- end_line
- 1907
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1866
- text
- 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
ye will never do; else, Pierre's fond faith in ye--now clean,
untouched--may clean depart; and give me up to be a railing atheist! Ah,
now the face departs. Pray heaven it hath not only stolen back, and
hidden again in thy high secrecies, oh tree! But 'tis
gone--gone--entirely gone; and I thank God, and I feel joy again; joy,
which I also feel to be my right as man; deprived of joy, I feel I
should find cause for deadly feuds with things invisible. Ha! a coat of
iron-mail seems to grow round, and husk me now; and I have heard, that
the bitterest winters are foretold by a thicker husk upon the Indian
corn; so our old farmers say. But 'tis a dark similitude. Quit thy
analogies; sweet in the orator's mouth, bitter in the thinker's belly.
Now, then, I'll up with my own joyful will; and with my joy's face scare
away all phantoms:--so, they go; and Pierre is Joy's, and Life's again.
Thou pine-tree!--henceforth I will resist thy too treacherous
persuasiveness. Thou'lt not so often woo me to thy airy tent, to ponder
on the gloomy rooted stakes that bind it. Hence now I go; and peace be
with thee, pine! That blessed sereneness which lurks ever at the heart
of sadness--mere sadness--and remains when all the rest has gone;--that
sweet feeling is now mine, and cheaply mine. I am not sorry I was sad, I
feel so blessed now. Dearest Lucy!--well, well;--'twill be a pretty time
we'll have this evening; there's the book of Flemish prints--that first
we must look over; then, second, is Flaxman's Homer--clear-cut outlines,
yet full of unadorned barbaric nobleness. Then Flaxman's Dante;--Dante!
Night's and Hell's poet he. No, we will not open Dante. Methinks now the
face--the face--minds me a little of pensive, sweet Francesca's
face--or, rather, as it had been Francesca's daughter's face--wafted on
the sad dark wind, toward observant Virgil and the blistered Florentine.
No, we will not open Flaxman's Dante. Francesca's mournful face is now
ideal to me. Flaxman might evoke it wholly,--make it present in lines of
misery--bewitching power. No! I will not open Flaxman's Dante! Damned be
the hour I read in Dante! more damned than that wherein Paolo and
Francesca read in fatal Launcelot!"
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