Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 100.djvu/90

76 forget the personality?" Life, by his estimate, being, after all, but a bundle of hints, each suggesting actual and positive development, but rarely reaching it, he holds himself to be as truly dealing with life when recalling these hints, and tracing them in fancy to their issues, as if his life had dealt them all to him. Hence, in this volume of "Dream-Life" his purpose is, to catch up here and there the "shreds of feeling which the brambles and roughnesses of the world have left tangling" on his heart, and weave them into shapely and harmonious tissue. If there are not enough elements of truth, honesty, and nature in his pictures, to make them believed, he repudiates the notion of swearing to their credibility, declaring it a shabby truth that wants an author's affidavit to make it trustworthy.

The dream-life of Spring, or Boyhood, takes us to school—where sketches are drawn that show, more definitely than need be, the sketcher's acquaintanceship with the manner of Dickens, to whom and to Washington Irving this volume owes not a little of its "inspiration." Boy Sentiment is illustrated—and Boy Religion, disturbed by an ineradicable dislike of long sermons, and a hopeless incapacity to get the force of that verse of Dr. Watts' which likens heaven to a never-ending Sabbath, or indeed to long much for heaven if it is to be full of certain potent, grave, and reverend seniors such as are the bane of the boy's life below. "There is very much religious teaching, even in so good a country as New England"—and quite possibly Old England has this among the faults, despite all which we love her still—"which is far too harsh, too dry, too cold, for the heart of a boy. Long sermons, doctrinal precepts, and such tediously-worded dogmas as were uttered by those honest, bat hard-spoken men, the Westminster divines, fatigue, and puzzle, and dispirit him." Then we have the boy on a visit to a New England squire (after Geoffrey Crayon's own heart), and at the country church, with its unadmired parson, its precentor (remarkable for clearing his throat by a sonorous ahem, followed by a powerful use of his Sunday bandanna, and imposing manipulations with his tuning-fork), its stout old deacon, the weazen-faced farmer, the dowdy farmers' daughters, and heavy-eyed youngsters that there do congregate.

With Summer open the dreams of Youth. The scene changes to the cloisters of a college—if cloisters must be the word for those "long, ungainly piles of brick and mortar which make the colleges of New England"—as much akin to the grand old structures of what Mr. Thackeray calls Camford and Oxbridge, as a scarlet-bricked Little Bethel baptistery is to Canterbury Cathedral. In such a scene, good it is to find our dreamer satirising the dreams of "first ambition" about Genius—the quotient of crude imaginings, and strong coffee, and whisky-toddy—as though there were a certain faculty of mind, first developed in colleges, which can with impunity despise painstaking, and on the strength of intuitions and instincts can do without means and processes; nor can he be a dreamer and nothing besides, who so enforces the doctrine, that there is no genius in life like the genius of energy and ambition—no rivals, to college or worldly ambition, so formidable as those earnest, determined minds which achieve eminence by persistent application. The chapter on College Romance is pitched in the same key;