Chapter VI: A Dream of Darkness 221 (4)

In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart. You turn away from all such with a sigh of conceit, to graze on that lofty but bitter pasturage where no daisies grow. Admiration may be called up by some graceful figure that you see moving under those sweeping elms; and you follow it with an intensity of look that makes you blush, and straightway hide the memory of the blush by summing up some artful sophistry, that resolves your delighted gaze into a weakness, and your contempt into a virtue.

But this cannot last. As the years drop off, a certain pair of eyes beam one day upon you that seem to have been cut out of a page of Greek poetry. They have all its sentiment, its fire, its intellectual reaches: it would be hard to say what they have not. The profile is a Greek profile, and the heavy chestnut hair is plaited in Greek bands. The figure, too, might easily be that of Helen, or of Andromache.

You gaze, ashamed to gaze; and your heart yearns, ashamed of its yearning. It is no young girl who is thus testing you: there is too much pride for that. A ripeness and maturity rest upon her look and figure that completely fill up that ideal which exaggerated fancies have wrought out of the Grecian heaven. The vision steals upon you at all hours,--now rounding its flowing outline to the mellifluous metre of Epic hexameter, and again with its bounding life pulsating with the glorious dashes of tragic verse.

Yet with the exception of stolen glances and secret admiration, you keep aloof. There is no wish to fathom what seems a happy mystery. There lies a content in secret obeisance. Sometimes it shames you, as your mind glows with its fancied dignity; but the heart thrusts in its voice; and, yielding to it, you dream dreams like fond old Boccaccio's upon the olive-shaded slopes of Italy. The tongue even is not trusted with the thoughts that are seething within: they begin and end in the voiceless pulsations of your nature.

After a time--it seems a long time, but it is in truth a very short time--you find who she is who is thus entrancing you. It is done most carelessly. No creature could imagine that you felt any interest in the accomplished sister--of your friend Dalton. Yet it is even she who has thus beguiled you; and she is at least some ten years Dalton's senior, and by even more years--your own!

It is singular enough, but it is true, that the affections of that transition state from youth to manliness run toward the types of maturity. The mind in its reaches toward strength and completeness creates a heart-sympathy--which in its turn craves fulness. There is a vanity too about the first steps of manly education, which is disposed to underrate the innocence and unripened judgment of the other sex. Men see the mistake as they grow older; for the judgment of a woman, in all matters of the affections, ripens by ten years faster than a man's.

In place of any relentings on such score you are set on fire anew. The stories of her accomplishments, and of her grace of conversation, absolutely drive you mad. You watch your occasion for meeting her upon the street. You wonder if she has any conception of your capacity for mental labor, and if she has any adequate idea of your admiration for Greek poetry, and for herself.

You tie your cravat poet-wise, and wear broad collars turned down, wondering how such disposition may affect her. Her figure and step become a kind of moving romance to you, drifting forward and outward into that great land of dreams which you call the world. When you see her walking with others, you pity her, and feel perfectly sure, that, if she had only a hint of that intellectual fervor which in your own mind blazes up at the very thought of her, she would perfectly scorn the stout gentleman who spends his force in tawdry compliments.

A visit to your home wakens ardor by contrast as much as by absence. Madge, so gentle, and now stealing sly looks at you in a way so different from her hoidenish manner of school-days, you regard complacently as a most lovable, fond girl,--the very one for some fond and amiable young man whose soul is not filled, as yours is, with higher things! To Nelly, earnestly listening, you drop only exaggerated hints of the wonderful beauty and dignity of this new being of your fancy. Of her age you scrupulously say nothing.

The trivialities of Dalton amaze you: it is hard to understand how a man within the limit of such influences as Miss Dalton must inevitably exert, can tamely sit down to a rubber of whist, and cigars! There must be a sad lack of congeniality;--it would certainly be a proud thing to supply that lack!

The new feeling, wild and vague as it is,--for as yet you have only most casual acquaintance with Laura Dalton,--invests the whole habit of your study; not quickening overmuch the relish for Dugald Stewart, or the miserable skeleton of college Logic, but spending a sweet charm upon the graces of Rhetoric and the music of Classic Verse. It blends harmoniously with your quickened ambition. There is some last appearance that you have to make upon the college stage, in the presence of the great worthies of the State, and of all the beauties of the town,--Laura chiefest among them. In view of it you feel dismally intellectual. Prodigious faculties are to be brought to the task.

You think of throwing out ideas that will quite startle His Excellency the Governor, and those very distinguished public characters whom the college purveyors vote into their periodic public sittings. You are quite sure of surprising them, and of deeply provoking such scheming, shallow politicians as have never read Wayland's "Treatise," and who venture incautiously within hearing of your remarks. You fancy yourself in advance the victim of a long leader in the next day's paper, and the thoughtful but quiet cause of a great change in the political programme of the State. But crowning and eclipsing all the triumph, are those dark eyes beaming on you from some corner of the church their floods of unconscious praise and tenderness.

