An Ideal World

The ship that is coming into harbor.

      One living in a state of expectancy, however temporary, lives really in an ideal world while it lasts. Every thing that comes within it is taken out of bald facts, and clothed in the bright drapery of dreams and pleasant fancies. Exactly what is expected never comes, to be sure, and unconsciously in these seasons of expectancy all of us are more or less poets. The maiden who wonders if her lover's steed "keeps pace with her expectancy and flies," is looking for a lover many degrees finer and tenderer than the lover who at last arrives, and divides the enjoyment of his love-making with the enjoyment of his cigar. The wife who awaits her husband, her heart beating at every sound, "listening less to her own music than for footsteps on the walk," pictures to herself, although perhaps without an articulate thought about it, a sort of model King Arthur, a noble pattern of all the excellencies, and in her love of this superior being of her conjuration forgets all about the real man, who, when he comes, will complain if his slippers have not been warmed, if his supper is not to his mind, who wants his wife well dressed on nothing a year, wants his table well set, but grumbles over the bills, and in general plays the part of that Pharaoh who would have bricks made without straw. And in turn, the husband whose wife has been absent, and who has missed her ordering, her bustling, her fault-finding, her presence in the house, so long that he has had time to forget the disagreeable part of her and remember only the cheerful and sweet, strangely recalls, now that he awaits her return, the wife of his youth, the girl he fell in love with, and who seemed to him at that time far "too good for human nature's daily food," and is somehow so fondly expecting that seraphic being, that he experiences an actual shock of surprise over the arrival of the woman who does come at last, only to dispute the hackman's charge, to reproach the servants, to complain of the misdoings during her interregnum, to set things straight with fury, and to tease for money. The merest trifle, in short, when we expect it and it has not yet arrived, seems something better than the truth. Even the bonnet on its way from the milliner's is changed in our waiting from a tolerably pretty affair into a bewitching and delicate confusion of straw and lace and ribbons and flowers, that with some throws a glamor of itself over the commoner bonnet when that arrives, and with others utterly annihilates the poor bonnet that falls under none of its provisions. And so of every other mote in the world it is gold while it swims in the sun; it is dust when it falls on our arm.

      The pleasures' of this expectancy are something that you may see little children begin to indulge in early. Half of their plays are made of it, and this, that, and the other joy and glory are to be theirs when they are big boys and girls; 'when they grow up ; when they take off petticoats, forswear knickerbockers, 'wear long dresses, have a tall hat; when they are ladies; when they are soldiers; when they go to college; when they have children of their own; when the great future arrives, with all that they expect in it. Who of us, even in middle life, is not expecting his ship to come in? And who of us cannot recall the magnificent expectancy concerning that vague realm of unknown labors and rewards which we used to call the great world, and to think of as a delightful region into which we should presently be launched, which lay always just below the horizon? And what would life be worth if that other world were cut off from it that world lying just beyond the horizon of life, which somehow casts its glory back over this actual world of today, and serves in our expectancy as perpetual compensation for all the ills and wrongs existing here?

      Everybody remembers that child experience of Mrs. Browning, when in her sylvan rambles she came across a spot that never seemed the same again, if again she ever found it:

I affirm that since I lost it,

Never bower has seemed so fair;

Never garden creeper crossed it

With so deft and brave an air;

Never bird sang in the summer

As I saw and heard them there. 

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