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- 12552
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- 12500
- text
- I.
We are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three lofty adjoining
chambers of the Apostles. And passing on a little further in time, and
overlooking the hundred and one domestic details, of how their internal
arrangements were finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly,
now giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter
occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel, the only
practical relief from the memories of her miserable past; how Isabel
herself in the otherwise occupied hours of Pierre, passed some of her
time in mastering the chirographical incoherencies of his manuscripts,
with a view to eventually copying them out in a legible hand for the
printer; or went below stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in
the modest and amiable society of the three young ladies and their
excellent mother, found some little solace for the absence of Pierre;
or, when his day's work was done, sat by him in the twilight, and played
her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its
wondrous suggestiveness; but alas! eternally incapable of being
translated into words; for where the deepest words end, there music
begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.
Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning in scorn
even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, which, written at Saddle
Meadows in the sweet legendary time of Lucy and her love, he had
jealously kept from the publishers, as too true and good to be
published; renouncing all his foregone self, Pierre was now engaged in a
comprehensive compacted work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous
motives unitedly impelled;--the burning desire to deliver what he
thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world;
and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the
sale of his book, he could realize money. Swayed to universality of
thought by the widely-explosive mental tendencies of the profound events
which had lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which
he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that most grand
productions of the best human intellects ever are built round a circle,
as atolls (_i. e._ the primitive coral islets which, raising themselves
in the depths of profoundest seas, rise funnel-like to the surface, and
present there a hoop of white rock, which though on the outside
everywhere lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet
lagoon within), digestively including the whole range of all that can be
known or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book, which
the world should hail with surprise and delight. A varied scope of
reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a
random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course of the multifarious,
incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilized young
inquirer after Truth; this poured one considerable contributary stream
into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and
time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself
upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality
to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all
mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not
an accelerator helpingly pushing him along.
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