- end_line
- 9703
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 9653
- text
- reference to the young, ardent hours of its earliest manifestations.
But as the advancing fruit itself extrudes the beautiful blossom, so in
many cases, does the eventual love for the other sex forever dismiss the
preliminary love-friendship of boys. The mere outer friendship may in
some degree--greater or less--survive; but the singular love in it has
perishingly dropped away.
If in the eye of unyielding reality and truth, the earthly heart of man
do indeed ever fix upon some one woman, to whom alone, thenceforth
eternally to be a devotee, without a single shadow of the misgiving of
its faith; and who, to him, does perfectly embody his finest, loftiest
dream of feminine loveliness, if this indeed be so--and may Heaven grant
that it be--nevertheless, in metropolitan cases, the love of the most
single-eyed lover, almost invariably, is nothing more than the ultimate
settling of innumerable wandering glances upon some one specific object;
as admonished, that the wonderful scope and variety of female
loveliness, if too long suffered to sway us without decision, shall
finally confound all power of selection. The confirmed bachelor is, in
America, at least, quite as often the victim of a too profound
appreciation of the infinite charmingness of woman, as made solitary for
life by the legitimate empire of a cold and tasteless temperament.
Though the peculiar heart-longings pertaining to his age, had at last
found their glowing response in the bosom of Lucy; yet for some period
prior to that, Pierre had not been insensible to the miscellaneous
promptings of the passion. So that even before he became a declarative
lover, Love had yet made him her general votary; and so already there
had gradually come a cooling over that ardent sentiment which in earlier
years he had cherished for Glen.
All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter's ambush,
to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking
rifles of the realities of the age. If the general love for women, had
in Pierre sensibly modified his particular sentiment toward Glen;
neither had the thousand nameless fascinations of the then brilliant
paradises of France and Italy, failed to exert their seductive influence
on many of the previous feelings of Glen. For as the very best
advantages of life are not without some envious drawback, so it is among
the evils of enlarged foreign travel, that in young and unsolid minds,
it dislodges some of the finest feelings of the home-born nature;
replacing them with a fastidious superciliousness, which like the
alledged bigoted Federalism of old times would not--according to a
political legend--grind its daily coffee in any mill save of European
manufacture, and was satirically said to have thought of importing
European air for domestic consumption. The mutually curtailed,
lessening, long-postponed, and at last altogether ceasing letters of
Pierre and Glen were the melancholy attestations of a fact, which
perhaps neither of them took very severely to heart, as certainly,
concerning it, neither took the other to task.
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