Your father and Nelly are there to greet you. He has spoken a few calm, quiet words of encouragement, that make you feel--very wrongfully--that he is a cold man, with no earnestness of feeling. As for Nelly, she clasps your arm with a fondness, and with a pride, that tell at every step her praises and her love.

But even this, true and healthful as it is, fades before a single word of commendation from the new arbitress of your feeling. You have seen Miss Dalton! You have met her on that last evening of your cloistered life in all the elegance of ball-costume; your eye has feasted on her elegant figure, and upon her eye sparkling with the consciousness of beauty. You have talked with Miss Dalton about Byron, about Wordsworth, about Homer. You have quoted poetry to Miss Dalton; you have clasped Miss Dalton's hand!

Her conversation delights you by its piquancy and grace; she is quite ready to meet you (a grave matter of surprise!) upon whatever subject you may suggest. You lapse easily and lovingly into the current of her thought, and blush to find yourself vacantly admiring when she is looking for reply. The regard you feel for her resolves itself into an exquisite mental love, vastly superior, as you think, to any other kind of love. There is no dream of marriage as yet, but only of sitting beside her in the moonlight during a countless succession of hours, and talking of poetry and nature, of destiny and love.

Magnificent Miss Dalton!

----And all the while vaunting youth is almost mindless of the presence of that fond Nelly whose warm sisterly affection measures itself hopefully against the proud associations of your growing years,--and whose deep, loving eye, half suffused with its native tenderness, seems longing to win you back to the old joys of that Home-love, which linger on the distant horizon of your boyhood like the golden glories of a sinking day.

As the night wanes, you wander for a last look toward the dingy walls that have made for you so long a home. The old broken expectancies, the days of glee, the triumphs, the rivalries, the defeats, the friendships, are recalled with a fluttering of the heart that pride cannot wholly subdue. You step upon the chapel-porch in the quiet of the night as you would step on the graves of friends. You pace back and forth in the wan moonlight, dreaming of that dim life which opens wide and long from the morrow. The width and length oppress you: they crush down your struggling self-consciousness like Titans dealing with Pygmies. 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; and they droop their trailing limbs lovingly to the same earth, which has steadily and quietly wrought in them their stature and their strength. Only here and there you catch the loitering footfall of some other benighted dreamer, strolling around the vast quadrangle of level green, which lies, like a prairie-child, under the edging shadows of the town. The lights glimmer one by one; and one by one, like breaking hopes, they fade away from the houses. The full-risen moon, that dapples the ground beneath the trees, touches the tall church-spires with silver, and slants their loftiness--as memory slants grief--in long, dark, tapering lines upon the silvered Green.

IV.

_First Look at the World._

Our Clarence is now fairly afloat upon the swift tide of Youth. The thrall of teachers is ended, and the audacity of self-resolve is begun. It is not a little odd, that, when we have least strength to combat the world, we have the highest confidence in our ability.

Very few individuals in the world possess that happy consciousness of their own prowess which belongs to the newly-graduated collegian. He has most abounding faith in the tricksy panoply that he has wrought out of the metal of his Classics. His Mathematics, he has not a doubt, will solve for him every complexity of life's questions; and his Logic will as certainly untie all Gordian knots, whether in politics or ethics.

He has no idea of defeat; he proposes to take the world by storm; he half wonders that quiet people are not startled by his presence. He brushes with an air of importance about the halls of country hotels; he wears his honor at the public tables; he fancies that the inattentive guests can have little idea that the young gentleman, who so recently delighted the public ear with his dissertation on the "General Tendency of Opinion," is actually among them, and quietly eating from the same dish of beef and of pudding!

Our poor Clarence does not know--Heaven forbid he should!--that he is but little wiser now than when he turned his back upon the old Academy, with its gallipots and broken retorts; and that with the addition of a few Greek roots, a smattering of Latin, and some readiness of speech, he is almost as weak for breasting the strong current of life as when a boy. America is but a poor place for the romantic book-dreamer. The demands of this new, Western life of ours are practical and earnest. Prompt action, and ready tact, are the weapons by which to meet it, and subdue it. The education of the cloister offers at best only a sound starting-point from which to leap into the tide.

The father of Clarence is a cool, matter-of-fact man. He has little sympathy with any of the romantic notions that enthrall a youth of twenty. He has a very humble opinion--much humbler than you think he should have--of your attainments at college. He advises a short period of travel, that by observation you may find out more fully how that world is made up with which you are henceforth to struggle.

