_
Winter 239
I. What is Gone 243
II. What is Left 249
III. Grief and Joy of Age 255
IV. The End of Dreams 261
_INTRODUCTORY._
I.
_With my Aunt Tabithy._
"Pshaw!" said my Aunt Tabithy, "have you not done with dreaming?"
My Aunt Tabithy, though an excellent and most notable person, loves
occasionally a quiet bit of satire. And when I told her that I was
sharpening my pen for a new story of those dreamy fancies and
half-experiences which lie grouped along the journeying hours of my
solitary life, she smiled as if in derision.
----"Ah, Isaac," said she, "all that is exhausted; you have rung so many
changes on your hopes and your dreams, that you have nothing left but to
make them real--if you can."
It is very idle to get angry with a good-natured old lady. I did better
than this,--I made her listen to me.
----Exhausted, do you say, Aunt Tabithy? Is life then exhausted; is
hope gone out; is fancy dead?
No, no. Hope and the world are full; and he who drags into book-pages a
phase or two of the great life of passion, of endurance, of love, of
sorrow, is but wetting a feather in the sea that breaks ceaselessly
along the great shore of the years.
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