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Ik. Marvel enjoys a comfortable income of reputation as the author of the "Lorgnette," "Dream-Life," and the "Reveries of a Bachelor." His delight it seems to be to put on record
Those sun-dyed fancies, airy reveries,
Freaks of imagination, waking dreamsm
Ephemeral fantasies of playful hues,
which indeed "fade into nothing if uncropt, and die forgotten;" but which
if seized on while yet fresh
In their rich tints of light, and so consigned
To the bland pressure of judicious thought
And chaste constraint of language, may become
Heir-looms for after-times.[1]
This lofty ideal is, however, a degree or two north of Ik. Marvel's whereabouts. Rather he reminds us of Christopher North's description of his fashion of reducing thick-coming fancies to the prose requirements of "copy"—of making an "article" of a reverie. "After walking up and down my room for half an hour," saith Sir Kit,[2] "with my cigar in my mouth, thinking of all things in the heavens, and the earth, and the waters under the earth—friends long since dead and buried—places once familiar that I shall never set mortal eye on again—books in posse—bores in esse—last summer's butterflies—chateaux en Espagne, no matter how high or how low—Suddenly the cigar's out, and by a natural instinct, as it were, I place myself at the table and begin writing. What suggests the first sentence? Probably the title of a book lying uncut on the desk. What the next? Of course some turn in the first sentence which suggested itself during the operation of penning that,"—and so on, till the mouth begins to feel uneasy, and then the scribe exchanges his quill for another cheroot, and walks up and down reverie-ing ut suprà. Such the mood of Coleridge, when his large grey eyes were fixed by "that film, which fluttered on the grate," a "companionable form" capable of eliciting "dim sympathies" from his "idling spirit"—
everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
Making a toy of Thought.
Ik. Marvel's book of Reveries consists, mainly, in his own words, of "just such whimsies and reflections as a great many brother bachelors are apt to indulge in, but which they are too cautious or too prudent to lay before the world." There is no bachelor extant, he believes, who has not his share of such floating visions. As for the truth of Ik.'s edition of them, he gratuitously empowers the world to believe what it likes: "I should
- ↑ Edward Quillinan's Poems
- ↑ Noctes. No. 68.
