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- And as he now walked on in the profound meditations induced by the hour;
and as all that was in him stirred to and fro, intensely agitated by the
ever-creative fire of enthusiastic earnestness, he became fully alive to
many palliating considerations, which had they previously occurred to
him would have peremptorily forbidden his impulsive intrusion upon the
respectable clergyman.
But it is through the malice of this earthly air, that only by being
guilty of Folly does mortal man in many cases arrive at the perception
of Sense. A thought which should forever free us from hasty imprecations
upon our ever-recurring intervals of Folly; since though Folly be our
teacher, Sense is the lesson she teaches; since if Folly wholly depart
from us, Further Sense will be her companion in the flight, and we will
be left standing midway in wisdom. For it is only the miraculous vanity
of man which ever persuades him, that even for the most richly gifted
mind, there ever arrives an earthly period, where it can truly say to
itself, I have come to the Ultimate of Human Speculative Knowledge;
hereafter, at this present point I will abide. Sudden onsets of new
truth will assail him, and over-turn him as the Tartars did China; for
there is no China Wall that man can build in his soul, which shall
permanently stay the irruptions of those barbarous hordes which Truth
ever nourishes in the loins of her frozen, yet teeming North; so that
the Empire of Human Knowledge can never be lasting in any one dynasty,
since Truth still gives new Emperors to the earth.
But the thoughts we here indite as Pierre's are to be very carefully
discriminated from those we indite concerning him. Ignorant at this time
of the ideas concerning the reciprocity and partnership of Folly and
Sense, in contributing to the mental and moral growth of the mind;
Pierre keenly upbraided his thoughtlessness, and began to stagger in his
soul; as distrustful of that radical change in his general sentiments,
which had thus hurried him into a glaring impropriety and folly; as
distrustful of himself, the most wretched distrust of all. But this last
distrust was not of the heart; for heaven itself, so he felt, had
sanctified that with its blessing; but it was the distrust of his
intellect, which in undisciplinedly espousing the manly enthusiast cause
of his heart, seemed to cast a reproach upon that cause itself.
But though evermore hath the earnest heart an eventual balm for the most
deplorable error of the head; yet in the interval small alleviation is
to be had, and the whole man droops into nameless melancholy. Then it
seems as though the most magnanimous and virtuous resolutions were only
intended for fine spiritual emotions, not as mere preludes to their
bodily translation into acts; since in essaying their embodiment, we
have but proved ourselves miserable bunglers, and thereupon taken
ignominious shame to ourselves. Then, too, the never-entirely repulsed
hosts of Commonness, and Conventionalness, and Worldly
Prudent-mindedness return to the charge; press hard on the faltering
soul; and with inhuman hootings deride all its nobleness as mere
eccentricity, which further wisdom and experience shall assuredly cure.
The man is as seized by arms and legs, and convulsively pulled either
way by his own indecisions and doubts. Blackness advances her banner
over this cruel altercation, and he droops and swoons beneath its folds.
It was precisely in this mood of mind that, at about two in the morning,
Pierre, with a hanging head, now crossed the private threshold of the
Mansion of Saddle Meadows.
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