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- mind; content and glad to embrace the good whenever presented, or with
whatever conjoined. So, in youth, do we unconsciously act upon those
peculiar principles, which in conscious and verbalized maxims shall
systematically regulate our maturer lives;--a fact, which forcibly
illustrates the necessitarian dependence of our lives, and their
subordination, not to ourselves, but to Fate.
If the grown man of taste, possess not only some eye to detect the
picturesque in the natural landscape, so also, has he as keen a
perception of what may not unfitly be here styled, the _povertiresque_
in the social landscape. To such an one, not more picturesquely
conspicuous is the dismantled thatch in a painted cottage of
Gainsborough, than the time-tangled and want-thinned locks of a beggar,
_povertiresquely_ diversifying those snug little cabinet-pictures of the
world, which, exquisitely varnished and framed, are hung up in the
drawing-room minds of humane men of taste, and amiable philosophers of
either the "Compensation," or "Optimist" school. They deny that any
misery is in the world, except for the purpose of throwing the fine
_povertiresque_ element into its general picture. Go to! God hath
deposited cash in the Bank subject to our gentlemanly order; he hath
bounteously blessed the world with a summer carpet of green. Begone,
Heraclitus! The lamentations of the rain are but to make us our
rainbows!
Not that in equivocal reference to the _povertiresque_ old farmer
Millthorpe, Pierre is here intended to be hinted at. Still, man can not
wholly escape his surroundings. Unconsciously Mrs. Glendinning had
always been one of these curious Optimists; and in his boyish life
Pierre had not wholly escaped the maternal contagion. Yet often, in
calling at the old farmer's for Charles of some early winter mornings,
and meeting the painfully embarrassed, thin, feeble features of Mrs.
Millthorpe, and the sadly inquisitive and hopelessly half-envious
glances of the three little girls; and standing on the threshold, Pierre
would catch low, aged, life-weary groans from a recess out of sight
from the door; then would Pierre have some boyish inklings of something
else than the pure _povertiresque_ in poverty: some inklings of what it
might be, to be old, and poor, and worn, and rheumatic, with shivering
death drawing nigh, and present life itself but a dull and a chill! some
inklings of what it might be, for him who in youth had vivaciously
leaped from his bed, impatient to meet the earliest sun, and lose no
sweet drop of his life, now hating the beams he once so dearly loved;
turning round in his bed to the wall to avoid them; and still postponing
the foot which should bring him back to the dismal day; when the sun is
not gold, but copper; and the sky is not blue, but gray; and the blood,
like Rhenish wine, too long unquaffed by Death, grows thin and sour in
the veins.
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