Your mother half fears your alienation from the affections of home. Her letters all run over with a tenderness that makes you sigh, and that makes you feel a deep reproach. You may not have been wanting in the more ordinary tokens of affection; you have made your periodic visits; but you blush for the consciousness that fastens on you of neglect at heart. You blush for the lack of that glow of feeling which once fastened to every home-object.

[Does a man indeed outgrow affections as his mind ripens? Do the early and tender sympathies become a part of his intellectual perceptions, to be appreciated and reasoned upon as one reasons about truths of science? Is their vitality necessarily young? Is there the same ripe, joyous burst of the heart at the recollection of later friendships, which belonged to those of boyhood; and are not the later ones more the suggestions of judgment, and less the absolute conditions of the heart's health?]

The letters of your mother, as I said, make you sigh: there is no moment in our lives when we feel less worthy of the love of others, and less worthy of our own respect, than when we receive evidences of kindness which we know we do not merit,--and when souls are laid bare to us, and we have too much indifference to lay bare our own in return.

"Clarence,"--writes that neglected mother,--"you do not know how much you are in our thoughts, and how often you are the burden of my prayers. Oh, Clarence, I could almost wish that you were still a boy,--still running to me for those little favors which I was only too happy to bestow,--still dependent in some degree on your mother's love for happiness.

"Perhaps I do you wrong, Clarence, but it does seem from the changing tone of your letters, that you are becoming more and more forgetful of us all; that you are feeling less need of our advice, and--what I feel far more deeply--less need of our affection. Do not, my son, forget the lessons of home. There will come a time, I feel sure, when you will know that those lessons are good. They may not indeed help you in that intellectual strife which soon will engross you; and they may not have fitted you to shine in what are called the brilliant circles of the world, but they are such, Clarence, as make the heart pure and honest and strong!

"You may think me weak to write you thus, as I would have written to my light-hearted boy years ago; indeed I am not strong, but growing every day more feeble.

"Nelly, your sweet sister, is sitting by me. 'Tell Clarence,' she says, 'to come home soon.' You know, my son, what hearty welcome will greet you; and that, whether here or away, our love and prayers will be with you always; and may God in his infinite mercy keep you from all harm!"

A tear or two--brushed away as soon as they come--is all that youth gives to embalm such treasure of love! A gay laugh, or the challenge of some companion of a day, will sweep away into the night the earnest, regretful, yet happy dreams that rise like incense from the pages of such hallowed affection.

The brusque world too is to be met, with all its hurry and promptitude. Manhood, in our swift American world, is measured too much by forgetfulness of all the sweet bonds which tie the heart to the home of its first attachments. We deaden the glow that nature has kindled, lest it may lighten our hearts into an enchanting flame of weakness. We have not learned to make that flame the beacon of our purposes and the warmer of our strength. We are men too early.

But an experience is approaching Clarence, that will drive his heart home for shelter, like a wounded bird!

----It is an autumn morning, with such crimson glories to kindle it as lie along the twin ranges of mountain that guard the Hudson. The white frosts shine like changing silk in the fields of late-growing clover; the river-mists curl, and idle along the bosom of the water, and creep up the hill-sides, and at noon float their feathery vapors aloft in clouds; the crimson trees blaze in the side valleys, and blend their vermilion tints under the fairy hands of our American frost-painters with the dark blood of the ash-trees and the orange-tinted oaks. Blue and bright under the clear Fall heaven, the broad river shines before the surging prow of the boat like a shield of steel.

The bracing air lights up rich dreams of life. Your fancy peoples the valleys and the hill-tops with its creations; and your hope lends some crowning beauty of the landscape to your dreamy future. The vision of your last college year is not gone. That figure, whose elegance your eyes then feasted on, still floats before you; and the memory of the last talk with Laura is as vivid as if it were only yesterday that you listened. Indeed this opening campaign of travel--although you are half ashamed to confess it to yourself--is guided by the thought of her.

Dalton with a party of friends, his sister among them, is journeying to the north. A hope of meeting them--scarce acknowledged as an intention--spurs you on. The eye rests dreamily and vaguely on the beauties that appear at every turn: they are beauties that charm you, and charm you the more by an indefinable association with that fairy object that floats before you, half unknown, and wholly unclaimed. The quiet towns with their noonday stillness, the out-lying mansions with their stately splendor, the bustling cities with their mocking din, and the long reaches of silent and wooded shore, chime with their several beauties to your heart, in keeping with the master-key that was touched long weeks before.

The cool, honest advices of the father drift across your memory in shadowy forms, as you wander through the streets of the first northern cities; and all the need for observation, and the incentives to purpose, which your ambitious designs would once have quickened, fade dismally when you find that _she_ is not there. All the lax gayety of Saratoga palls on the appetite; even the magnificent shores of Lake George, though stirring your spirit to an insensible wonder and love, do not cheat you into a trance that lingers. In vain the sun blazons every isle, and lights every shaded cove, and at evening stretches the Black Mountain in giant slumber on the waters.

