My dear Jeremy,—I place before you the perils of a passage to a Turkish Paradise, because you have shown a passion for turbans, meerschaums and pretty women, and I wish to warn you. The narrow path of Christian theology is still further reduced, you see, in the Mohammedan, so that, sinner as you are, you will find it advisable to stick to the true faith, and to practice it with more diligence.

You should not let your imagination run riot—it will be the ruin of you; but take the substantials, with thankfulness, which are yours by possession, and enjoy them to the uttermost. We all—the poorest of us—have enough and to spare of the gifts of Providence to make somebody envious—the veriest slave of money, who boasts of his millions, I’ll warrant me, looks with discomfort upon your superior intellect, or your better appetite, and would part with a good slice of gold, for a taste for a fine poem, or a relish for roast-beef—and I doubt much whether you would bargain them off at his valuation. I would not give a good temper and a cheerful disposition for all the gold that any crabbed old miser may have in his bank vault; nor my troop of true friends for the hungry faces of his poor relations. Would you? Your shilling or mine will buy us more pleasure, with a friend, than he can impart, with a one per cent. discount. This is true—and yet the world does not look upon things thus philosophically. We strain our imaginations to catch at some supposed good, something we fancy would make us blessed, discarding the real good that God has imparted to us.

“You wish to travel, do you?” said an old friend of mine. “You are very silly! there is no pleasure in that. I once went all the way to Saratoga, with my family, but I saw it all in half an hour, and left in the return train. The young folks imagined, that by staying two or three weeks, something else might be discovered, and I left them to experiment; but I was done with it, and was off.”

You say this never happened. By Jove, it did though! and a sensible old codger he was in his way too—though I found that, in the end, was rather eccentric and uncertain. But he adhered to his opinion, and traveled no more. “As for traveling for pleasure,” said he, “it is absurd. I am ten times more comfortable and happy at home, where I can call for what I want, and get it, and instead of sweating in a stage-coach, on a hot and dusty day, with my knees squeezed into a perfect jelly, I throw up the back window that opens on the garden—wheel up a recumbent chair—place another for my feet—call for a bottle of champagne and a cigar, and with ice at my elbow, take mine own ease, at mine own inn. Then, as for traveling to see fine prospects, if I tire of the garden and the champagne, I can shut my eyes here—he never did in his counting-room—and can call up more splendid scenery than the Rhine can boast—can crown the hills with finer palaces than ever shone in Greece—and people them with prettier women than Mahomet will find in his Paradise, I’ll warrant him: And all this while your sight-seeing traveler is perhaps toiling and puffing up the sides of Vesuvius, over hardened lava, or is blowing his fingers on the sides of Mont Blanc, which, I dare say, are flattered in the engravings, while I can add in imagination unnumbered beauties the artists never dreamed of.”

There is good philosophy in this, Jeremy, and as it suits my pocket just now, if you will send over the champagne, I’ll try it. There is a home doctrine about it that I like, for my experience is, that a man gets into very little mischief while he stays there. How does it tally with yours?

The farther we wander in chase of forbidden pleasures, the more impressive is the conviction that we are in pursuit of bubbles, which go dancing and dazzling on, and when grasped, are empty.

And yet the world is but a vast army of bubble chasers, with here and there a sage smiling at, or rebuking, the folly. Each has his fatuity—each his blind passion, his bubble of the imagination. Fortune, Fame, Pleasure, how many do they beckon away from comfort, peace and happiness? Amid the press upon each crowded avenue, how few are allowed to turn back! How many fall and are trodden down forever! and yet the sanguine multitude, rushing over the bodies of the slain, heed not the fall of their companions, but press on as eagerly as before after vanishing shadows. Why is it, that when happiness itself is basking at our feet, imploring acceptance, that with a blind fatuity we rush at any cost on misery? Is it because the mind is ever, in this world, after the unattainable, that we see fortune, fame, domestic comfort, personal ease, all shipwrecked, on all sides of us in life, to attain the undesirable? That the merchant with his bank-roll of tens of thousands, squanders all in one wild effort to grasp a bubble upon an unknown sea. That the man of letters, to whom God has given an intellect but a little lower than that of angels, and who might model and mould the mind of a nation to good, and shine as a star in the intellectual firmament, to be worshiped in all time by the students of genius, “who follow her flashing torch along every path to knowledge”—knowing his high gifts for good, and feeling their power, scorns the possession, and scatters the bale-fires of a mighty intellect, as a volcano showers down lava and ashes, upon mankind—blighting, as with a destroying angel’s touch, the fair world in which he lives.

That the domestic hearth, with children merry-voiced, over which meek-eyed Peace hovered like a dove, and around which Heaven’s own smile seemed to linger, is treacherously invaded by the demon of jealousy, green-eyed and furious, until Crime, with swarthy countenance and bloody locks, broods with Death’s Angel over the silent spot.

The Perils of the Imagination, how they invest the unsatisfied! Are these the penalties which God imposes for unthankfulness? or is it that the devil, ever working at the heart, urges man to ingratitude, and excites him to folly? What think you, Jeremy?

G. R. G.

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