the white robe of the dear child-all pale-coldsilent

I had touched my Aunt Tabithy: she had dropped a stitch in her knitting. I believe she was weeping.

-Aye, this brain of ours is a master-worker, whose appliances we do not one half know; and this heart of ours is a rare storehouse, furnishing the brain with new material every hour of our lives; and their limits we shall not know, until they shall end-together.

Nor is there, as many faint-hearts imagine, but one phase of earnestness in our life of feeling. One train of deep emotion cannot fill up the heart it radiates like a star, God-ward and earth-ward. It spends and reflects all ways. Its force is to be reckoned not so much by token, as by capacity. Facts are the poorest and most slumberous evidences of passion, or of affection. True feeling is ranging everywhere; whereas your actual attachments are too apt to be tied

to sense.

A single affection may indeed be true, earnest and absorbing; but such an one after all, is but a type— and if the object be worthy, a glorious type-of the great book of feeling it is only the vapor from the cauldron of the heart, and bears no deeper relation to its exhaustless sources, than the letter which my pen makes, bears to the thought that inspires it,—or than a single morning strain of your orioles and thrushes, bears

to that wide bird-chorus, which is making every sunrise-a worship, and every grove-a temple!

My Aunt Tabithy nodded.

Nor is this a mere bachelor fling against constancy. I can believe, Heaven knows, in an unalterable and unflinching affection, which neither desires nor admits. the prospect of any other. But when one is tasking his brain to talk for his heart,-when he is not writing positive history, but only making mention (as it were) of the heart's capacities, who shall say that he has reached the fullness,-that he has exhausted the stock of its feeling, or that he has touched its highest notes? It is true there is but one heart in a man to be stirred; but every stir creates a new combination of feeling, that like the turn of a kaleidoscope will show some fresh color, or form.

A bachelor to be sure has a marvellous advantage in this; and with the tenderest influences once anchored in the bay of marriage, there is little disposition to scud off under each pleasant breeze of feeling. Nay, I can even imagine-perhaps somewhat captiously-that after marriage, feeling would become a habit, a rich and holy habit certainly, but yet a habit, which weakens the omnivorous grasp of the affections, and schools one to a unity of emotion, that doubts and ignores the promptness and variety of impulse, which we bachelors

possess.

My aunt nodded again.

Could it be that she approved what I had been saying? I hardly knew.

Poor old lady, she did not know herself. She was asleep!

II.

WITH MY READER.

AVING silenced my Aunt Tabithy, I shall be

HA

generous enough in my triumph, to offer an explanatory chat to my reader.

This is a history of Dreams; and there will be those who will sneer at such a history, as the work of a dreamer. So indeed it is; and you, my courteous reader, are a dreamer too!

You would perhaps like to find your speculations about wealth, marriage or influence, called by some better name than Dreams. You would like to see the history of them-if written at all-baptized at the font of your own vanity, with some such title as-life's cares, or life's work. If there had been a philosophic naming to my observations, you might have reckoned

them good as it is, you count them all bald and palpable fiction.

But is it so I care not how matter of fact you may be, you have in your own life, at some time, proved the very truth of what I have set down: and the chances are, that even now, gray as you may be, and economic as you may be, and devotional as you pretend to be, you light up your Sabbath reflections with just such dreams of wealth, of per centages, or of family, as you will find scattered over these pages.

I am not to be put aside with any talk about stocks, and duties, and respectability: all these though very eminent matters, are but so many types in the volume of your thought; and your eager resolves about them, are but so many ambitious waves, breaking up from that great sea of dreamy speculation, that has spread over your soul, from its first start into the realm of CONSCIOUSNESS.

No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams. Each little episode of life is full, had we but the perception of its fullness. There is no such thing as blank, in the world of thought. Every action and emotion have their development growing and gaining on the soul. Every affection has its tears and smiles. Nay, the very material world is full of meaning, and by suggesting