Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart

by Donald Grant Mitchell

—Tears indeed; but they are tears of thanksgiving, of resignation, and of hope!

And the eyes, full of those tears which ministering angels bestow, climb with quick vision upon the angelic ladder, and open upon the futurity where she has entered, and upon the country which she enjoys.

It is midnight, and the sounds of life are dead.

You are in the death chamber of life; but you are also in the death chamber of care. The world seems sliding backward; and hope and you are sliding forward. The clouds, the agonies, the vain expectancies, the braggart noise, and fears, now vanish behind the curtain of the past, and of the night. They roll from your soul like a load.

In the dimness of what seems the ending present, you reach out your prayerful hands toward that boundless future, where God’s eye lifts over the horizon, like sunrise on the ocean. Do you recognize it as an earnest of something better? Aye, if the heart has been pure and steady—burning like my fire—it has learned it without seeming to learn. Faith has grown upon it, as the blossom grows upon the bud, or the flower upon the slow-lifting stalk.

Cares can not come into the dreamland where I live. They sink with the dying street noise, and vanish with the embers of my fire. Even ambition, with its hot and shifting flame, is all gone out. The heart in the dimness of the fading fire-glow is all itself. The memory of what good things have come over it in the troubled youthlife, bear it up; and hope and faith bear it on. There is no extravagant pulse-glow; there is no mad fever of the brain; but only the soul, forgetting—for once—all, save its destinies and its capacities for good. And it mounts higher and higher on these wings of thought; and hope burns stronger and stronger out of the ashes of decaying life, until the sharp edge of the grave seems but a foot-scraper at the wicket of Elysium!

But what is paper; and what are words? Vain things! The soul leaves them behind; the pen staggers like a starveling cripple; and your heart is leaving it, a whole length of the life-course behind. The soul’s mortal longings—its poor baffled hopes, are dim now in the light of those infinite longings, which spread over it soft and holy as daydawn. Eternity has stretched a corner of its mantle toward you, and the breath of its waving fringe is like a gale of Araby.

A little rumbling, and a last plunge of the cinders within my grate, startled me, and dragged back my fancy from my flower chase, beyond the Phlegethon, to the white ashes that were now thick all over the darkened coals.

—And this—mused I—is only a bachelor-dream about a pure and loving heart! And to-morrow comes cankerous life again—is it wished for? Or if not wished for, is the not wishing wicked?

Will dreams satisfy, reach high as they can? Are we not, after all, poor groveling mortals, tied to earth, and to each other; are there not sympathies, and hopes, and affections which can only find their issue and blessing in fellow absorption? Does not the heart, steady and pure, as it may be, and mounting on soul flights often as it dare, want a human sympathy, perfectly indulged, to make it healthful? Is there not a fount of love for this world as there is a fount of love for the other? Is there not a certain store of tenderness cooped in this heart, which must, and will be lavished, before the end comes? Does it not plead with the judgment, and make issue with prudence, year after year? Does it not dog your steps all through your social pilgrimage, setting up its claims in forms fresh and odorous as new-blown heath bells, saying—come away from the heartless, the factitious, the vain, and measure your heart not by its constraints, but by its fullness, and by its depth! Let it run, and be joyous!