WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

BY MAUNSELL B. FIELD.

I would that I were dreaming,
Where lovely flowers are gleaming,
And the tall green grass is streaming
O'er the gone—for ever gone.

Motherwell.

The evening glories of a summer sky
Brimming the heart with yearnings to be blest;
The wood-bird's wailing as he soars on high
Winging his weary way to distant nest;
The murmuring billows as they kiss the strand,
Bearing dim memories of stranger land;

The sad mysterious voices of the night,
Bathing the soul in reverie and love;
The low wind, whispering of its former might
To the tall trees that sigh the hills above,
Like angel-tones that roll from sphere to sphere
And dimly echo to the faithful ear;

The flitting shadows glancing o'er the sail
Of some proud ship that's dreaming on the sea;
The lighthouse fires that fitful glow and pale;
The far-off strains of martial minstrelsy;
Wechawken's hoary head o'er hill and dell,
Gloomy and proud, a giant sentinel;

Such the soft charms, thou Paradise of Death!
My languid spirit hath erewhile confest,
When wearied with the city's tainted breath,
Fever'd and faint I've sought thy shades of rest,
Where all combines in heaven, and earth, and sea,
To image life, death, immortality!—

Here where the dusky savage twanged his bow
In the old time at startled doe or fawn,
Raised the shrill war-whoop at the approach of foe,
His wild eye flashing with revenge and scorn;
Here where the Indian maiden told her love
To the soft sighing spirits of the grove.

Here, where the bloody fiend of frantic war
Flapped its red wings o'er hill-top and o'er plain—
Where the sharp musket ring, and cannon roar,
Crashed o'er the valley, thundered o'er the main,
No sound is heard, save the sweet symphony
Of Nature's all-pervading harmony.

Here the pale willow, drooping o'er the wave,
Dips its long tresses in the silvery flood;
Here the blue violet, blooming o'er the grave,
Distils its fragrance to the enamored wood,
While the complaining turtle's mournful woe
Steals on the ear in murmurs soft and low.

Here its cold shaft the polished marble rears;
Here, eloquent of grief, the sculptured urn
Bares its white bosom to the dewy tears,
Dropt pure from heaven, far purer to return!
Here the grim granite's sempeternal pile
In monumental grandeur stands the while.

Where the still stars with gentlest radiance shine
On forest green and flower-enamelled vale,
Two simple columns circled by one vine,
Tell to the traveller's eye the tender tale
Of constancy in life and death—and love,
Not e'en the horrors of the tomb could move.

Here strained, and struggling with the unequal might
Of sea and tempest, the poor foundering bark,
And the snapp'd cable, chiselled on yon height,
Where calmly sleeps the wave-tossed pilot mark;
Hope, with her anchor, pointing to the sky,
Triumphant hails the spirit flight on high!

Hark! how the solemn spirit dirge ascends
In floating cadence on the evening air,
Where with clasped hands the weeping angel bends
In human grief o'er her that's buried there;
The gentle maid, in festive garments hurled
From life's gay glitter to the gloomy world!

Thy childish laughter lingers on mine ear,
Thy fairy form still floats before mine eye;
Still is the music of thy footsteps near,
Visioned to sense by tenderest memory;
Thy soul too pure for purest mortal love,
Enraptured seraphs snatched to realms above!

Here where the sparkling fountain flings its spray
In sportive freedom, frolicksome and wild,
Mocking the wood-nymphs with its gladsome lay,
Serenely sleeps the dark-eyed forest child—
Her kinsman's glory and her nation's pride!
A chieftain's daughter and a warrior's bride!

Oft shall the pale face, pensive o'er thy mound,
Weep for the white man's shame, the red man's wrong;
Oft from spring warblers, o'er this hallowed ground,
Shall gush the tenderest melody of song,
For the poor pilgrim to that distant shore,
Her fathers loved, their sons shall see no more!

Pause, weary wanderer, pause! In yon lone glade
Where silence reigns in deep funereal gloom,
Where the pale moonbeams struggle through the shade,
Open the portals of "The Stranger's Tomb!"
No holier symbol taught since time began
The sacred sympathy of man for man!

Dear Greenwood! when the solemn heights I tread,
And catch the gray old ocean's sullen roar,
Chanting the dirge of the mighty dead,
Over whose graves the oblivious billows pour,
A tearful prayer is gushing from my breast,
"Here in thy peaceful bosom may I rest!—

"Rest till the signal calls the ransomed throng
With shouts their Saviour and their God to greet;
Rest till the harp, the trumpet, and the song
Summon the dead, Death's conqueror to meet;
And love, imperfect, man's best gift below,
In heaven eternal rapture shall bestow!"

