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- eternally entangle him in a fictitious alliance, which, though in
reality but a web of air, yet in effect would prove a wall of iron; for
the same powerful motive which induced the thought of forming such an
alliance, would always thereafter forbid that tacit exposure of its
fictitiousness, which would be consequent upon its public
discontinuance, and the real nuptials of Pierre with any other being
during the lifetime of Isabel.
But according to what view you take of it, it is either the gracious or
the malicious gift of the great gods to man, that on the threshold of
any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise, the thousand ulterior
intricacies and emperilings to which it must conduct; these, at the
outset, are mostly withheld from sight; and so, through her
ever-primeval wilderness Fortune's Knight rides on, alike ignorant of
the palaces or the pitfalls in its heart. Surprising, and past all
ordinary belief, are those strange oversights and inconsistencies, into
which the enthusiastic meditation upon unique or extreme resolves will
sometimes beget in young and over-ardent souls. That all-comprehending
oneness, that calm representativeness, by which a steady philosophic
mind reaches forth and draws to itself, in their collective entirety,
the objects of its contemplations; that pertains not to the young
enthusiast. By his eagerness, all objects are deceptively foreshortened;
by his intensity each object is viewed as detached; so that essentially
and relatively every thing is misseen by him. Already have we exposed
that passing preposterousness in Pierre, which by reason of the
above-named cause which we have endeavored to portray, induced him to
cherish for a time four unitedly impossible designs. And now we behold
this hapless youth all eager to involve himself in such an inextricable
twist of Fate, that the three dextrous maids themselves could hardly
disentangle him, if once he tie the complicating knots about him and
Isabel.
Ah, thou rash boy! are there no couriers in the air to warn thee away
from these emperilings, and point thee to those Cretan labyrinths, to
which thy life's cord is leading thee? Where now are the high
beneficences? Whither fled the sweet angels that are alledged guardians
to man?
Not that the impulsive Pierre wholly overlooked all that was menacing to
him in his future, if now he acted out his most rare resolve; but
eagerly foreshortened by him, they assumed not their full magnitude of
menacing; nor, indeed,--so riveted now his purpose--were they pushed up
to his face, would he for that renounce his self-renunciation; while
concerning all things more immediately contingent upon his central
resolution; these were, doubtless, in a measure, foreseen and understood
by him. Perfectly, at least, he seemed to foresee and understand, that
the present hope of Lucy Tartan must be banished from his being; that
this would carry a terrible pang to her, which in the natural recoil
would but redouble his own; that to the world all his heroicness,
standing equally unexplained and unsuspected, therefore the world would
denounce him as infamously false to his betrothed; reckless of the most
binding human vows; a secret wooer and wedder of an unknown and
enigmatic girl; a spurner of all a loving mother's wisest counselings; a
bringer down of lasting reproach upon an honorable name; a besotted
self-exile from a most prosperous house and bounteous fortune; and
lastly, that now his whole life would, in the eyes of the wide humanity,
be covered with an all-pervading haze of incurable sinisterness,
possibly not to be removed even in the concluding hour of death.
Such, oh thou son of man! are the perils and the miseries thou callest
down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou steppest aside from
those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which the common world, however
base and dastardly, surrounds thee for thy worldly good.
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