John Howard Payne touched the tenderest chord that vibrates in the great heart of all humankind when he gave to immortality his song of "Home, Sweet Home;" and thank G.o.d, the grand mansions and palaces of the rich do not hold all the happiness and n.o.bility of this world. There are millions of humble cottages where virtue resides in the warmth and purity of vestal fires, and where contentment dwells like perpetual summer.

The antediluvians plowed with a forked stick, with one p.r.o.ng for the beam and the other for the scratcher; and the plow boy and his sleepy ox had no choice of p.r.o.ngs to hitch to. It was all the same to Adam whether "Buck" was yoked to the beam or the scratcher. But some n.o.ble Cincinnatus dreamed of the burnished plowshare; genius wrought his dream into steel and now the polished Oliver Chill slices the earth like a hot knife plowing a field of Jersey b.u.t.ter, and the modern gang plow, bearing upon its wheels the gloved and umbrella'd leader of the Populist Party, plows up the whole face of the earth in a single day.

What a wonderful workshop is the brain of man! Its noiseless machinery cuts, and carves, and moulds, in the imponderable material of ideas.

It works its endless miracles through the brawny arm of labor, and the deft fingers of skill, and the world moves forward by its magic. Aladdin rubbed his lamp and the shadowy genii of fable performed impossible wonders. The dreamer of to-day rubs his fingers through his hair and the genii of his intellect work miracles which eclipse the most extravagant fantasies of the "Arabian Nights."

A dreamer saw the imprisoned vapor throw open the lid of a teakettle, and lo! a steam engine came puffing from his brain. And now many a huge monster of Corliss, beautiful as a vision of Archimedes and smooth in movement as a wheeling planet, sends its thrill of life and power through mammoth plants of humming machinery. The fiery courser of the steel-bound track shoots over hill and plain, like a mid-night meteor through the fields of heaven, outstripping the wind.

A dreamer carried about in his brain a great Leviathan. It was launched upon the billows, and like some collossal swan the palatial steamship now sweeps in majesty through the blue wastes of old ocean.

Six hundred years before Christ, some old Greek discovered electricity by rubbing a piece of amber, and unable to grasp the mystery, he called it soul. His discovery slept for more than two thousand years until it awoke in the dreams of Galvani, and Volta, and Benjamin Franklin. In the morning of the nineteenth century the sculptor and scientist, Morse, saw in his dreams, phantom lightnings leap across continents, and oceans, and felt the pulse of thunder beat as it came bounding over threads of iron that girdled the earth. In each throb he read a human thought. The electric telegraph emerged from his brain, like Minerva from the brow of Jove, and the world received a fresh baptism of light and glory.

In a few more years we will step over the threshold of the twentieth century. What greater wonders will the dreamers yet unfold? It may be that another magician, greater even than Edison, the "Wizzard of Menloe Park," will rise up and coax the very laws of nature into easy compliance with his unheard-of dreams. I think he will construct an electric railway in the form of a huge tube, and call it the "electro-scoot,"

and pa.s.sengers will enter it in New York and touch a b.u.t.ton and arrive in San Francisco two hours before they started! I think a new discovery will be made by which the young man of the future may stand at his "kiss-o-phone" in New York, and kiss his sweetheart in Chicago with all the delightful sensations of the "aforesaid and the same." I think some Liebig will reduce foods to their last a.n.a.lyses, and by an ultimate concentration of their elements, will enable the man of the future to carry a year's provisions in his vest pocket. The sucking dude will store his rations in the head of his cane, and the commissary department of a whole army will consist of a mule and a pair of saddlebags. A train load of cabbage will be transported in a sardine box, and a thousand fat Texas cattle in an oyster can. Power will be condensed from a forty horse engine to a quart cup. Wagons will roll by the power in their axles, and the cushions of our buggies will cover the force that propels them. The armies of the future will fight with chain lightning, and the battlefield will become so hot and unhealthy that,

"He who fights and runs away Will never fight another day."

Some dreaming Icarus will perfect the flying machine, and upon the aluminium wings of the swift Pega.s.sus of the air the light-hearted society girl will sail among the stars, and

"Behind some dark cloud, where no one's allowed, Make love to the man in the moon."

The rainbow will be converted into a Ferris wheel; all men will be bald headed; the women will run the Government--_and then I think the end of time will be near at hand_.

DREAMS.

I heard a song of love, and tenderness, and sadness, and beauty, sweeter than the song of a nightingale. It was breathed from the soul of Robert Burns. I heard a song of deepest pa.s.sion surging like the tempest-tossed waves of the sea. It was the restless spirit of Lord Byron.

I heard a mournful melody of despairing love, full of that wild, mad, hopeless longing of a bereaved soul which the mid-night raven mocked at with that bitterest of all words--"Nevermore!" It was the weird threnody of the brilliant, but ill-starred Poe, who, like a meteor, blazed but for a moment, dazzling a hemisphere, and then went out forever in the darkness of death.

Then I was exalted, and lifted into the serene sunlight of peace, as I listened to the spirit of faith, pouring out in the songs of our own immortal Longfellow.

With Milton I walked the scented isles of long lost Paradise, and caught the odor of its bloom, and the swell of its music. He led me through its rose brakes, and under the vermilion and flame of its orchids and honeysuckles, down to the margin of the limpid river, where the water lilies slept in fadeless beauty, and the lotus nodded to the rippling waves; and there, under a bridal arch of orange blossoms, cordoned by palms and many-colored flowers, I saw a vision of bliss and beauty from which Satan turned away with an envy that stabbed him with pangs unfelt before in h.e.l.l! It was earth's first vision of wedded love.

