Literary ambition may inflame you at certain periods; and a thought of some great names will flash like a spark into the mine of your purposes; you dream till midnight over books; you set up shadows, and chase them down—other shadows, and they fly. Dreaming will never catch them. Nothing makes the “scent lie well,” in the hunt after distinction, but labor.
And it is a glorious thing, when once you are weary of the dissipation, and the ennui of your own aimless thought, to take up some glowing page of an earnest thinker, and read—deep and long, until you feel the metal of his thought tinkling on your brain, and striking out from your flinty lethargy, flashes of ideas, that give the mind light and heat. And away you go, in the chase of what the soul within is creating on the instant, and you wonder at the fecundity of what seemed so barren, and at the ripeness of what seems so crude. The glow of toil wakes you to the consciousness of your real capacities: you feel sure that they have taken a new step toward final development. In such mood it is, that one feels grateful to the musty tomes, which at other hours, stand like curiosity-making mummies, with no warmth, and no vitality. Now they grow into the affections like new-found friends; and gain a hold upon the heart, and light a fire in the brain, that the years and the mould cannot cover, nor quench.
| [11] | From Dream Life, just published by Charles Scribner, New York. |
THE STAR OF DESTINY.
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BY ANNE G. HALE.
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[It is related of Signora Angelica Kauffman, the celebrated Italian, that when a youthful maiden, she was one evening by the bank of her native stream, a short distance from Mount Rosa, near the entrance of a forest, when, charmed with the beauty of the sunset, she fell into a reverie, during which a vision passed before her, which led her to form the resolution—which she patiently kept—of being a painter. She afterward obtained the prize from the Royal Academy at London, England, for her painting of the Weeping Magdalen. See Graham’s Magazine, Vol. XXX.]