here
they have planted no seed. They carry the dreams of youth in among the
realities of the world, and its vanishing visions leave them naked and
discouraged. The light of romance, that glorified all things in the
future, recedes as they advance, and they come upon rugged paths of
fact--upon plain toil and daily care,--upon the market and the field,
and upon men as they are in their weakness, and their selfishness, and
their mutual distrust. Or they belong, it may be, to that class who
are too highly charged with hope; whose sanguine notions never go by
induction, but by leaps; who never calculate the difficulties, but only
see the thing complete and rounded in imagination;--men with plenty
of poetry, and no arithmetic; whose theories work miracles, but whose
attempts are failures. It is pleasant, sometimes, to meet with people
like these, who, clothed in the scantiest garments, and with only a
crust upon their tables, at the least touch of suggestion, mount into a
region of splendor. Their poverty all fades away;--the bare walls,
the tokens of stern want, the dusty world, are all transfigured with
infinite possibilities. Achievement is only a word, and fortune comes in
at a stride. The palace of beauty rises, fruits bloom in waste places,
gold drops from the rocks, and the entire movement of life becomes a
march of jubilee. And they are so certain this time,--the plan they now
have is so sure to succeed! I repeat, it is pleasant, sometimes, to have
intercourse with such men, who throw bloom and marvelousness upon
the actualities of the world, from the reservoirs of their sanguine
invention. At least, it is pleasant to think how this faculty of
unfailing enthusiasm enables them to bear defeat, and to look away from
the cold face of necessity;--to think that, while so many are trudging
after the sounding wheels and the monotonous jar of life, and lying down
by the way to die, these men are marching buoyantly to a tune inside.
And yet this is pleasant only from a hasty point of view. These people
meet with disappointment, of course; and it is sad to think how many
lives have come to absolutely nothing, and are all strewn over, from
boyhood to the grave, with the fragments of splendid schemes. It is sad
to think how all their visionary Balbecs and Palmyras have been reared
in a real desert,--the desert of an existence producing no substantial
thing. And among these vanishing dreams, and on that melancholy waste,
they learn