Jeffersonian Republican. [volume] (Stroudsburg, Pa.) 1840-1853, 1851-11-13
From the Reueries Of a Bachelor.
Evening.
BY TX. MARVEL.

1
The Future is great land:--how The
lights and the shadows throng overit,-
bright and dark, slow and swift
Pride and Ambition built up great cas-
ties on its plans, ns,-great monuments on
the mountains, that reach heavenward,
and dip their top in the blue Eternity.
Then comes an earthquake-the earth
quake of disappointment, of distrust, or
of inaction, and lays them low. Gaping
desolation widensits branches everywhere;
the eye is full of them, and can see moth
ing besides. BY and by, the sun peeps
FORTH now from behind yonder cloud
and teammates the soul.
Fame beckons, sitting highin the heav-
ems; and JOY lends a halo to the vision
A thousand resolves stir your heart, your
hand is hot, and feverish for action; your
brain works madly, and you snatch here,
and you snatch there, in the convulsiye
throeS of your delirium. Perhaps you
see some earnest, CAREFUL plodder, once
far behind you, now toiing slowly but
surely, over the plain of life, until he
seems near to grasping those brilliant
! phantoms which dance along the horizon
of the future; and the sight stirs your
soul to frenzy, and you bound on after
him with madness of fever in your veins
/ But itwas by no such action, that the for
tunate toiler has won his progress. His
hand is steady, his brain is cool; his
/ eye is fixed, and sure.
The Future is great land; a man can
not 90 round it in day; he cannot meas
ure it, with bound; he cannot bind its
harvests into single sheaf. 1t is wider
than the vision, and has no end.
Yet always, day by day, hour by honr,
second by second, the hard Present is ell
bowling us off into that great land of the
Future. Our souls indeed, wander to it,
as to homeland; they run beyond time
and space, beyond planets and suns, be-
yond far-off suns and comets, until like
blind flies, they are lost in the blaze OF
immensity, and can only grope their way
back to our earth, and our time, by the
cunning of insects.
Cut out the Future-even the little Fu-
ture, which is the EVENING of our life,
and what fall into vacuity! Forbid
these earnest forays over the borders of
Now, and on what spoils would the soul
live?
For myself, delight to wander there,
and to weave every day, the passing life,
into the coming life,-so closely that l
may be unconscious of the joining. And
if SO be that | am able, I would make
the whole piece bear fair proportions, and
just fgures,-like those tapestries, on
which nuns work by inches, and finish
with their lives;--or like those grand
frescos, which poet artists have wrought
on the vaults of old cathedrals, gaunt, and
colossal, appearing mere daubs of car
mine and azure, as they lay upon their
backs, working out a hands breadth at a
time, but when complete, showing-sym-
metrical and glorious
But not alone does the soul wander to
those glittering heights where fame sits,
with plumes waving inzephyrs of applause;
there belong to it, other appetites, which
range wide, and constantly over the broad
Future land. We are not merely, wor-
king, intellectual machines, but social
puzzles, whose solution is the work OF
life. Much as hope may lean toward the
Intoxicating JOY of distinction, there is
another leaning in the soul, deeper, and
stronger, toward those pleasures which
the heart pants for, and in whose atmos-
phere, the affections bloom and ripen.
The first may indeed be uppermOst; ii
may be noisiest; it may drown with the
clamor of mid day, the nicer sympathies.
But all our day is not midday; and all
our life is not noise. Silence is as strong
as the soul; and there is no tempest so
wild with blasts, but has a wilder lull~
There lies in the depth of every mans
soul mine of affection, which from time
to time will burn with the seething heat
of volcano, and heave up laya-like mon,
uments, through all the cold strata of hi
commoner nature.
One may hide his warmer feelings
he may paint them dimly;-he may crowt
them out of his sailing chart, where he
only sets down the. harbors for traffic
yet in his secret heart, he will map ou
uron the, great country of the Future
fairy islands of love, and of JOY. There
| he will be sure to wander, when his sou
is lost in those quiet and hallowed hope
which take hold on Heaven.
Love only, unlocks the door upon tina
Futurity, where the isles of the blessed
lie like stars. Affection is the steppinl
stone to God. The heart is our onl
r measure of infnitude, The mind trie