In the world of dreams all are equal. It is an unreal world, true, but to many it is the happiest. In it there are no distinctions. The woman who is old and wrinkled and gray, who has known nothing but hard work and sorrow in this world, in the land of dreams finds pleasure she has never known. In spirit, she is in pleasant places, carried back perhaps to scenes she loved in childhood, to the old home; sees pleasant faces of the almost forgotten dead, is carried above and beyond the world of reality into the dim shadowy land of dreams. Then comes the waking, and with the waking the regret of what "might have been."
In this land of dreams the rich may travel with the poor, may revisit the same old scenes, see the same faces of the dead, leave all that is "earth earthy," and the spirit or soul wander abroad, over land and seas and in dreams kneel again at a mother's knee repeating the prayer she taught and which has long since been forgotten, to awake with regret to the cares which riches bring.
There is one more journey which the rich and the poor take together and that is down and through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
It is a curious study to watch the faces one meets in a large city or town. Every face has a history, every life a story, if we but take the trouble to read. The face is but an index of the heart, and even in the heart of the happiest the "muffled drums are beating."
As Longfellow so beautifully expresses it in "Hyperion" "and then mark! how amid the chorus of a hundred voices and a hundred instruments—of flutes and drums, and trumpets—this unreal shout and whirlwind of the vexed air, you can so clearly distinguish the melancholy vibration of a single string touched by the finger—a mournful sobbing sound. Ah this is indeed human life! where in the rushing noisy crowd, and sounds of gladness, and a thousand mingling emotions, distinctly audible to the ear of thought, are the pulsations of some melancholy string of the heart, touched by an invisible hand."
An Optimist, a pleasant, sweet faced woman, with a voice like the chime of silver bells, is saying:
"It is only to morbid and diseased minds that existence looks colorless. People who live too much within themselves, whose imagination becomes disordered see only the dark side of life. It was not intended that life should be all sunshine and no shadow."
"For life is one, and in its warp and woof,
There runs a thread of gold that glitters fair,
And sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet