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- III.
It has been said that the beautiful country round about Pierre appealed
to very proud memories. But not only through the mere chances of things,
had that fine country become ennobled by the deeds of his sires, but in
Pierre's eyes, all its hills and swales seemed as sanctified through
their very long uninterrupted possession by his race.
That fond ideality which, in the eyes of affection, hallows the least
trinket once familiar to the person of a departed love; with Pierre that
talisman touched the whole earthly landscape about him; for remembering
that on those hills his own fine fathers had gazed; through those woods,
over these lawns, by that stream, along these tangled paths, many a
grand-dame of his had merrily strolled when a girl; vividly recalling
these things, Pierre deemed all that part of the earth a love-token; so
that his very horizon was to him as a memorial ring.
The monarchical world very generally imagines, that in demagoguical
America the sacred Past hath no fixed statues erected to it, but all
things irreverently seethe and boil in the vulgar caldron of an
everlasting uncrystalizing Present. This conceit would seem peculiarly
applicable to the social condition. With no chartered aristocracy, and
no law of entail, how can any family in America imposingly perpetuate
itself? Certainly that common saying among us, which declares, that be a
family conspicuous as it may, a single half-century shall see it abased;
that maxim undoubtedly holds true with the commonalty. In our cities
families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat. For indeed the democratic
element operates as a subtile acid among us; forever producing new
things by corroding the old; as in the south of France verdigris, the
primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by
grape-vinegar poured upon copper plates. Now in general nothing can be
more significant of decay than the idea of corrosion; yet on the other
hand, nothing can more vividly suggest luxuriance of life, than the idea
of green as a color; for green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile
Nature herself. Herein by apt analogy we behold the marked anomalousness
of America; whose character abroad, we need not be surprised, is
misconceived, when we consider how strangely she contradicts all prior
notions of human things; and how wonderfully to her, Death itself
becomes transmuted into Life. So that political institutions, which in
other lands seem above all things intensely artificial, with America
seem to possess the divine virtue of a natural law; for the most mighty
of nature's laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.
Still, are there things in the visible world, over which ever-shifting
Nature hath not so unbounded a sway. The grass is annually changed; but
the limbs of the oak, for a long term of years, defy that annual decree.
And if in America the vast mass of families be as the blades of grass,
yet some few there are that stand as the oak; which, instead of
decaying, annually puts forth new branches; whereby Time, instead of
subtracting, is made to capitulate into a multiple virtue.
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