AN AUGUST REVERIE.

WRITTEN FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

BY A. OAKLEY HALL.

I have "laid" the tiniest ghost of my professional duties. I shook off city dust twenty hours ago, and my lungs are rejoicing this August morning with the glorious breezes that sweep from the summits of the "Trimountains" of Waywayanda lake—that stretches its ten miles expanse before my freshened vision.

Waywayanda lake?

A Quere. Shall I play geographer to those who are learned in the nomenclature of snobbism? Who allow innkeepers and railroad guides to assassinate Aboriginal terms in order that petty pride may exult in petty fame? No! But if snobbism has a curiosity, I refer it to the first landscape painter of its vicinage: or the nearest fisherman amateur: or the Recorder of New-York: or sportsman Herbert and the pages of his "Warwick Woodlands;" a list of references worthy of the spot.

And as I gaze and breathe I feel as if the waters before me had bubbled from the fountains of rejuvenescence for which Ponce de Leon so enthusiastically searched in the everglades of Florida; and as if, too, I had just emerged from their embraces.

My pocket almanac says that I am living in the dogdays. Perhaps so. But "Sirius" hath no power around these mountains and primeval solitudes. Were the fiercest theological controversialist at my elbow, he would be as cool as an Esquimaux.

I feel at peace with all things. My friend M. says the conscience lieth in the stomach. Perhaps so; and perhaps I owe my quietude of spirit to the influence of as comforting a breakfast as ever blessed the palate of a scientific egg-breaker.

Shall I join forces with the laughing beauties who are handling maces in the billiard room of the inn hard by? Shall I challenge my "Lady Gay Spanker" of last night's acquaintance to a game of bowling? Shall I tempt the unsophisticated pickerel of the lake under the shadow of yonder frowning precipice, with glittering bait? Shall I clamber the mountain side and feast my vision with an almost boundless view—rich expanses of farm land stretching away for miles and miles, and edging themselves in the blue haze of the horizon where the distant Catskill peaks rise solitary in their sublimity?

It is very comfortable here. Is there always poetry in motion? How far distant are the confines of dreamland: that magical kingdom where the tired soul satiates itself in the intoxications of fancy?

I had just carefully deposited upon a velvety tuft of grass Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor." I had arrived at the conclusion that its pages should be part and parcel of the landscape about. Surely there is a unison between them both. There are always certain places where only certain melodies can be sung to the proper harmony of the heart-strings. Who ever learned "Thanatopsis" on the summit of the Catskills, and afterwards forgot a line of it? Now I have seen these same "Reveries" of the said bachelor upon many a centre-table: in the lap of many a town beauty, half cushioned in the velvet of a drawing room sofa: but the latter half of the volume never looked so inviting as it does here just in the middle of one of nature's lexicons. May the page of it never be blurred.

Reveries of a Bachelor!

'Tis a sugared pill of a title. Its morals are sad will o' wisps. And if the definition "that happiness consists in the search after it" be true, it is so when the definition settles itself on the mind of a bachelor. Hath he reveries half so sweet for morsels under the tongues of memory and fancy as those which come nigh to the brain of the married man? As sure as the lesser is always included in the greater: as certain as the maxim de minimis lex non curat: the reveries of the first are but bound up in the reveries of the last; one is a pleasing romance, the other its enchanting sequel.

What is that yonder? There is a merry-faced form in the distant haze, shaking a dreamy negative with his head. A head whose reality is miles and miles away, airing its brow of single blessedness in foreign travel.

Let us argue the point: he smiles as if willing. Man socially is at least a three volumed work: however much longer the James-like pen of destiny may extend him. Volume first—bachelor. Volume second—husband. Volume third—father. There may be a dozen more—there should be none less.

You have been a bachelor: you are a husband and a father. You always had, perhaps, a bump of self-esteem attractive to the digits of Fowler. You never believed half so well of yourself as when one morning at your business you were first asked concerning the well being of your family. At the moment, you were in a fog, like the young attorney upon the first question of his first examination: next, memory rallied and your face brightened; your stature increased as you replied. You felt you were going up in the social numeration table of life. Two years ago you were a unit: you next counted your importance by tens over the parson's shoulder; when your child was born you felt that the leap to hundreds in the scale was far from enough and should have been higher.

