- end_line
- 1871
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1811
- text
- VII.
As Pierre drove through the silent village, beneath the vertical shadows
of the noon-day trees, the sweet chamber scene abandoned him, and the
mystical face recurred to him, and kept with him. At last, arrived at
home, he found his mother absent; so passing straight through the wide
middle hall of the mansion, he descended the piazza on the other ride,
and wandered away in reveries down to the river bank.
Here one primeval pine-tree had been luckily left standing by the
otherwise unsparing woodmen, who long ago had cleared that meadow. It
was once crossing to this noble pine, from a clump of hemlocks far
across the river, that Pierre had first noticed the significant fact,
that while the hemlock and the pine are trees of equal growth and
stature, and are so similar in their general aspect, that people unused
to woods sometimes confound them; and while both trees are proverbially
trees of sadness, yet the dark hemlock hath no music in its thoughtful
boughs; but the gentle pine-tree drops melodious mournfulness.
At its half-bared roots of sadness, Pierre sat down, and marked the
mighty bulk and far out-reaching length of one particular root, which,
straying down the bank, the storms and rains had years ago exposed.
"How wide, how strong these roots must spread! Sure, this pine-tree
takes powerful hold of this fair earth! Yon bright flower hath not so
deep a root. This tree hath outlived a century of that gay flower's
generations, and will outlive a century of them yet to come. This is
most sad. Hark, now I hear the pyramidical and numberless, flame-like
complainings of this Eolean pine;--the wind breathes now upon it:--the
wind,--that is God's breath! Is He so sad? Oh, tree! so mighty thou, so
lofty, yet so mournful! This is most strange! Hark! as I look up into
thy high secrecies, oh, tree, the face, the face, peeps down on
me!--'Art thou Pierre? Come to me'--oh, thou mysterious girl,--what an
ill-matched pendant thou, to that other countenance of sweet Lucy, which
also hangs, and first did hang within my heart! Is grief a pendant then
to pleasantness? Is grief a self-willed guest that _will_ come in? Yet I
have never known thee, Grief;--thou art a legend to me. I have known
some fiery broils of glorious frenzy; I have oft tasted of revery;
whence comes pensiveness; whence comes sadness; whence all delicious
poetic presentiments;--but thou, Grief! art still a ghost-story to me. I
know thee not,--do half disbelieve in thee. Not that I would be without
my too little cherished fits of sadness now and then; but God keep me
from thee, thou other shape of far profounder gloom! I shudder at thee!
The face!--the face!--forth again from thy high secrecies, oh, tree! the
face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl! who art thou? by what right
snatchest thou thus my deepest thoughts? Take thy thin fingers from
me;--I am affianced, and not to thee. Leave me!--what share hast thou in
me? Surely, thou lovest not me?--that were most miserable for thee, and
me, and Lucy. It can not be. What, _who_ art thou? Oh! wretched
vagueness--too familiar to me, yet inexplicable,--unknown, utterly
unknown! I seem to founder in this perplexity. Thou seemest to know
somewhat of me, that I know not of myself,--what is it then? If thou
hast a secret in thy eyes of mournful mystery, out with it; Pierre
demands it; what is that thou hast veiled in thee so imperfectly, that I
seem to see its motion, but not its form? It visibly rustles behind the
concealing screen. Now, never into the soul of Pierre, stole there
before, a muffledness like this! If aught really lurks in it, ye
sovereign powers that claim all my leal worshipings, I conjure ye to
lift the veil; I must see it face to face. Tread I on a mine, warn me;
advance I on a precipice, hold me back; but abandon me to an unknown
misery, that it shall suddenly seize me, and possess me, wholly,--that
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