At mid-day the air is mild and soft; a warm, blue smoke lies in the mountain gaps; the tracery of distant woods upon the upland hangs in the haze with a dreamy gorgeousness of coloring. The river runs low with August drought, and frets upon the pebbly bottom with a soft, low murmur, as of joyousness gone by. The hemlocks of the river-bank rise in tapering sheens, and tell tales of Spring.
As the sun sinks, doubling his disk in the October smoke, the low south-wind creeps over the withered tree-tops, and drips the leaves upon the land. The windows, that were wide open at noon, are closed; and a bright blaze—to drive off the easterly dampness that promises a storm—flashes lightly and kindly over the book-shelves and busts upon my wall.
As the sun sinks lower and lower, his red beams die in a sea of great gray clouds. Slowly and quietly they creep up over the night-sky. Venus is shrouded. The western stars blink faintly, then fade in the mounting vapors. The vane points east of south. The constellations in the zenith struggle to be seen, but presently give over, and hide their shining.
By late lamp-light the sky is all gray and dark; the vane has turned two points nearer east. The clouds spit fine rain-drops, that you only feel with your face turned to the heavens. But soon they grow thicker and heavier; and as I sit, watching the blaze, and—dreaming—they patter thick and fast under the driving wind upon the window, like the swift tread of an army of Men!
I.
Pride of Manliness.
And has manhood no dreams? Does the soul wither at that Rubicon which lies between the Gallic country of youth and the Rome of manliness? Does not fancy still love to cheat the heart, and weave gorgeous tissues to hang upon that horizon which lies along the years that are to come? Is happiness so exhausted that no new forms of it lie in the mines of imagination, for busy hopes to drag up to day?
Where then would live the motives to an upward looking of the eye and of the soul; where the beckonings that bid us ever onward?
But these later dreams are not the dreams of fond boyhood, whose eye sees rarely below the surface of things; nor yet the delicious hopes of sparkling-blooded youth: they are dreams of sober trustfulness, of practical results, of hard-wrought world-success, and, maybe, of Love and of Joy.