A bachelor, to be sure, has a marvellous advantage in this; and with the tenderest influences once anchored in the bay of marriage, there is little disposition to scud off under each pleasant breeze of feeling.  Nay, I can even imagine—­perhaps somewhat captiously—­that after marriage, feeling would become a habit, a rich and holy habit certainly, but yet a habit, which weakens the omnivorous grasp of the affections, and schools one to a unity of emotion that doubts and ignores the promptness and variety of impulse which we bachelors possess.

My aunt nodded again.

Could it be that she approved what I had been saying?  I hardly knew.

Poor old lady,—­she did not know herself.  She was asleep!

II.

With my Reader.

Having silenced my Aunt Tabithy, I shall be generous enough, in my triumph, to offer an explanatory chat to my reader.

This is a history of Dreams; and there will be those who will sneer at such a history, as the work of a dreamer.  So indeed it is; and you, my courteous reader, are a dreamer too!

You would perhaps like to find your speculations about wealth, marriage, or influence called by some better name than Dreams.  You would like to see the history of them—­if written at all—­baptized at the font of your own vanity, with some such title as—­life’s cares, or life’s work.  If there had been a philosophic naming to my observations, you might have reckoned them good; as it is, you count them all bald and palpable fiction.

But is it so?  I care not how matter-of-fact you may be, you have in your own life at some time proved the very truth of what I have set down; and the chances are, that even now, gray as you may be, and economic as you may be, and devotional as you pretend to be, you light up your Sabbath reflections with just such dreams of wealth, of per centages, or of family, as you will find scattered over these pages.

I am not to be put aside with any talk about stocks, and duties, and respectability:  all these, though very eminent matters, are but so many types in the volume of your thought; and your eager resolves about them are but so many ambitious waves breaking up from that great sea of dreamy speculation that has spread over your soul from its first start into the realm of Consciousness.

No man’s brain is so dull, and no man’s eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams.  Each little episode of life is full, had we but the perception of its fulness.  There is no such thing as blank in the world of thought.  Every action and emotion have their development growing and gaining on the soul.  Every affection has its tears and smiles.  Nay, the very material world is full of meaning, and by suggesting thought is making us what we are and what we will be.