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- suspected for a sportful assumption; since the amaranthiness of Mrs.
Glendinning fully sustained this youthful pretension.--Thus freely and
lightsomely for mother and son flowed on the pure joined current of
life. But as yet the fair river had not borne its waves to those
sideways repelling rocks, where it was thenceforth destined to be
forever divided into two unmixing streams.
An excellent English author of these times enumerating the prime
advantages of his natal lot, cites foremost, that he first saw the rural
light. So with Pierre. It had been his choice fate to have been born and
nurtured in the country, surrounded by scenery whose uncommon loveliness
was the perfect mould of a delicate and poetic mind; while the popular
names of its finest features appealed to the proudest patriotic and
family associations of the historic line of Glendinning. On the meadows
which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion, far to
the winding river, an Indian battle had been fought, in the earlier days
of the colony, and in that battle the paternal great-grandfather of
Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass,
with his dying voice, still cheering his men in the fray. This was
Saddle-Meadows, a name likewise extended to the mansion and the
village. Far beyond these plains, a day's walk for Pierre, rose the
storied heights, where in the Revolutionary War his grandfather had for
several months defended a rude but all-important stockaded fort, against
the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories, and Regulars. From
before that fort, the gentlemanly, but murderous half-breed, Brandt, had
fled, but had survived to dine with General Glendinning, in the amicable
times which followed that vindictive war. All the associations of
Saddle-Meadows were full of pride to Pierre. The Glendinning deeds by
which their estate had so long been held, bore the cyphers of three
Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods
and plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth, did
Pierre glance along the background of his race; little recking of that
maturer and larger interior development, which should forever deprive
these things of their full power of pride in his soul.
But the breeding of Pierre would have been unwisely contracted, had his
youth been unintermittingly passed in these rural scenes. At a very
early period he had begun to accompany his father and mother--and
afterwards his mother alone--in their annual visits to the city; where
naturally mingling in a large and polished society, Pierre had
insensibly formed himself in the airier graces of life, without
enfeebling the vigor derived from a martial race, and fostered in the
country's clarion air.
Nor while thus liberally developed in person and manners, was Pierre
deficient in a still better and finer culture. Not in vain had he spent
long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father's fastidiously
picked and decorous library; where the Spenserian nymphs had early led
him into many a maze of all-bewildering beauty. Thus, with a graceful
glow on his limbs, and soft, imaginative flames in his heart, did this
Pierre glide toward maturity, thoughtless of that period of remorseless
insight, when all these delicate warmths should seem frigid to him, and
he should madly demand more ardent fires.
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