My Aunt Tabithy, though an excellent and most notable person, loves occasionally a quiet bit of satire. And when I told her that I was sharpening my pen for a new story of those dreamy fancies, and half-experiences, which lie grouped along the journeying hours of my solitary life, she smiled as if in derision.
It is very idle to get angry with a good-natured old lady: I did better than this: I made her listen to me.
Exhausted, do you say, Aunt Tabithy? Is life then exhausted, is hope gone out, is fancy dead?
No, no, Aunt Tabithy—this life of musing does not exhaust so easily. It is like the springs on the farm-land, that are fed with all the showers and the dews of the year, and that from the narrow fissures of the rock send up streams continually. Dream-land will never be exhausted until we enter on the land of dreams; and until, in “shuffling off this mortal coil,” thought will become fact and all facts will be only thought.
“ISAAC, YOU ARE A SAD FELLOW”
It was warm weather, and my aunt was dozing. “What is this all to be about?” said she, recovering her knitting-needle.
“About love, and toil, and duty, and sorrow,” said I.
My aunt finished the needle she was upon—smoothed the stocking-leg over her knee, and went on to ask me in a very bantering way, if my stock of youthful loves was not nearly exhausted.
A better man than myself—if he had only a fair share of vanity—would have been nettled at this; and I replied somewhat tartly, that I had never professed to write my experiences. Life after all is but a bundle of hints, each suggesting actual and positive development, but rarely reaching it. And as I recall these hints, and in fancy, trace them to their issues, I am as truly dealing with life, as if my life had dealt them all to me.