Your thought bounds away from the beauty of sky and lake, and fastens upon the ideal which your dreamy humors cherish. The very glow of pursuit heightens your fervor,--a fervor that dims sadly the new-wakened memories of home. The southern gates of Champlain, those fir-draped Trosachs of America, are passed, and you find yourself, upon a golden evening of Canadian autumn, in the quaint old city of Montreal.

Dalton with his party has gone down to Quebec. He is to return within a few days on his way to Niagara. There is a letter from Nelly awaiting you. It says:--"Mother is much more feeble: she often speaks of your return in a way that I am sure, if you heard, Clarence, would bring you back to us soon."

There is a struggle in your mind: old affection is weaker than young pride and hope. Moreover, the world is to be faced; the new scenes around you are to be studied. An answer is penned full of kind remembrances, and begging a few days of delay. You wander, wondering, under the quaint old houses, and wishing for the return of Dalton.

He meets you with that happy, careless way of his,--the dangerous way which some men are born to, and which chimes easily to every tone of the world,--a way you wondered at once; a way you admire now; and a way that you will distrust as you come to see more of men. Miss Dalton--(it seems sacrilege to call her Laura)--is the same elegant being that entranced you first.

They urge you to join their party. But there is no need of urging: those eyes, that figure, the whole presence indeed of Miss Dalton, attract you with a power which you can neither explain nor resist. One look of grace enslaves you; and there is a strange pride in the enslavement.

----Is it dream, or is it earnest,--those moonlit walks upon the hills that skirt the city, when you watch the stars, listening to her voice, and feel the pressure of that jewelled hand upon your arm?--when you drain your memory of its whole stock of poetic beauties to lavish upon her ear? 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?

----Poor Clarence! it is his first look at Life!

The Thousand Isles with their leafy beauties lie around your passing boat, like the joys that skirt us, and pass us, on our way through life. The Thousand Isles rise sudden before you, and fringe your yeasty track, and drop away into floating spectres of beauty, of haze, of distance, like those dreams of joy that your passion lends the brain. The low banks of Ontario look sullen by night; and the moon, rising tranquilly over the tops of vast forests that stand in majestic ranks over ten thousand acres of shore-land, drips its silvery sparkles along the rocking waters, and flashes across your foamy wake.

With such attendance, that subdues for the time the dreamy forays of your passion, you draw toward the sound of Niagara; and its distant, vague roar, coming through great aisles of gloomy forest, bears up your spirit, like a child's, into the Highest Presence.

The morning after, you are standing with your party upon the steps of the hotel. A letter is handed to you. Dalton remarks in a quizzical way, that "it shows a lady's hand."

"Aha, a lady!" says Miss Dalton,--and _so_ gayly!

"A sister," I say; for it is Nelly's hand.

"By the by, Clarence," says Dalton, "it was a very pretty sister you gave us a glimpse of at Commencement."

"Ah, you think so;" and there is something in your tone that shows a little indignation at this careless mention of your fond Nelly; and from those lips! It will occur to you again.

A single glance at the letter blanches your cheek. Your heart throbs--throbs harder--throbs tumultuously. You bite your lip, for there are lookers-on. But it will not do. You hurry away; you find your chamber; you close and lock the door, and burst into a flood of tears.

V.

_A Broken Home._

It is Nelly's own fair hand, yet sadly blotted,--blotted with her tears, and blotted with yours.

----"It is all over, dear, dear Clarence! Oh, how I wish you were here to mourn with us! I can hardly now believe that our poor mother is indeed dead."

----Dead!--It is a terrible word! You repeat it with a fresh burst of grief. The letter is crumpled in your hand. Unfold it again, sobbing, and read on.

"For a week she had been failing every day; but on Saturday we thought her very much better. I told her I felt sure she would live to see you again.

"'I shall never see him again, Nelly,' said she, bursting into tears."

----Ah, Clarence, where is your youthful pride, and your strength now?--with only that frail paper to annoy you, crushed in your grasp!

"She sent for father, and taking his hand in hers, told him she was dying. I am glad you did not see his grief. I was kneeling beside her, and she put her hand upon my head, and let it rest there for a moment, while her lips moved as if she were praying.

"'Kiss me, Nelly,' said she, growing fainter: kiss me again for Clarence.'

"A little while after she died."

For a long time you remain with only that letter, and your thought, for company. You pace up and down your chamber: again you seat yourself, and lean your head upon the table, enfeebled by the very grief that you cherish still. The whole day passes thus: you excuse yourself from all companionship: you have not the heart to tell the story of your troubles to Dalton,--least of all, to Miss Dalton. How is this? Is sorrow too selfish, or too holy?

