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- 15224
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 15169
- text
- IV.
During this state of semi-unconsciousness, or rather trance, a
remarkable dream or vision came to him. The actual artificial objects
around him slid from him, and were replaced by a baseless yet most
imposing spectacle of natural scenery. But though a baseless vision in
itself, this airy spectacle assumed very familiar features to Pierre. It
was the phantasmagoria of the Mount of the Titans, a singular height
standing quite detached in a wide solitude not far from the grand range
of dark blue hills encircling his ancestral manor.
Say what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own ever-sweet
interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby
selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar
lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood. Thus a
high-aspiring, but most moody, disappointed bard, chancing once to visit
the Meadows and beholding that fine eminence, christened it by the name
it ever after bore; completely extinguishing its former title--The
Delectable Mountain--one long ago bestowed by an old Baptist farmer, an
hereditary admirer of Bunyan and his most marvelous book. From the spell
of that name the mountain never afterward escaped; for now, gazing upon
it by the light of those suggestive syllables, no poetical observer
could resist the apparent felicity of the title. For as if indeed the
immemorial mount would fain adapt itself to its so recent name, some
people said that it had insensibly changed its pervading aspect within a
score or two of winters. Nor was this strange conceit entirely without
foundation, seeing that the annual displacements of huge rocks and
gigantic trees were continually modifying its whole front and general
contour.
On the north side, where it fronted the old Manor-house, some fifteen
miles distant, the height, viewed from the piazza of a soft
haze-canopied summer's noon, presented a long and beautiful, but not
entirely inaccessible-looking purple precipice, some two thousand feet
in air, and on each hand sideways sloping down to lofty terraces of
pastures.
Those hill-side pastures, be it said, were thickly sown with a small
white amaranthine flower, which, being irreconcilably distasteful to the
cattle, and wholly rejected by them, and yet, continually multiplying on
every hand, did by no means contribute to the agricultural value of
those elevated lands. Insomuch, that for this cause, the disheartened
dairy tenants of that part of the Manor, had petitioned their
lady-landlord for some abatement in their annual tribute of upland
grasses, in the Juny-load; rolls of butter in the October crock; and
steers and heifers on the October hoof; with turkeys in the Christmas
sleigh.
"The small white flower, it is our bane!" the imploring tenants cried.
"The aspiring amaranth, every year it climbs and adds new terraces to
its sway! The immortal amaranth, it will not die, but last year's
flowers survive to this! The terraced pastures grow glittering white,
and in warm June still show like banks of snow:--fit token of the
sterileness the amaranth begets! Then free us from the amaranth, good
lady, or be pleased to abate our rent!"
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