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- him to honor them and the world with a neat draft of his life, including
criticisms on his own writings; the printed circular indiscriminately
protesting, that undoubtedly he knew more of his own life than any other
living man; and that only he who had put together the great works of
Glendinning could be fully qualified thoroughly to analyze them, and
cast the ultimate judgment upon their remarkable construction.
Now, it was under the influence of the humiliating emotions engendered
by things like the above; it was when thus haunted by publishers,
engravers, editors, critics, autograph-collectors, portrait-fanciers,
biographers, and petitioning and remonstrating literary friends of all
sorts; it was then, that there stole into the youthful soul of Pierre,
melancholy forebodings of the utter unsatisfactoriness of all human
fame; since the most ardent profferings of the most martyrizing
demonstrations in his behalf,--these he was sorrowfully obliged to turn
away.
And it may well be believed, that after the wonderful vital
world-revelation so suddenly made to Pierre at the Meadows--a revelation
which, at moments, in some certain things, fairly Timonized him--he had
not failed to clutch with peculiar nervous detestation and contempt that
ample parcel, containing the letters of his Biographico and other silly
correspondents, which, in a less ferocious hour, he had filed away as
curiosities. It was with an almost infernal grin, that he saw that
particular heap of rubbish eternally quenched in the fire, and felt
that as it was consumed before his eyes, so in his soul was forever
killed the last and minutest undeveloped microscopic germ of that most
despicable vanity to which those absurd correspondents thought to
appeal.
BOOK XVIII.
PIERRE, AS A JUVENILE AUTHOR, RECONSIDERED.
I.
Inasmuch as by various indirect intimations much more than ordinary
natural genius has been imputed to Pierre, it may have seemed an
inconsistency, that only the merest magazine papers should have been
thus far the sole productions of his mind. Nor need it be added, that,
in the soberest earnest, those papers contained nothing uncommon;
indeed--entirely now to drop all irony, if hitherto any thing like that
has been indulged in--those fugitive things of Master Pierre's were the
veriest common-place.
It is true, as I long before said, that Nature at Saddle Meadows had
very early been as a benediction to Pierre;--had blown her wind-clarion
to him from the blue hills, and murmured melodious secrecies to him by
her streams and her woods. But while nature thus very early and very
abundantly feeds us, she is very late in tutoring us as to the proper
methodization of our diet. Or,--to change the metaphor,--there are
immense quarries of fine marble; but how to get it out; how to chisel
it; how to construct any temple? Youth must wholly quit, then, the
quarry, for awhile; and not only go forth, and get tools to use in the
quarry, but must go and thoroughly study architecture. Now the
quarry-discoverer is long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter
is long before the architect; and the architect is long before the
temple; for the temple is the crown of the world.
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