Toward nightfall there is a calmer and stronger feeling. The voice of the present world comes to your ear again. But you move away from it unobserved to that stronger voice of God in the Cataract. Great masses of angry cloud hang over the west; but beneath them the red harvest sun shines over the long reach of Canadian shore, and bathes the whirling rapids in splendor. You stroll alone over the quaking bridge, and under the giant trees of the Island, to the edge of the British Fall. You go out to the little shattered tower, and gaze down, with sensations that will last till death, upon the deep emerald of those awful masses of water.

It is not the place for a bad man to ponder; it is not the atmosphere for foul thoughts, or weak ones. A man is never better than when he has the humblest sense of himself: he is never so unlike the spirit of Evil as when his pride is utterly vanished. You linger, looking upon the stream of fading sunlight that plays across the rapids, and down into the shadow of the depths below, lit up with their clouds of spray;--yet farther down, your sight swims upon the black eddying masses, with white ribbons streaming across their glassy surface; and your dizzy eye fastens upon the frail cockle-shells--their stout oarsmen dwindled to pygmies--that dance like atoms upon the vast chasm, or like your own weak resolves upon the whirl of Time.

Your thought, growing broad in the view, seems to cover the whole area of life: you set up your affections and your duties; you build hopes with fairy scenery, and away they all go, tossing like the relentless waters to the deep gulf that gapes a hideous welcome! You sigh at your weakness of heart, or of endeavor, and your sighs float out into the breeze, that rises ever from the shock of the waves, and whirl, empty-handed, to Heaven. You avow high purposes, and clench them with round utterance; and your voice, like a sparrow's, is caught up in the roar of the fall, and thrown at you from the cliffs, and dies away in the solemn thunders of nature. Great thoughts of life come over you--of its work and destiny--of its affections and duties, and roll down swift--like the river--into the deep whirl of doubt and danger. Other thoughts, grander and stronger, like the continuing rush of waters, come over you, and knit your purposes together with their weight, and crush you to exultant tears, and then leap, shattered and broken, from the very edge of your intent into mists of fear!

The moon comes out, and gleaming through the clouds, braids its light fantastic bow upon the waters. 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. Her smile of parting is very gracious, but it is not, after all, such a smile as your warm heart pines for.

Ten days after, you are walking toward the old homestead with such feelings as it never called up before. In the days of boyhood there were triumphant thoughts of the gladness and the pride with which, when grown to the stature of manhood, you would come back to that little town of your birth. As you have bent with your dreamy resolutions over the tasks of the cloister life, swift thoughts have flocked on you of the proud step, and prouder heart, with which you would one day greet the old acquaintances of boyhood; and you have regaled yourself on the jaunty manner with which you would meet old Dr. Bidlow, and the patronizing air with which you would address the pretty, blue-eyed Madge.

It is late afternoon when you come in sight of the tall sycamores that shade your home; you shudder now, lest you may meet any whom you once knew. The first keen grief of youth seeks little of the sympathy of companions: it lies--with a sensitive man--bounded within the narrowest circles of the heart. They only who hold the key to its innermost recesses can speak consolation. Years will make a change;--as the Summer grows in fierce heats, the balminess of the violet banks of Spring is lost in the odors of a thousand flowers;--the heart, as it gains in age, loses freshness, but wins breadth.

----Throw a pebble into the brook at its source, and the agitation is terrible, and the ripples chafe madly their narrowed banks;--throw in a pebble when the brook has become a river, and you see a few circles, widening and widening and widening, until they are lost in the gentle every-day murmur of its life!

You draw your hat over your eyes, as you walk toward the familiar door: the yard is silent; the night is falling gloomily; a few katydids are crying in the trees. The mother's window, where at such a season as this it was her custom to sit watching your play, is shut, and the blinds are closed over it. The honeysuckle, which grew over the window, and which she loved so much, has flung out its branches carelessly; and the spiders have hung their foul nets upon its tendrils.

And she, who made that home so dear to your boyhood, so real to your after-years,--standing amid all the flights of your youthful ambition, and your paltry cares (for they seem paltry now), and your doubts, and anxieties and weaknesses of heart, like the light of your hope--burning ever there under the shadow of the sycamores,--a holy beacon, by whose guidance you always came to a sweet haven, and to a refuge from all your toils,--is gone, gone forever!

The father is there indeed,--beloved, respected, esteemed; but the boyish heart, whose old life is now reviving, leans more readily and more kindly into that void where once beat the heart of a mother.

Nelly is there,--cherished now with all the added love that is stricken off from her who has left you forever. Nelly meets you at the door.

----"Clarence!"

