It was in this way that our bargain was struck; my part of it is already stated. On her part, Aunt Tabithy was to allow me, in case of my success, an evening cigar unmolested, upon the front porch, underneath her favorite rose-tree. It was concluded, I say, as I sat; the smoke of my cigar rising gracefully around my Aunt Tabithy’s curls; our right hands joined; my left was holding my cigar, while in hers, was tightly grasped—her broom-stick.
And this reverie, to make the matter short, is what came of the contract.
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I TAKE up a coal with the tongs, and setting the end of my cigar against it, puff—and puff again; but there is no smoke. There is very little hope of lighting from a dead coal—no more hope, thought I, than of kindling one’s heart into flame by contact with a dead heart.
To kindle, there must be warmth and life; and I sat for a moment, thinking—even before I lit my cigar—on the vanity and folly of those poor, purblind fellows, who go on puffing for half a lifetime, against dead coals. It is to be hoped that Heaven, in its mercy, has made their senses so obtuse that they know not when their souls are in a flame, or when they are dead. I can imagine none but the most moderate satisfaction, in continuing to love what has got no ember of love within it. The Italians have a very sensible sort of proverb—_amare, e non essere amato, é tempo perduto_—to love, and not be loved, is time lost.
I take a kind of rude pleasure in flinging down a coal that has no life in it. And it seemed to me—and may Heaven pardon the ill-nature that belongs to the thought—that there would be much of the same kind of satisfaction in dashing from you a lukewarm creature covered over with the yellow ashes of old combustion that, with ever so much attention, and the nearest approach of the lips, never shows signs of fire. May Heaven forgive me again, but I should long to break away, though the marriage bonds held me, and see what liveliness was to be found elsewhere.
I have seen before now a creeping vine try to grow up against a marble wall; it shoots out its tendrils in all directions, seeking for some crevice by which to fasten and to climb—looking now above and now below—twining upon itself—reaching farther up, but, after all, finding no good foothold, and falling away as if in despair. But nature is not unkind; twining things were made to twine. The longing tendrils take new strength in the sunshine, and in the showers, and shoot out toward some hospitable trunk. They fasten easily to the kindly roughness of the bark, and stretch up, dragging after them the vine, which, by and by, from the topmost bough, will nod its blossoms over at the marble wall, that refused it succor, as if it said—stand there in your pride, cold, white wall! we, the tree and I, are kindred, it the helper, and I the helped! and bound fast together, we riot in the sunshine and in gladness.