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- 12717
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 12659
- text
- own reason go down. Unendurable grief of a man, when Death itself gives
the stab, and then snatches all availments to solacement away. For in
the grave is no help, no prayer thither may go, no forgiveness thence
come; so that the penitent whose sad victim lies in the ground, for that
useless penitent his doom is eternal, and though it be Christmas-day
with all Christendom, with him it is Hell-day and an eaten liver
forever.
With what marvelous precision and exactitude he now went over in his
mind all the minutest details of his old joyous life with his mother at
Saddle Meadows. He began with his own toilet in the morning; then his
mild stroll into the fields; then his cheerful return to call his mother
in her chamber; then the gay breakfast--and so on, and on, all through
the sweet day, till mother and son kissed, and with light, loving hearts
separated to their beds, to prepare themselves for still another day of
affectionate delight. This recalling of innocence and joy in the hour of
remorsefulness and woe; this is as heating red-hot the pincers that tear
us. But in this delirium of his soul, Pierre could not define where
that line was, which separated the natural grief for the loss of a
parent from that other one which was born of compunction. He strove hard
to define it, but could not. He tried to cozen himself into believing
that all his grief was but natural, or if there existed any other, that
must spring--not from the consciousness of having done any possible
wrong--but from the pang at what terrible cost the more exalted virtues
are gained. Nor did he wholly fail in this endeavor. At last he
dismissed his mother's memory into that same profound vault where
hitherto had reposed the swooned form of his Lucy. But, as sometimes men
are coffined in a trance, being thereby mistaken for dead; so it is
possible to bury a tranced grief in the soul, erroneously supposing that
it hath no more vitality of suffering. Now, immortal things only can
beget immortality. It would almost seem one presumptive argument for the
endless duration of the human soul, that it is impossible in time and
space to kill any compunction arising from having cruelly injured a
departed fellow-being.
Ere he finally committed his mother to the profoundest vault of his
soul, fain would he have drawn one poor alleviation from a circumstance,
which nevertheless, impartially viewed, seemed equally capable either of
soothing or intensifying his grief. His mother's will, which without the
least mention of his own name, bequeathed several legacies to her
friends, and concluded by leaving all Saddle Meadows and its rent-rolls
to Glendinning Stanly; this will bore the date of the day immediately
succeeding his fatal announcement on the landing of the stairs, of his
assumed nuptials with Isabel. It plausibly pressed upon him, that as all
the evidences of his mother's dying unrelentingness toward him were
negative; and the only positive evidence--so to speak--of even that
negativeness, was the will which omitted all mention of Pierre;
therefore, as that will bore so significant a date, it must needs be
most reasonable to conclude, that it was dictated in the not yet
subsided transports of his mother's first indignation. But small
consolation was this, when he considered the final insanity of his
mother; for whence that insanity but from a hate-grief unrelenting, even
as his father must have become insane from a sin-grief irreparable? Nor
did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail to impress
his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate--his own hereditary
liability to madness. Presentiment, I say; but what is a presentiment?
how shall you coherently define a presentiment, or how make any thing
out of it which is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is
but a judgment in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet
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