----"Nelly!"

There are no other words; but you feel her tears as the kiss of welcome is given. With your hand joined in hers, you walk down the hall into the old, familiar room,--not with the jaunty college step,--not with any presumption on your dawning manhood,--oh, no,--nothing of this!

Quietly, meekly, feeling your whole heart shattered, and your mind feeble as a boy's, and your purposes nothing, and worse than nothing,--with only one proud feeling you fling your arm around the form of that gentle sister,--the pride of a protector,--the feeling--"_I_ will care for you now, dear Nelly!"--that is all. And even that, proud as it is, brings weakness.

You sit down together upon the lounge; Nelly buries her face in her hands, sobbing.

"Dear Nelly!" and your arm clasps her more fondly.

There is a cricket in the corner of the room, chirping very loudly. It seems as if nothing else were living,--only Nelly, Clarence, and the noisy cricket. Your eye on the chair where she used to sit; it is drawn up with the same care as ever beside the fire.

"I am _so_ glad to see you, Clarence," says Nelly, recovering herself; there is a sweet, sad smile now And sitting there beside you, she tells you of it all,--of the day, and of the hour,--and how she looked,--and of her last prayer, and how happy she was.

"And did she leave no message for me, Nelly?"

"Not to forget us, Clarence; but you could not!"

"Thank you, Nelly. And was there nothing else?"

"Yes, Clarence,--to meet her one day!"

You only press her hand.

Presently your father comes in: he greets you with far more than his usual cordiality. He keeps your hand a long time, looking quietly in your face, as if he were reading traces of some resemblance that had never struck him before.

The father is one of those calm, impassive men, who shows little upon the surface, and whose feelings you have always thought cold. But now there is a tremulousness in his tones that you never remember observing before. He seems conscious of it himself, and forbears talking. He goes to his old seat, and after gazing at you a little while with the same steadfastness as at first, leans forward, and buries his face in his hands.

From that very moment you feel a sympathy and a love for him, that you have never known until then. And in after-years, when suffering or trial come over you, and when your thoughts fly as to a refuge to that shattered home, you will recall that stooping image of the father,--with his head bowed, and from time to time trembling convulsively with grief,--and feel that there remains yet by the household fires a heart of kindred love and of kindred sorrow!

Nelly steals away from you gently, and stepping across the room, lays her hand upon his shoulder with a touch that says, as plainly as words could say it,--"We are here, father!"

And he rouses himself,--passes his arm around her,--looks in her face fondly,--draws her to him, and prints a kiss upon her forehead.

"Nelly, we must love each other now more than ever."

Nelly's lips tremble, but she cannot answer; a tear or two go stealing down her cheek.

You approach them; and your father takes your hand again with a firm grasp,--looks at you thoughtfully,--drops his eyes upon the fire, and for a moment there is a pause;--"We are quite alone now, my boy!"

----It is a Broken Home!

VI.

_Family Confidence._

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. There is a pleasure wholly new to you in telling him of your youthful projects, in listening to his questionings, in seeking his opinions, and in yielding to his judgment.

It is a sad thing for the child, and quite as sad for the parent, when this confidence is unknown. Many and many a time with a bursting heart you have longed to tell him of some boyish grief, or to ask his guidance out of some boyish trouble; but at the first sight of that calm, inflexible face, and at the first sound of his measured words, your enthusiastic yearnings toward his love and his counsels have all turned back upon your eager and sorrowing heart, and you have gone away to hide in secret the tears which the lack of his sympathy has wrung from your soul.

But now over the tomb of her, for whom you weep in common, there is a new light breaking; and your only fear is lest you weary him with what may seem a barren show of your confidence.

Nelly too is nearer now than ever; and with her you have no fears of your extravagance; you listen delightfully there by the evening flame to all that she tells you of the neighbors of your boyhood. You shudder somewhat at her genial praises of the blue-eyed Madge,--a shudder that you can hardly account for, and which you do not seek to explain. It may be that there is a clinging and tender memory yet--wakened by the home atmosphere--of the divided sixpence.

Of your quondam friend, Frank, the pleasant recollection of whom revives again under the old roof-tree, she tells you very little,--and that little in a hesitating and indifferent way that utterly surprises you. Can it be, you think, that there has been some cause of unkindness?

----Clarence is still very young!

The fire glows warmly upon the accustomed hearth-stone, and--save that vacant place never to be filled again--a home cheer reigns even in this time of your mourning. The spirit of the lost parent seems to linger over the remnant of the household; and the Bible upon its stand--the book she loved so well--the book so sadly forgotten--seems still to open on you its promises in her sweet tones, and to call you, as it were, with her angel-voice to the land that she inherits.

