Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848

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Various. Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848

CLARA HARLAND

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN MUSE

THERESA, OR GENIUS AND WOMANHOOD

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

SONNETS

PHANTASMAGORIA

THE OAK-TREE

PAULINE GREY. OR THE ONLY DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

SONNET. – TO A MINIATURE

WHORTLEBERRYING

STANZAS

EURYDICE

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT WIND

MAJOR-GENERAL WORTH

ENCOURAGEMENT

THE CHANGED AND THE UNCHANGED

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

THE DAYSPRING

SONNET. – CULTIVATION

FIRST LOVE. OR LILLIE MASON'S DEBUT

MIDNIGHT

A VISION

THE NEW ENGLAND FACTORY GIRL. A SKETCH OF EVERYDAY LIFE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

REVOLUTION

FAIR MARGARET

STANZAS

THE LONE BUFFALO

THE ADOPTED CHILD

WHEN SHALL I SEE THE OBJECT THAT I LOVE. A FAVORITE SWISS AIR

REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS

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I am no visionary – no dreamer; and yet my life has been a ceaseless struggle between the realities of everyday care, and a myriad of shadowy phantoms which ever haunt me. In the crowded and thronged city; in the green walks and sunny forests of my native hills; on the broad and boundless prairie, carpeted with velvet flowers; on the blue and dreamy sea – it is the same. I look around, and perceive men and women moving mechanically about me; I even take part in their proceedings, and seem to float along the tardy current upon which they swim, and become a part – an insignificant portion – of the dull and stagnant scene; and yet, often and often, in the busiest moment, when commonplace has its strongest hold upon me, and I feel actually interested in the ordinary pursuits of my fellow-beings, of a sudden, a great curtain seems to fall around, and enclose me on every side; and, instead of the staid and sober visages of the throng, vague and shadowy faces gleam around me, and magnificent eyes, bright and dreamy, glance and flash before me like the figures on a phantasmagoria. In such moments, there comes over me a happy consciousness that this is the reality and all else a dull and painful dream, from which I have escaped as by a great effort. The dreamy faces are familiar to me, and their large, spiritual eyes encounter mine with glances of pleasant recognition. My heart is glad within me that it has found again its friends and old companions, and the mental outline of the common world, faintly drawn by memory, becomes more and more dim and indistinct, like the surface of the earth to one who soars upward in a balloon, and is at length blended with the gray shadows of forgotten thought, which disturb me no more. But anon some rude and jarring discord, from the world below, pierces upward to my ear, and the air becomes suddenly dark and dreary, and dusty, and I fall heavily to earth again.

As years steal by, these fits of delightful abstraction become rarer and rarer. My visions seem to have lost their substantiality; and even when they do revisit me, they are thin and transparent, and no longer hide the real world from my sight – yet they hold strange power over me; and when they come upon my soul, although they do not all conceal the real, yet they concentrate upon some casual object there, and impart to it a spirituality of aspect and quality which straightway embalms it in my heart. Thus do I invest the faces of friends with a holiness and fervor of devotion which belongs not to them; and when I have wreaked the treasures of my soul upon objects thus elevated above their real quality, I find what a false vision I have been worshiping – its higher qualities mingle again with my own thoughts, whence they emanated, and the real object stands before me, low, dull, and insipid as the thousands of similar ones by which it is surrounded. Thus do I, enamored of qualities and perfections which exist only in my own thought, continually cheat and delude myself into the belief that a congenial spirit has been found, when some trivial incident breaks the spell – the charms I loved glide back to my own soul, and the charmer, unconscious of change in himself, wonders what has wrought so sudden an alteration in me. Then come heart-burnings and self-reproaches against those I have foolishly loved, of treachery, hypocrisy, and ingratitude, which they cannot understand, and over which I mourn and weep.

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For three days Medwin waited in an agony of impatience to hear from St. Maur, but not a word came – and he began to despair. Everywhere he went he was regarded with significant glances, and pointed at, while a disdainful whisper ran round the room, in which he could always distinguish the words, "white-livered Yankee," "coward," or some equally obnoxious epithet. He saw the cruel game that was playing against him. He had forgotten that, in refusing to fight with Allington, he had rendered it perfectly safe for every whipster in the community to insult him; and he now became suddenly aware that he had involved himself in a dilemma from which it was impossible for him to escape.

In the midst of these reflections – while life had become intolerable, and infamy and disgrace dogged his steps like a shadow – he never entertained a doubt of Clara's love and constancy, and looked forward to the time when he might claim her as his bride, and, amid the milder and manlier associations of his youth, regain that calmness and self-respect which he had here so strangely lost. His position was, in truth, a most wretched one. Opposed to the barbarous practice of dueling, circumstances and his own loss of self-control had forced him to accept a challenge, and then recall that acceptance, and to offer an insult to a stranger, for the express purpose of drawing out another.

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