Page:Dream Life - Mitchell - 1899? Altemus.djvu/20

12 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. Hope and the world are full; and he who drags into book-pages a phase or two of the great life of passion, of endurance, of love, of sorrow, is but wetting a feather, in the sea that breaks ceaselessly along the great shore of the years. Every man's heart is a living drama; every death is a drop-scene; every book only a faint foot-light to throw a little flicker on the stage.

There is no need of wandering widely to catch incident or adventure: they are everywhere about us; each day is a succession of escapes and joys;—not perhaps clear to the world, but brooding in our thought, and living in our brain. From the very first, Angels and Devils are busy with us, and we are struggling against them, and for them.

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:—or it is