[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by George Payne Rainsford James, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the District of Massachusetts.]
(Continued from page 147.)
A YOUNG DREAM.
Memory is certainly a very strange gift, or quality of the mind—or whatever else it may be rightly termed; for I am no philosopher, and but little acquainted with the technology of metaphysics. It seems often a capricious faculty, selecting its own objects, and amusing itself with them to the rejection of others. But I am not quite sure that this imputation upon memory is justified. I must admit that with myself, as I suppose is the case with others, when I try to recall the past, the lady often proves restive with me, and without any apparent cause, recalls all the particulars of certain scenes, and omits other passages of life close by them. Nor is this to be attributed always to the particular interest of the scenes she recalls; for some of them are quite unimportant, light, and even ludicrous, while things affecting one’s whole destiny, if not utterly forgotten, are brought back but indistinctly. I suspect, however, that the fact is, memory is like a sentinel who will not let any one enter the treasury she guards without the countersign, even though it be the master of the treasure himself.
The objects and events that we remember best are, in fact, those for which we have learned the countersign by heart, and the moment that any accidental circumstance furnishes us with the pass-word, apparently forgotten, the door is thrown open, and we behold them again, somewhat dusty perhaps, but plain and distinct. Acts never die. They at least are immortal; and I do not think they ever die to memory either. They sleep within, and it only requires to have the key to waken them. The time will come when all shall be awakened: when every door of the heart shall be thrown open, and when the spirits of man’s deeds and thoughts will stand revealed to his own eyes at least—perhaps to be his bright companions in everlasting joy—perhaps his tormentors in the hell which he has dug for himself.
Often, often, as I look back in life, I see a cloud hanging over a particular spot in the prospect, which for days, sometimes for years, will hide all beyond. Then suddenly the lightest trifle—a casual word—a peculiar odor—the carol of a bird—the notes of some old melody, will, as with a charm, dispel that cloud—sometimes dissolving it in rain-drops—sometimes absorbing it in sunshine—and all that it concealed will burst upon the sight in horror or in loveliness. Even while I have been writing these few pages many things have thus been brought back to remembrance by the connection of one event with another, which seemed to have altogether passed away from memory when first I sat down to write. Now what is the next thing I remember; for the rest of our journey, after we left Juliers, has passed away from me?
I find myself on looking back, in a small, neat house, with a garden, and a little fountain in the garden, upon a sandy soil, and with a forest of long needle-leaved fir-trees stretching out to the westward. To the east there is a city of no very great extent, but still a capital, with a range of high hills running in a wavy line behind, and here and there an old ruined castle upon the lower points.
Before the city lies a wide plain, rich and smiling, full of corn-fields and vineyards, with here and there a curious-looking spire or a couple of dome-topped towers marking the place of a village or small town, and beyond the plain, glistening in a long, long wavy line of silver, glides a broad river—the mighty Rhine.
Oh! what sweet sunny lapses come cheering and softening the rapid course of life’s troubled stream. There are several of those green spots of memory, as the poet calls it—these oases in the midst of the desert, even within my own remembrance. But on few, if any of them can my heart rest with as much pleasure as on the months we passed in that little cottage. There were no events—there was no excitement—for me and Mariette, at least. I remember wandering with her about that sunny garden, playing with her in the cool, airy pleasure-house which stood in one corner, helping her to gather flowers to deck her mother’s table, wandering with her through the forest beneath the green shade, with the dry, brown filaments of the fir crackling under our young feet. Here and there we would come to a place where oaks and beeches mingled with the pine and a thick growth of underwood narrowed our path; but as compensation, we were there sure to find a rich treasure of wild-flowers, more beautiful in our eyes than all the garden bestowed. Very often, too, in the clear May evenings we would sit under the little shabby porch of the house—Mariette upon my knee, with her arms clasped round my neck—and as the sky grew gray, and the stars began to peer and glimmer up above, would listen to the notes of the nightingale as he prolonged his song after all the forest choir had fallen into silence; and when some of those peculiar notes were coming which we love the best to hear, and Mariette knew that the delicious cadence was nigh at hand, she would raise her beautiful liquid eyes to my face, and whisper “hark” and gaze at me still as if to share my enjoyment, and to make me share hers.
Oh! how that child twined herself round my boy’s heart. Dear, dear, dear Mariette. In all that I have seen in life, and strange and varied has that life been, I have never seen any thing that I loved as much as you. The first freshness of my thoughts—the first—the tenderest—the purest of my affections, were all yours!