plank securely, - we have walked a
plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we
are. My life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still
without delay, while I go about the streets, and chaffer with
this man and that to secure it a living. It is as indifferent
and easy meanwhile as a poor man's dog, and making acquaintance
with its kind. It will cut its own channel like a mountain
stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at
last. I have found all things thus far, persons and inanimate
matter, elements and seasons, strangely adapted to my resources.
No matter what imprudent haste in my career; I am permitted to be
rash. Gulfs are bridged in a twinkling, as if some unseen
baggage-train carried pontoons for my convenience, and while from
the heights I scan the tempting but unexplored Pacific Ocean of
Futurity, the ship is being carried over the mountains piecemeal
on the backs of mules and lamas, whose keel shall plough its
waves, and bear me to the Indies. Day would not dawn if it were
not for
THE INWARD MORNING
Packed in my mind lie all the clothes
Which outward nature wears,
And in its fashion's hourly change
It all things else repairs.
In vain I look for change abroad,
And can no difference find,
Till some new ray of peace uncalled
Illumes my inmost mind.
What is it gilds the trees and clouds,
And paints the heavens so gay,
But yonder fast-abiding light
With its unchanging ray?
Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,
Upon a winter's morn,
Where'er his silent beams intrude,
The murky night is gone.
How could the patient pine have known
The morning breeze would come,
Or humble flowers anticipate
The insect's noonday hum, -
Till the new light with morning cheer
From far streamed through the aisles,
And nimbly told the forest trees
For many stretching miles?
I've heard within my inmost soul
Such cheerful morning news,
In the horizon of my mind
Have seen such orient hues,
As in the twilight of the dawn,
When the first birds awake,
Are heard within some silent wood,
Where they the small twigs break,
Or in the eastern skies are seen,
Before the sun appears,
The harbingers of summer heats
Which from afar he bears.
Whole weeks and months of my summer life slide away in thin
volumes like mist and smoke, till at length, some warm morning,
perchance, I see a sheet of mist blown down the brook to the
swamp, and I float as high above the fields with it. I can recall
to mind the stillest summer hours, in which the grasshopper sings
over the mulleins, and there is a valor in that time the bare
memory of which is armor that can laugh at any blow of fortune.
For our lifetime the strains of a harp are heard to swell and die
alternately, and death is but "the pause when the blast is
recollecting itself."
We lay awake a long while, listening to the murmurs of the brook,
in the angle formed by whose bank with the river our tent was
pitched, and there was a sort of human interest in its story,
which ceases not in freshet or in drought the livelong summer,
and the profounder lapse of the river was quite drowned by its
din. But the rill, whose
"Silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring,"
is silenced by the first frosts of winter, while mightier
streams, on whose bottom the sun never shines, clogged with
sunken rocks and the ruins of forests, from whose surface comes
up no murmur, are strangers to the icy fetters which bind fast a
thousand contributary rills.
I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long before.
It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased to give
me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream
ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I
received that compensation which I had never obtained in my
waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after
I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are
deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final
judgment.
We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as
some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one
"Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray."
Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. We are scarcely
less afflicted when we remember some unworthiness in our conduct
in a dream, than if it had been actual, and the intensity of our
grief, which is our atonement, measures the degree by which this
is separated from an actual unworthiness. For in dreams we but
act a part which must have been learned and rehearsed in our
waking hours, and no doubt could discover some waking consent
thereto. If this meanness had not its foundation in us, why are
we grieved at it? In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting
out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others
awake. But an unwavering and commanding virtue would compel even
its most fantastic and faintest dreams to respect its
ever-wakeful authority; as we are accustomed to say carelessly,
we should never have _dreamed_ of such a thing. Our truest life
is when we are in dreams awake.
