Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1878 — The Things We Have Not. [ARTICLE]

The Things We Have Not.

Among nil the various kinds of charm, whether inherent in the objects of our desires or woven around them by fine threads of association and circumstance, is there one more subtly enthralling than that which belongs to the things which we do not possess P We can scarcely tell how much of the ethereal beauty of . youthful dreams depends upon their inaccessible distance, for many other things conspire to steep them in a magical atmosphere. But when we have long ago emerged from that enchanted ground, and have reached the level table-land of middle life, there still are visions haunting us some more, some less, but not wholly absent from the busiest and sternest lives; there is still a halo surrounding some objects which we could not even if we would entirely dispel. And of all the favorite spots about which the glamor hovers there is none to which it clings so persistently as to the things we have not. In a sense this is true, of course, of what we have had and have lost. But that is a comparatively intelligible feeling, made up largely of regret, mixed with love and self-reproach, and bound up with many personal and perhaps even arbitrary associations. It is not the same as the strange bloom of ideal beauty which we have not, and never had, nor can hope to have a share. Such things wear a kind of remote impersonal grace which can be scattered by norude touch of change or chance, and withered by no closeness of grasp. Our thoughts of them are culled from all the most perfect instances, aud combined into a type which perhaps transcends experience. There is an incident in “Transformation” which shows how fully alive Hawthorne was to this idealizing faculty as exercised especially by those not in possession. In looking over Hilda’s picture, some of her friends pause at one of a child’s shoe, painted, as the. author tells us, with a care and tenderness of which none but a woman who deeply loved children wojtld have been capable, and which no actual mother would have been likely to bestow upon such a subject. Actual mothers, no doubt, have enough to do with their children’s shoes without painting them. Possession brings an object into many disenchanting relations. Children themselves, however idolized by their mothers, can scarcely have for them that abstract visionary charm wlnch thev possess for the childless. No doubt the joys of possession are far more intense and more richly colored than those of contemplation; but they have not the same half-sacred remoteness, the same unchanging luster. They are purchased by so many cares, often so much toil, and exposed to so many r*sks, that enjoyment is often obscured by fatigue and anxiety. However, we need not disparage the delights of possession in order to enhance those of mere contemplation. These are pure enough and keen enough to need no adventitious aids. But their comparative excellence can scarcely be appreciated until after a certain rather severe discipline.— London Saturday Revieto.