Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons

by Donald Grant Mitchell

DREAMS OF YOUTH.

Summer.

I feel a great deal of pity for those honest but misguided people who call their little, spruce suburban towns, or the shaded streets of their inland cities,—the country and I have still more pity for those who reckon a season at the summer resorts—country enjoyment. Nay, my feeling is more violent than pity; and I count it nothing less than blasphemy so to take the name of the country in vain.

I thank Heaven every summer's day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks. And from all the tramp and bustle of the world into which fortune has led me in these latter years of my life, I delight to steal away for days, and for weeks together, and bathe my spirit in the freedom of the old woods; and to grow young again, lying upon the brook-side, and counting the white clouds that sail along the sky softly and tranquilly—even as holy memories go stealing over the vault of life.

I am deeply thankful that I could never find it in my heart so to pervert truth as to call the smart villages with the tricksy shadow of their maple avenues—the Country.

I love these in their way, and can recall pleasant passages of thought, as I have idled through the Sabbath-looking towns, or lounged at the inn-door of some quiet New-England village. But I love far better to leave them behind me, and to dash boldly out to where some out-lying farm-house sits—like a sentinel—under the shelter of wooded hills, or nestles in the lap of a noiseless valley.

In the town, small as it may be, and darkened as it may be with the shadows of trees, you cannot forget—men. Their voice, and strife, and ambition come to your eye in the painted paling, in the swinging signboard of the tavern, and—worst of all—in the trim-printed "Attorney at Law." Even the little milliner's shop, with its meagre show of leghorns, and its string across the window all hung with tabs and with cloth roses, is a sad epitome of the great and conventional life of a city neighborhood.

I like to be rid of them all, as I am rid of them this midsummer's day. I like to steep my soul in a sea of quiet, with nothing floating past me, as I lie moored to my thought, but the perfume of flowers, and soaring birds, and shadows of clouds.

Two days since I was sweltering in the heat of the City, jostled by the thousand eager workers, and panting under the shadow of the walls. But I have stolen away; and for two hours of healthful regrowth into the darling Past I have been lying this blessed summer's morning upon the grassy bank of a stream that babbled me to sleep in boyhood.—Dear old stream, unchanging, unfaltering,—with no harsher notes now than then,—never growing old,—smiling in your silver rustle, and calming yourself in the broad, placid pools,—I love you as I love a friend!

But now that the sun has grown scalding hot, and the waves of heat have come rocking under the shadow of the meadow-oaks, I have sought shelter in a chamber of the old farm-house. The window-blinds are closed; but some of them are sadly shattered, and I have intertwined in them a few branches of the late-blossoming white azalia, so that every puff of the summer air comes to me cooled with fragrance. A dimple or two of the sunlight still steals through my flowery screen, and dances (as the breeze moves the branches) upon the oaken floor of the farm-house.