Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons

by Donald Grant Mitchell

Ambitious forays do not rest where they rested once: hitherto the balance of youth has given you, in all that you have dreamed of accomplishment, a strong vantage against age; hitherto in all your estimates you have been able to multiply them by that access of thought and of strength which manhood would bring to you. Now this is forever ended.

There is a great meaning in that word—manhood. It covers all human growth. It supposes no extensions or increase; it is integral, fixed, perfect,—the whole. There is no getting beyond manhood; it is much to live up to it; but once reached, you are all that a man was made to be in this world.

It is a strong thought—that a man is perfected, so far as strength goes; that he will never be abler to do his work than under the very sun which is now shining on him. There is a seriousness that few call to mind in the reflection that whatever you do in this age of manhood is an unalterable type of your whole bigness. You may qualify particulars of your character by refinements, by special studies, and practice; but, once a man, and there is no more manliness to be lived for!

This thought kindles your soul to new and swifter dreams of ambition than belonged to youth. They were toys; these are weapons. They were fancies; these are motives. The soul begins to struggle with the dust, the sloth, the circumstance, that beleaguer humanity, and to stagger into the van of action.

Perception, whose limits lay along a narrow horizon, now tops that horizon, and spreads, and reaches toward the heaven of the Infinite. The mind feels its birth, and struggles toward the great birth-master. The heart glows; its humanities even yield and crimple under the fierce heat of mental pride. Vows leap upward, and pile rampart upon rampart to scale all the degrees of human power.

Are there not times in every man's life when there flashes on him a feeling—nay, more, an absolute conviction—that this soul is but a spark belonging to some upper fire; and that, by as much as we draw near by effort, by resolve, by intensity of endeavor, to that upper fire, by so much we draw nearer to our home, and mate ourselves with angels? Is there not a ringing desire in many minds to seize hold of what floats above us in the universe of thought, and drag down what shreds we can to scatter to the world? Is it not belonging to greatness to catch lightning from the plains where lightning lives, and curb it for the handling of men?

Resolve is what makes a man manliest;—not puny resolve, not crude determination, not errant purpose, but that strong and indefatigable will which treads down difficulties and danger as a boy treads down the heaving frost-lands of winter,—which kindles his eye and brain with a proud pulse-beat toward the unattainable. Will makes men giants. It made Napoleon an emperor of kings, Bacon a fathomer of nature, Byron a tutor of passion, and the martyrs masters of Death!

In this age of manhood you look back upon the dreams of the years that are past: they glide to the vision in pompous procession; they seem bloated with infancy. They are without sinew or bone. They do not bear the hard touches of the man's hand.

It is not long, to be sure, since the summer of life ended with that broken hope; but the few years that lie between have given long steps upward. The little grief that threw its shadow, and the broken vision that deluded you, have made the passing years long in such feeling as ripens manhood. Nothing lays the brown of autumn upon the green of summer so quick as storms.

There have been changes too in the home scenes; these graft age upon a man. Nelly—your sweet Nelly of childhood, your affectionate sister of youth—has grown out of the old brotherly companionship into the new dignity of a household.