Читать книгу Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart онлайн

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Yet the cold critic will say—“It was artfully done.” A curse on him!—it was not art: it was nature.

Another, a young, fresh, healthful girl-mind, has seen something in the love-picture—albeit so weak—of truth; and has kindly believed that it must be earnest. Ay, indeed is it, fair, and generous one—earnest as life and hope! Who, indeed, with a heart at all, that has not yet slipped away irreparably and forever from the shores of youth—from that fairyland which young enthusiasm creates, and over which bright dreams hover—but knows it to be real? And so such things will be read, till hopes are dashed, and death is come.

Another, a father, has laid down the book in tears.

—God bless them all! How far better this, than the cold praise of newspaper paragraphs, or the critically contrived approval of colder friends!

Let me gather up these letters, carefully—to be read when the heart is faint, and sick of all that there is unreal, and selfish in the world. Let me tie them together, with a new and longer bit of ribbon—not by a love-knot, that is too hard—but by an easy-slipping knot, that so I may get at them the better. And now, they are all together, a snug packet, and we will label them, not sentimentally (I pity the one who thinks it!), but earnestly, and in the best meaning of the term—Souvenirs du Coeur.