The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.  The rose-tree which shades his mottled coat is full of buds and blossoms; and each bud and blossom is a token of promise that has issues covering life, and reaching beyond death.  The quiet sunshine beyond the flower and beyond the sparrow,—­glistening upon the leaves, and playing in delicious waves of warmth over the reeking earth,—­is lighting both heart and hope, and quickening into activity a thousand thoughts of what has been and of what will be.  The meadow stretching away under its golden flood,—­waving with grain, and with the feathery blossoms of the grass, and golden buttercups, and white, nodding daisies,—­comes to my eye like the lapse of fading childhood, studded here and there with the bright blossoms of joy, crimsoned all over with the flush of health, and enamelled with memories that perfume the soul.  The blue hills beyond, with deep-blue shadows gathered in their bosom, lie before me like mountains of years, over which I shall climb through shadows to the slope of Age, and go down to the deeper shadows of Death.

Nor are dreams without their variety, whatever your character may be.  I care not how much in the pride of your practical judgment, or in your learned fancies, you may sneer at any dream of love, and reckon it all a poet’s fiction:  there are times when such dreams come over you like a summer-cloud, and almost stifle you with their warmth.

Seek as you will for increase of lands or moneys, and there are moments when a spark of some giant mind will flash over your cravings, and wake your soul suddenly to a quick and yearning sense of that influence which is begotten of intellect; and you task your dreams—­as I have copied them here—­to build before you the pleasures of such a renown.

I care not how worldly you may be:  there are times when all distinctions seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you dream of a coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.  Yet you call this fiction:  you stave off the thoughts in print which come over you in reverie.  You will not admit to the eye what is true to the heart.  Poor weakling, and worldling, you are not strong enough to face yourself!

You will read perhaps with smiles; you will possibly praise the ingenuity; you will talk with a lip schooled against the slightest quiver of some bit of pathos, and say that it is—­well done.  Yet why is it well done?—­only because it is stolen from your very life and heart.  It is good, because it is so common; ingenious, because it is so honest; well-conceived, because it is not conceived at all.