Reveries of a Bachelor: or, A Book of the Heart, by “Ik Marvel,” pseudonym of Donald Grant Mitchell. The Bachelor’s first Reverie was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1849, and was reprinted the following year in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It represents the sentimental Bachelor before a fire of oak and hickory in a country farmhouse. He broods through an evening of “sober and thoughtful quietude.” His thoughts are of matrimony, suggested by the smoke—signifying doubt; blaze—signifying cheer; ashes—signifying desolation. Why should he let himself love, with the chance of losing? The second Reverie is by a city grate, where the tossing sea-coal flame is like a flirt,—“so lively yet uncertain, so bright yet flickering,”—and its corruscations like the leapings of his own youthful heart; and just here the maid comes in and throws upon the fire a pan of anthracite, and its character soon changes to a pleasant glow, the similitude of a true woman’s love, which the bachelor enlarges much upon in his dream-thoughts. The third Reverie is over his cigar, as lighted by a coal, a wisp of paper, or a match,—each bearing its suggestion of some heart-experience. The fourth is divided into three parts, also: morning, which is the past,—a dreaming retrospect of younger days; noon, which is the bachelor’s unsatisfied present; evening, which is the future, with its vision of Caroline, the road of love which runs not smooth at first, and then their marriage, foreign travel, full of warm and lively European scenes, and the return home with an ideal family conclusion. These papers, full of sentiment, enjoyed a wide popularity.
1/2 leather & marble boards, marbled endpapers, TEG, 7 raised bands

One of the primary examples of the long-defunct genre of "bachelor" fiction, Reveries of A Bachelor is represented as a young single man's daydreams of marriage and romance. It struck a chord at the time of publication, but it's an acquired taste to modern readers. ( )