Is there no demon that comes to your harsh night-dreams, like a taunting fiend, whispering—be satisfied; keep your heart from running over; bridle those affections; there is nothing worth loving?
Does not some sweet being hover over your spirit of reverie like a beckoning angel, crowned with halo, saying—hope on, hope ever; the heart and I are kindred; our mission will be fulfilled; nature shall accomplish its purpose; the soul shall have its paradise?
—I threw myself upon my bed: and as my thoughts ran over the definite, sharp business of the morrow, my reverie, and its glowing images, that made my heart bound, swept away like those fleecy rain clouds of August, on which the sun paints rainbows-—driving southward, by the cool, rising wind from the north.
—I wonder—thought I, as I dropped asleep—if a married man with his sentiment made actual is, after all, as happy as we poor fellows, in our dreams?
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I DO not believe that there was ever an Aunt Tabithy who could abide cigars. My Aunt Tabithy hated them with a peculiar hatred. She was not only insensible to the rich flavor of a fresh rolling volume of smoke, but she could not so much as tolerate the sight of the rich russet color of an Havana-labeled box. It put her out of all conceit with Guava jelly, to find it advertised in the same tongue, and with the same Cuban coarseness of design.
“But by your leave, my aunt,” said I to her the other morning—“there is very much that is good in a cigar.”
My aunt, who was sweeping, tossed her head, and with it, her curls—done up in paper.
“It is a very excellent matter,” continued I, puffing.
“It is clean and sweet,” said I; “and a most pleasant soother of disturbed feelings; and a capital companion; and a comforter—” and I stopped to puff.
“You know it is a filthy abomination,” said my aunt—“and you ought to be—” and she stopped to put up one of her curls, which, with the energy of her gesticulation, had fallen out of its place.