But the horizon of Shakespeare was broader than them all. There is no depth which he has not sounded, no height which he has not measured.

He walked in the gardens of the intellectual G.o.ds and gathered sweets for the soul from a thousand unwithering flowers. He caught music from the spheres, and beauty from ten thousand fields of light. His brain was a mighty loom. His genius gathered and cla.s.sified, his imagination spun and wove; the flying shuttle of his fancy delivered to the warp of wisdom and philosophy the shining threads spun from the fibres of human hearts and human experience; and with his wondrous woof of pictured tapestries, he clothed all thought in the bridal robes of immortality.

His mind was a resistless flood that deluged the world of literature with its glory. The succeeding poets are but survivors as by the ark, and, like the ancient dove, they gather and weave into garlands only the "flotsam" of beauty which floats on the bosom of the Shakespearean flood.

Oh, Shakespeare, archangel of poetry! The light from thy wings drowns the stars and flashes thy glory on the civilizations of the whole world!

"Unwearied, unfettered, unwatched, unconfined, Be my spirit like thee, in the world of the mind; No leaning for earth e'er to weary its flight; But fresh as thy pinions in regions of light."

All honor to the poets and philosophers and painters and sculptors and musicians of the world! They are its honeybees; its songbirds; its carrier doves, its ministering angels.

VISIONS OF DEPARTED GLORY.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

I walked with Gibbon and Hume, through the sombre halls of the past, and caught visions of the glory of the cla.s.sic Republics and Empires that flourished long ago, and whose very dust is still eloquent with the story of departed greatness. The spirit of genius lingers there still like the fragrance of roses faded and gone.

I thought I heard the harp of Pindar, and the impa.s.sioned song of the dark-eyed Sappho. I thought I heard the lofty epic of the blind Homer, rushing on in the red tide of battle, and the divine Plato discoursing like an oracle in his academic shades.

The canvas spoke and the marble breathed when Apelles painted and Phidias carved.

I stood with Michael Angelo and saw him chisel his dreams from the marble.

I saw Raphael spread his visions of beauty in immortal colors.

I sat under the spirit of Paganini's power. The flow of his melody turned the very air into music. I thought I was in the presence of Divinity as I listened to the warbles, and murmurs, and the ebb and flow of the silver tides, from his violin. And I said: Music is the dearest gift of G.o.d to man. The sea, the forest, the field, and the meadow, are the very fountain heads of music.

I believe that Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Schubert, and Verdi, and all the great masters, caught their sweetest dreams from nature's musicians.

I think their richest airs of mirth, and gladness, and joy, were stolen from the purling rivulet and the rippling river. I believe their grandest inspirations were born of the tempest, and the thunder, and the rolling billows of the angry ocean.

NATURE'S MUSICIANS.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

I sat on the gra.s.sy brink of a mountain stream in the gathering twilight of evening. The shadowy woodlands around me became a great theatre. The greensward before me was its stage.

The tinkling bell of a pa.s.sing herd rang up the curtain, and I sat there all alone in the hush of the dying day and listened to a concert of nature's musicians who sing as G.o.d hath taught them to sing. The first singer that entered my stage was Signor Gra.s.shopper. He mounted a mullein leaf and sang, and sang, and sang, until Professor Turkey Gobbler slipped up behind him with open mouth, and Signor Gra.s.shopper vanished from the footlights forevermore. And as Professor Turkey Gobbler strutted off my stage with a merry gobble, the orchestra opened before me with a flourish of trumpets. The katydid led off with a trombone solo; the cricket chimed in with his E. flat cornet; the b.u.mblebee played on his violoncello, and the jay-bird, laughed with his piccolo. The music rose to grandeur with the deep ba.s.s horn of the big black beetle; the mocking bird's flute brought me to tears of rapture, and the screech-owl's fife made me want to fight. The tree-frog blew his alto horn; the jar-fly clashed his tinkling cymbals; the woodp.e.c.k.e.r rattled his kettledrum, and the locust jingled his tambourine. The music rolled along like a sparkling river in sweet accompaniment with the oriole's leading violin. But it suddenly hushed when I heard a ripple of laughter among the hollyhocks before the door of a happy country home. I saw a youth standing there in the shadows with his arm around "something" and holding his sweetheart's hand in his. He bent forward; lip met lip, and there was an explosion like the squeak of a new boot.

The la.s.sie vanished into the cottage; the lad vanished over the hill, and as he vanished he swung his hat in the shadows, and sang back to her his happy love song.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LOVE AMONG THE HOLLYHOCKS.]

Did you never hear a mountain love song? This is the song he sang:

"Oh, when she saw me coming she rung her hands and cried, She said I was the prettiest thing that ever lived or died.

Oh, run along home Miss Nancy, get along home Miss Nancy, Run along home Miss Nancy, down in Rockinham."

The birds inclined their heads to listen to his song as it died away on the drowsy summer air.

That night I slept in a mansion; but I "closed my eyes on garnished rooms to dream of meadows and clover blooms," and love among the hollyhocks. And while I dreamed I was serenaded by a band of mosquitoes.

This is the song they sang: