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- 8886
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 8824
- text
- bitter presence there, but Isabel was become a thing of intense and
fearful love for him; therefore, it was loathsome to him, that in the
smiling and ambiguous portrait, her sweet mournful image should be so
sinisterly becrooked, bemixed, and mutilated to him.
When, the first shock, and then the pause were over, he lifted the
portrait in his two hands, and held it averted from him.
"It shall not live. Hitherto I have hoarded up mementoes and monuments
of the past; been a worshiper of all heirlooms; a fond filer away of
letters, locks of hair, bits of ribbon, flowers, and the
thousand-and-one minutenesses which love and memory think they
sanctify:--but it is forever over now! If to me any memory shall
henceforth be dear, I will not mummy it in a visible memorial for every
passing beggar's dust to gather on. Love's museum is vain and foolish as
the Catacombs, where grinning apes and abject lizards are embalmed, as,
forsooth, significant of some imagined charm. It speaks merely of decay
and death, and nothing more; decay and death of endless innumerable
generations; it makes of earth one mold. How can lifelessness be fit
memorial of life?--So far, for mementoes of the sweetest. As for the
rest--now I know this, that in commonest memorials, the twilight fact of
death first discloses in some secret way, all the ambiguities of that
departed thing or person; obliquely it casts hints, and insinuates
surmises base, and eternally incapable of being cleared. Decreed by God
Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the last scene of the last act of
man's play;--a play, which begin how it may, in farce or comedy, ever
hath its tragic end; the curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse.
Therefore, never more will I play the vile pigmy, and by small memorials
after death, attempt to reverse the decree of death, by essaying the
poor perpetuating of the image of the original. Let all die, and mix
again! As for this--this!--why longer should I preserve it? Why preserve
that on which one can not patient look? If I am resolved to hold his
public memory inviolate,--destroy this thing; for here is the one great,
condemning, and unsuborned proof, whose mysticalness drives me half
mad.--Of old Greek times, before man's brain went into doting bondage,
and bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs lost
their barbaric tan and beauty; when the round world was fresh, and rosy,
and spicy, as a new-plucked apple;--all's wilted now!--in those bold
times, the great dead were not, turkey-like, dished in trenchers, and
set down all garnished in the ground, to glut the damned Cyclop like a
cannibal; but nobly envious Life cheated the glutton worm, and
gloriously burned the corpse; so that the spirit up-pointed, and visibly
forked to heaven!
"So now will I serve thee. Though that solidity of which thou art the
unsolid duplicate, hath long gone to its hideous church-yard
account;--and though, God knows! but for one part of thee it may have
been fit auditing;--yet will I now a second time see thy obsequies
performed, and by now burning thee, urn thee in the great vase of air!
Come now!"
A small wood-fire had been kindled on the hearth to purify the
long-closed room; it was now diminished to a small pointed heap of
glowing embers. Detaching and dismembering the gilded but tarnished
frame, Pierre laid the four pieces on the coals; as their dryness soon
caught the sparks, he rolled the reversed canvas into a scroll, and tied
it, and committed it to the now crackling, clamorous flames. Steadfastly
Pierre watched the first crispings and blackenings of the painted
scroll, but started as suddenly unwinding from the burnt string that had
tied it, for one swift instant, seen through the flame and smoke, the
upwrithing portrait tormentedly stared at him in beseeching horror, and
then, wrapped in one broad sheet of oily fire, disappeared forever.
- title
- Chunk 2