And when late night has come, and the household is quiet, you call up in the darkness of your chamber that other night of grief which followed upon the death of Charlie. That was the boy's vision of death; and this is the youthful vision. Yet essentially there is but little difference. Death levels the capacities of the living as it levels the strength of its victims. It is as grand to the man as to the boy, its teachings are as deep for age as for infancy.

You may learn its manner, and estimate its approaches; but when it comes, it comes always with the same awful front that it wore to your boyhood. Reason and Revelation may point to rich issues that unfold from its very darkness; yet all these are no more to your bodily sense, and no more to your enlightened hope, than those foreshadowings of peace which rest like a halo on the spirit of the child as he prays in guileless tones--OUR FATHER, WHO ART IN HEAVEN!

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.

This calm brings a smile in the middle of tears, and an inward looking and leaning toward that Eternal Power which governs and guides us;--with that smile and that leaning, sleep comes like an angelic minister, and fondles your wearied frame and thought into that repose which is the mirror of the Destroyer.

----Poor Clarence, he is like the rest of the world,--whose goodness lies chiefly in the occasional throbs of a better nature, which soon subside, and leave them upon the old level of _desire_.

As you lie between waking and sleeping, you have a fancy of a sound at your door;--it seems to open softly, and the tall figure of your father, wrapped in his dressing-gown, stands over you, and gazes--as he gazed at you before;--his look is very mournful; and he murmurs your mother's name--and sighs--and looks again--and passes out.

At morning you cannot tell if it was real or a dream. Those higher resolves too, which grief and the night made, seem very vague and shadowy. Life with its ambitious and cankerous desires wakes again. You do not feel them at first; the subjugation of holy thoughts and of reaches toward the Infinite, leave their traces on you, and perhaps bewilder you into a half-consciousness of strength. But at the first touch of the grosser elements about you,--on your very first entrance upon those duties which quicken pride or shame, and which are pointing at you from every quarter,--your holy calm, your high-born purpose, your spiritual cleavings, pass away, like the electricity of August storms drawn down by the thousand glittering turrets of a city!

The world is stronger than the night; and the bindings of sense are tenfold stronger than the most exquisite delirium of soul. This makes you feel, or will one day make you feel, that life,--strong life and sound life,--that life which lends approaches to the Infinite, and takes hold on Heaven, is not so much a PROGRESS as it is a RESISTANCE!

There is one special confidence which, in all your talk about plans and purposes, you do not give to your father: you reserve that for the ear of Nelly alone. Why happens it that a father is almost the last confidant that a son makes in any matter deeply affecting the feelings? Is it the fear that a father may regard such matter as boyish? Is it a lingering suspicion of your own childishness; or of that extreme of affection which reduces you to childishness?

Why is it always that a man, of whatever age or condition, forbears to exhibit to those whose respect for his judgment and mental abilities only he seeks, the most earnest qualities of the heart, and those intenser susceptibilities of love which underlie his nature, and which give a color in spite of him to the habit of his life? Why is he so morbidly anxious to keep out of sight any extravagances of affection, when he blurts officiously to the world his extravagances of action and of thought? Can any lover explain me this?

Again, why is a sister the one of all others to whom you first whisper the dawnings of any strong emotion,--as if it were a weakness that her charity alone could cover?

However this may be, you have a long story for Nelly's ear. 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 are quite sure that you would be wretched and miserable without her.

"Do you mean to marry her?" says Nelly.

It is a question that gives a swift bound to the blood of youth. It involves the idea of possession, and of the dependence of the cherished one upon your own arm and strength. But the admiration you entertain seems almost too lofty for this; Nelly's question makes you diffident of reply; and you lose yourself in a new story of those excellencies of speech and of figure which have so charmed you.

Nelly's eye on a sudden becomes full of tears.

----"What is it, Nelly?"

"Our mother, Clarence."

The word and the thought dampen your ardor; the sweet watchfulness and gentle kindness of that parent for an instant make a sad contrast with the showy qualities you have been naming; and the spirit of that mother--called up by Nelly's words--seems to hang over you with an anxious love that subdues all your pride of passion.

But this passes; and now--half believing that Nelly's thoughts have run over the same ground with yours--you turn special pleader for your fancy. You argue for the beauty which you just now affirmed; you do your utmost to win over Nelly to some burst of admiration. Yet there she sits beside you, thoughtfully and half sadly, playing with the frail autumn flowers that grow at her side. What can she be thinking? You ask it by a look.

She smiles,--takes your hand, for she will not let you grow angry,--

"I was thinking, Clarence, whether this Laura Dalton would, after all, make a good wife,--such an one as you would love always?"

VII.

