Dream Life | Page 7

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; and you task your
dreams--as I have copied them here--to build before you the pleasures
of such a renown.
I care not how worldly you may be: there are times when all
distinctions seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you
dream of a coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be
dimmed forever.
Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a
dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.
Yet you call this fiction: you stave off the thoughts in print which come
over you in reverie. You will not admit to the eye what is true to the
heart. Poor weakling, and worldling, you are not strong enough to face
yourself!
You will read perhaps with smiles; you will possibly praise the
ingenuity; you will talk with a lip schooled against the slightest quiver
of some bit of pathos, and say that it is--well done. Yet why is it well
done?--only because it is stolen from your very life and heart. It is good,
because it is so common; ingenious, because it is so honest;
well-conceived, because it is not conceived at all.
There are thousands of mole-eyed people who count all passion in print
a lie,--people who will grow into a rage at trifles, and weep in the dark,
and love in secret, and hope without mention, and cover it all under the
cloak of what they call--propriety. I can see before me now some

gray-haired old gentleman, very money-getting, very correct, very
cleanly, who reads the morning paper with unction, and his Bible with
determination,--who listens to dull sermons with patience, and who
prays with quiet self-applause; and yet there are moments belonging to
his life, when his curdled affections yearn for something that they have
not,--when his avarice oversteps all the commandments,--when his
pride builds castles full of splendor; and yet put this before his eye, and
he reads with the most careless air in the world, and condemns as arrant
fiction, what cannot be proved to the elders.
We do not like to see our emotions unriddled: it is not agreeable to the
proud man to find his weaknesses exposed; it is shocking to the
disappointed lover to see his heart laid bare; it is a great grief to the
pining maiden to witness the exposure of her loves. We do not like our
fancies painted; we do not contrive them for rehearsal: our dreams are
private, and when they are made public, we disown them.
I sometimes think that I must be a very honest fellow for writing down
those fancies,--which every one else seems afraid to whisper. I shall at
least come in for my share of the odium in entertaining such fancies:
indeed I shall expect the charge of entertaining them exclusively, and
shall scarce expect to find a single fellow-confessor, unless it be some
pure and innocent-thoughted girl, who will say peccavi to--here and
there--a single rainbow fancy.
Well, I can bear it; but in bearing it, I shall be consoled with the
reflection that I have a great company of fellow-sufferers, who lack
only the honesty to tell me of their sympathy. It will even relieve in no
small degree my burden to watch the effort they will take to conceal
what I have so boldly divulged.
Nature is very much the same thing in one man that it is in another; and,
as I have already said, Feeling has a higher truth in it than circumstance.
Let it only be touched fairly and honestly, and the heart of humanity
answers; but if it be touched foully or one-sidedly, you may find here
and there a lame-souled creature who will give response, but there is no
heart-throb in it.

Of one thing I am sure:--if my pictures are fair, worthy, and hearty, you
must see it in the reading; but if they are forced and hard, no amount of
kindness can make you feel their truth, as I want them felt.
I make no self-praise out of this: if feeling has been honestly set down,
it is only in virtue of a native impulse, over which I have altogether too
little control, but if it is set down badly, I have wronged Nature, and (as
Nature is kind) I have wronged myself.
A great many inquisitive people will, I do not doubt, be asking, after all
this prelude, if my pictures are true pictures? The question--the
courteous