Before the publication of your third volume—the father—you had been measurably blind. Your mental sight was afflicted with amaurosis. Like the philosopher of old you are now tempted to grasp every one by the hand and cry "Eureka." How indignantly you take down "Malthus" from your upper library shelf and bury him on the lowest among the books of possible reference. Your political views upon education are cured of their jaundice. You pray of Sundays in the service for the widow and the orphan with a double unction. You walk the streets with a new mantle of comfort. The little beggar child whose importunities of the last wet day at the street crossings excited your petulance, upon the next wet day invites your sympathies. You stop and talk to her, nor perceive until you have ascertained where her hard-hearted parents live, and that she is uncommonly bright for the child of poverty and wretchedness, and that you have a half dollar unappropriated—nor perceive until these are found out, I say, that your umbrella has been dripping upon the skirts of your favorite coat, and that you have stood with one foot in a puddle. How this would have annoyed you years ago. But now—? How unconcernedly of the curious looks from pedestrians around do you stop the careless nurse in Broadway, who has allowed her infant charge to fall asleep in a painful attitude, and lay "it" tenderly and comfortably in position. You recall to mind with much remorse the execrations of five years ago, when the moanings of a dying babe in the next apartment to your own at the hotel disturbed your rest; and you wonder whether the mother still thinks of the little grave and the white slab which a sympathetic fancy now brings up before you.

You are at your business: the lamps are lighting: in the suggestions of profit by an hour or longer at the desk you recognize an unholy temptation. Now, as often before, through all the turmoils of business memory suggests the lines of Willis:

"I sadden when thou smilest to my smile,
Child of my love! I tremble to believe
That o'er the mirror of thine eye of blue
The shadow of my soul must always pass—
That soul which from its conflicts with the world
Comes ever to thy guarded cradle home,
And careless of the staining dust it brings,
Asks for its idol!"

And you dwell on them. You bless the author first, and truly think how cruelly unjust are they who can call into torturing question the loyalty as husband and father of him whose soul could plan and whose pen could write such holy lines. And then you think deeper of the sentiments. And then the profit-tempter hides himself in the farthest corner of the money-drawer; and you begin to think your clerk a very clever manager: and wonder if his remaining will not do as well—poor fellow, he's only a bachelor. And then you decide that he will, and so yourself, "careless of the staining dust" your coming brings, fly to "the guarded cradle home."

You have been in Italy. Or you have studied the pictures in the Louvre. But the hours which you passed before the canvas whereon was embodied Madonna and child never seemed so agreeable in their realization as they now appear in the glass of memory, as you see the child of your love in the arms of your life companion whose eyes, always bright to yours, and brighter still at your coming after absence, grow brightest when they are lifted from the slumbering innocence beneath them. Men call you rough in your bearing, perhaps. What would they say to see how gently your arms receive the sleeping burthen and transfer it softly to its snowy couch? Your step abroad is heavy and impetuous: how noiselessly it falls upon the floor—now! And how the modulated voice accords with every present thought!

You cannot give the child a sweeter sleep by watching over him so intently: and yet you choose to stay. Moments are not so precious to you that at this one household shrine they will become valueless in some most chastened heart-worship! Your infant does not when awake understand the language which your affection addresses: and yet you look with rapture to the future, when the now inquiring eye will become one of understanding; when the cautiously put forth arms will clasp in loving confidence; when the fond endearing name now half intelligibly and doubtingly lisped forth will be uttered in the boldness of love.

The shadowy form in the distant cloud over the lake has been listening intently. It listens still; and the face of it bends towards me as if to say, there's a hidden truth and mysterious sympathy in all you say; and yet the language soundeth strangely in these bachelor ears—

Bachelor ears!

Listless and deaf, as yet, to all the sweeter human music of our nature. Deafer yet to the clarion call of emulation in the race of life and struggles for power, rank, and fame. Deafest of all to that which spurreth on man to be a king of kings among the great men of his race.

You are a father, then, I say; and working in your mental toil by night and day, in the severest and darkest frowning of all professions. But in the crowded senate-room, and in the close committee-chamber; and in the court-room among the multitudes of faces all about, (some of these anticipating in their changing features defeat and disgrace,) there is a something which overrides all agitation: clears the heavy brain, and oils the tongue with every pungency of rhetoric.

What is that "something?"

