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- become marbleized; so that things which in themselves were evanescent,
thus became unchangeable and eternal. So, some rare waters in Derbyshire
will petrify birds'-nests. But if fate preserves the father to a later
time, too often the filial obsequies are less profound; the canonization
less ethereal. The eye-expanded boy perceives, or vaguely thinks he
perceives, slight specks and flaws in the character he once so wholly
reverenced.
When Pierre was twelve years old, his father had died, leaving behind
him, in the general voice of the world, a marked reputation as a
gentleman and a Christian; in the heart of his wife, a green memory of
many healthy days of unclouded and joyful wedded life, and in the inmost
soul of Pierre, the impression of a bodily form of rare manly beauty and
benignity, only rivaled by the supposed perfect mould in which his
virtuous heart had been cast. Of pensive evenings, by the wide winter
fire, or in summer, in the southern piazza, when that mystical
night-silence so peculiar to the country would summon up in the minds of
Pierre and his mother, long trains of the images of the past; leading
all that spiritual procession, majestically and holily walked the
venerated form of the departed husband and father. Then their talk would
be reminiscent and serious, but sweet; and again, and again, still deep
and deeper, was stamped in Pierre's soul the cherished conceit, that his
virtuous father, so beautiful on earth, was now uncorruptibly sainted in
heaven. So choicely, and in some degree, secludedly nurtured, Pierre,
though now arrived at the age of nineteen, had never yet become so
thoroughly initiated into that darker, though truer aspect of things,
which an entire residence in the city from the earliest period of life,
almost inevitably engraves upon the mind of any keenly observant and
reflective youth of Pierre's present years. So that up to this period,
in his breast, all remained as it had been; and to Pierre, his father's
shrine seemed spotless, and still new as the marble of the tomb of him
of Arimathea.
Judge, then, how all-desolating and withering the blast, that for
Pierre, in one night, stripped his holiest shrine of all over-laid
bloom, and buried the mild statue of the saint beneath the prostrated
ruins of the soul's temple itself.
II.
As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very
walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the sweetest joys
of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.
But is life, indeed, a thing for all infidel levities, and we, its
misdeemed beneficiaries, so utterly fools and infatuate, that what we
take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of
the minutest event--the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or
the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small
characters by a sharpened feather? Are we so entirely insecure, that
that casket, wherein we have placed our holiest and most final joy, and
which we have secured by a lock of infinite deftness; can that casket be
picked and desecrated at the merest stranger's touch, when we think that
we alone hold the only and chosen key?
Pierre! thou art foolish; rebuild--no, not that, for thy shrine still
stands; it stands, Pierre, firmly stands; smellest thou not its yet
undeparted, embowering bloom? Such a note as thine can be easily enough
written, Pierre; impostors are not unknown in this curious world; or the
brisk novelist, Pierre, will write thee fifty such notes, and so steal
gushing tears from his reader's eyes; even as _thy_ note so strangely
made thine own manly eyes so arid; so glazed, and so arid,
Pierre--foolish Pierre!
Oh! mock not the poniarded heart. The stabbed man knows the steel; prate
not to him that it is only a tickling feather. Feels he not the interior
gash? What does this blood on my vesture? and what does this pang in my
soul?
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