Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/89

Rh Defiled by Death, untenanted

Of the belovèd lately there—

That 18 a grief too hard to bear!

When a man might, too, if he chose,

Refrain from having ties like those. Faugh! thou Benthamised old widower! Howl on, with thy monotonous, to the pathos of which we, remembering what Alcestis was, and what thou art, are as the deaf adder that will not be charmed, charm thou never so wisely. We are more interested in the rude seaman's "Aye, aye, sir," than in thine. And herewith we crave Ik. Marvel's forbearance for hinting a comparison with one who "riles" us till analogy and good manners are forgotten. And from the "Reveries" pass we on to

"Dream-Life!" Who has not a knowledge of, who has not an open or a sneaking kindness for, that? Who welcomes not, at times, that sleep to his eyes, that slumber to his eyelids, and in sluggard mood indulges himself with yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep? We dream, and are happy again, young again, prosperous again, hopeful, heart-whole, strong.

Ik. Marvel's "Dream-Life" passes successively in review the dreams of fond boyhood, whose eye sees rarely below the surface of things; the delidous hopes of sparkling-blooded youth; manhood's dreams of sober trustfulness, of practical results, of hard-wrought world-success, and perhaps of love and joy; and age's dreams of what is gone, a wide waste, a mingled array of griefs and delights—its dreams, too, of what is to come, of an advent Rest which already hath garnered in the darlings of its heart.

Dream-land, says the author, will never be exhausted until we enter the land of dreams; and until, in "shuffling off this mortal coil," thought will become fact, and all facts will be only thought. And thus he can conceive no mood of mind more in keeping with what is to follow upon the grave, than "those fancies which warp our frail hulks toward ocean of the infinite." And in working up this "fable of the seasons," from the Spring of childhood to the Winter of hoary eld, he is content that the "facts" should be false, if but the "feeling" be real—content, if he can catch the bolder and richer truth of feeling, that the types of it should be all confessed fabrications. "If," he argues, "if I run over some sweet experience of love, must I make good the fact that the loved one lives, and expose her name and qualities to make your sympathies sound? Or shall I not rather be working upon higher and holier ground, if I take the passion for itself, and so weave it into words, that you, and every willing sufferer, may recognise the fervour, and