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- 2231
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
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- 2190
- text
- affections; and by a silent and tyrannic call, challenging him in his
deepest moral being, and summoning Truth, Love, Pity, Conscience, to the
stand. Apex of all wonders! thought Pierre; this indeed almost unmans me
with its wonderfulness. Escape the face he could not. Muffling his own
in his bed-clothes--that did not hide it. Flying from it by sunlight
down the meadows, was as vain.
Most miraculous of all to Pierre was the vague impression, that
somewhere he had seen traits of the likeness of that face before. But
where, he could not say; nor could he, in the remotest degree, imagine.
He was not unaware--for in one or two instances, he had experienced the
fact--that sometimes a man may see a passing countenance in the street,
which shall irresistibly and magnetically affect him, for a moment, as
wholly unknown to him, and yet strangely reminiscent of some vague face
he has previously encountered, in some fancied time, too, of extreme
interest to his life. But not so was it now with Pierre. The face had
not perplexed him for a few speculative minutes, and then glided from
him, to return no more. It stayed close by him; only--and not
invariably--could he repel it, by the exertion of all his resolution and
self-will. Besides, what of general enchantment lurked in his strange
sensations, seemed concentringly condensed, and pointed to a spear-head,
that pierced his heart with an inexplicable pang, whenever the
specializing emotion--to call it so--seized the possession of his
thoughts, and waved into his visions, a thousand forms of by-gone times,
and many an old legendary family scene, which he had heard related by
his elderly relations, some of them now dead.
Disguising his wild reveries as best he might from the notice of his
mother, and all other persons of her household, for two days Pierre
wrestled with his own haunted spirit; and at last, so effectually purged
it of all weirdnesses, and so effectually regained the general mastery
of himself, that for a time, life went with him, as though he had never
been stirred so strangely. Once more, the sweet unconditional thought of
Lucy slid wholly into his soul, dislodging thence all such phantom
occupants. Once more he rode, he walked, he swam, he vaulted; and with
new zest threw himself into the glowing practice of all those manly
exercises, he so dearly loved. It almost seemed in him, that ere
promising forever to protect, as well as eternally to love, his Lucy, he
must first completely invigorate and embrawn himself into the possession
of such a noble muscular manliness, that he might champion Lucy against
the whole physical world.
- title
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