Were I home and in my library the downturned leaf of the duodecimo biography in the left corner of the first shelf would tell it you at a glance. The biography of Lord Erskine; marked at the page which speaks of his dauntless legal debut in the Sandwich case, when not the necessity of speaking in a crowded court-room from the obscure back benches: when not the sarcastic eyes of a hundred (etiquette-ly termed) brethren; when not the awful presence of Lord Mansfield nor his rebuking interruption at a critical sentence frightened the self-possession of the enthusiastic advocate, or stopped the current of his eloquent invective. The biography, which goes on to tell how, when the speech was ended, all the attorneys in the room flocked around the debutant with retainers—needed, more than all the smiles and congratulations to be drawn from earnest heart-wells: and how the advocate replied—(when some one, timid of the judge, asked how the barrister had the courage to stand the rebuking interruption, and never to quail with embarrassment before it)—I felt my little children tugging at my gown and crying, now is the time, father, to get us bread.

How eloquent!

How worthy of a father's heart! And in the reference, the dullest mind cannot fail to read the "something" which, to every father in a like position, nerves the will, disarms all agitation, clears the heavy brain, and oils the tongue with every pungency of rhetoric.

—The shadowy form turns closer towards me as my reverie yet chains me to the lake side, where the mountain breezes still are freshening all the August air.—

You have a purpose now in life, which, like the messenger of the king, that every morning knocked at his bedroom door to say, "Oh king, remember all this day that you are mortal," hourly brings to mind the bright reward of every toil and every aspiration. Besides a physical frame there is a mental constitution hinging on your own. There's a long life far beyond your own brief years of breath to provide for. Your name is to be perpetuated. In the very evening of your life there is to be a star that is now in its morning of existence, which will cheer and enliven. You feel all this as in some sad hour of the sickly night; you pace your room with the little sufferer wrestling with disease, and you feel that in the future will be found ample rewards for all your present bitter draughts of anxiety.

Wrestling with disease!

The thought is ugly to the mental sight. I pause to brush its cobweb from my August Reverie as an idle vaporish thing. But the shadowy form, in the edge of the distant cloud, over the far off waters of the lake, hisses the words back into my brain. And then it comes nearer. And then the atmosphere grows more dreamy and hazy about. And I half feel the mountain breezes, and half miss them from off my temples. And next I feel my thoughts less concentrate, as the shadowy form I know so well seems to be looking under my half-closed lids, and dwelling on the words I brushed like cob-webs—"wrestling with disease."

And I think of the still chamber, with the blue edge of the bracket, as it is rimmed with the faintest glimmer of the turned-down gas. And I see the half-closed shutters. And the tumbler with its significant spoon on the mantel. And the pale watcher by the ghostly curtains of the bed. And I am bending silently and almost pulseless over the sleeping boy, upon whose face each minute the fever-flushes play like summer lightning under a satin cloud.

And days go by. There is a strange hush in the household, with a horridly sensitive jarring from the vehicles in the street, which never, never were before so noisy, neither have the thronging passengers from the pavements ever gossipped so discordantly, as they go under the windows of the silent house. There's a strange echo of infantile prattle by the niches on the landings of the stairs, and from the couches, and behind the curtains; but the substantive music, whence the conjured-up echo came, is nowhere found. Then the echo itself becomes but an illusion. And Memory is strangely and impassionately chid for its creation.

I pass into a little room scarcely wide enough to wheel a sofa within. It seems as boundless in its desolation as an untenanted temple-ruin. There are mournful spirits in the little atmosphere which sting me to the heart—not to be torn away. The little cotton-dog, and morocco-ball, and jingling-bells, and coral-toys, so strangely scattered all about, are prodigious ruins to the sight. There's a gleeful laugh, a cunning smile, an artless waving of the hands, which should be here as tenants of the room. All gone! all gone into that hushed and silent chamber where yet the patient-watcher is by the snowy curtains; and the sickly blue still edges the rim of the bracket light, and the fever-flushes still play about the wasted cheek.

How long to last? What next to come? And the shadowy form no longer can peep under the all-closed eyelids, but enters its whisperings through the delicate passages of the ear into the brain, which tortures in a maze of bitter conjecture and horrid contemplation. And my reverie becomes a painful nightmare dream.

But the mountain-breezes, and the uprising-to-meridian sun, are merciful. The shadowy form my reverie hinged itself upon is blown away. The open eyes once more glance upon the glassy waters of the lake close by the shore, and onward to the dancing ripples far away. And a merry prattling voice, from out of loving arms, is coming nearer and nearer over the velvety lawn—a voice so full of spirit, and life, and health, and sparkling innocence of care, that in a moment the frightful nightmare-dream is quite forgotten.

More—

My reverie turns itself into a lesson of bright reality; a present study of budding mind; a jealous watch of care encroaching upon innocence; a kindly outpouring of the father's manly heart upon the shrine of his idol.

Could such a reverie better end?