_A Good Wife._

The thought of Nelly suggests new dreams that are little apt to find place in the rhapsodies of a youthful lover. The very epithet of a good wife mates tamely with the romantic fancies of a first passion. It is measuring the ideal by too practical a standard. It sweeps away all the delightful vagueness of a fairy dream of love, and reduces one to a dull and economic estimate of actual qualities. Passion lives above all analysis and estimate, and arrives at its conclusions by intuition.

Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever think it of Corinne? Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever think it of the impassioned Flora? Would it not weaken faith in their romantic passages, if you believed it? What have such vulgar, practical issues to do with that passion which sublimates the faculties, and makes the loving dreamer to live in an ideal sphere where nothing but goodness and brightness can come?

Nelly is to be pitied for entertaining such a thought; and yet Nelly is very good and kind. Her affections are without doubt all centred in the remnant of the shattered home; she has never known any further and deeper love; never once fancied it even--

--Ah, Clarence, you are very young!

And yet there are some things that puzzle you in Nelly. You have found accidentally, in one of her treasured books,--a book that lies almost always on her dressing-table,--a little withered flower with its stem in a slip of paper, and on the paper the initials of--your old friend Frank. You recall, in connection with this, her indisposition to talk of him on the first evening of your return. It seems--you scarce know why--that these are the tokens of something very like a leaning of the heart. It does occur to you that she too may have her little casket of loves; and you try one day very adroitly to take a look into this casket.

----You will learn later in life that the heart of a modest, gentle girl is a very hard matter for even a brother to probe; it is at once the most tender and the most unapproachable of all fastnesses. It admits feeling by armies, with great trains of artillery,--but not a single scout. It is as calm and pure as polar snows; but deep underneath, where no footsteps have gone, and where no eye can reach but one, lies the warm and the throbbing earth.

Make what you will of the slight, quivering blushes, and of the half broken expressions,--more you cannot get. 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. And fearful, thrice fearful is the shock, if these flow out unmet!

That deep, thrilling voice, bearing all the perfume of the womanly soul in its flow, rarely finds utterance; and if uttered vainly,--if called out by tempting devices, and by a trust that is abused,--desolate indeed is the maiden heart, widowed of its chastest thought! The soul shrinks affrighted within itself. Like a tired bird lost at sea, fluttering around what seem friendly boughs, it stoops at length, and finding only cold, slippery spars, with no bloom and no foliage,--its last hope gone,--it sinks to a wild ocean grave!

Nelly--and the thought brings a tear of sympathy to your eye--must have such a heart; it speaks in every shadow of her action. And this very delicacy seems to lend her a charm that would make her a wife to be loved and honored.

Ay, there is something in that maidenly modesty--retiring from you as you advance, retreating timidly from all bold approaches, fearful and yet joyous--which wins upon the iron hardness of a man's nature like a rising flame. To force of action and resolve he opposes force; to strong will he mates his own; pride lights pride; but to the gentleness of the true womanly character he yields with a gush of tenderness that nothing else can call out. He will never be subjugated on his own ground of action and energy; but let him be lured to that border country over which the delicacy and fondness of a womanly nature presides, and his energy yields, his haughty determination faints, he is proud of submission!

And with this thought of modesty and gentleness to illuminate your dream of an ideal wife, you chase the pleasant phantom to that shadowy home--lying far off in the future--of which she is the glory and the crown. I know it is the fashion nowadays with many to look for a woman's excellencies and influence--away from her home; but I know too that a vast many eager and hopeful hearts still cherish the belief that her virtues will range highest and live longest within those sacred walls.

Where, indeed, can the modest and earnest virtue of a woman tell a stronger story of its worth than upon the dawning habit of a child? Where can her grace of character win a higher and a riper effect than upon the action of her household? What mean those noisy declaimers who talk of the feeble influence, and of the crushed faculties, of a woman?

What school of learning, or of moral endeavor, depends more on its teacher, than the home upon the mother? What influence of all the world's professors and teachers tells so strongly on the habit of a man's mind as those gentle droppings from a mother's lips, which, day by day and hour by hour, grow into the enlarging stature of his soul, and live with it forever? They can hardly be mothers who aim at a broader and noisier field; they have forgotten to be daughters; they must needs have lost the hope of being wives!

Be this how it may, the heart of a man with whom affection is not a name, and love a mere passion of the hour, yearns toward the quiet of a home as toward the goal of his earthly joy and hope. And as you fasten there your thought, an indulgent yet dreamy fancy paints the loved image that is to adorn it and to make it sacred.

----She is there to bid you God speed! and an adieu that hangs like music on your ear as you go out to the every-day labor of life. At evening she is there to greet you, as you come back wearied with a day's toil; and her look so full of gladness cheats you of your fatigue; and she steals her arm around you with a soul of welcome that beams like sunshine on her brow, and that fills your eye with tears of a twin gratitude--to her and Heaven!