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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- 9696
- text
- 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.
In the earlier periods of that strange transition from the generous
impulsiveness of youth to the provident circumspectness of age, there
generally intervenes a brief pause of unpleasant reconsidering; when
finding itself all wide of its former spontaneous self, the soul
hesitates to commit itself wholly to selfishness; more than repents its
wanderings;--yet all this is but transient; and again hurried on by the
swift current of life, the prompt-hearted boy scarce longer is to be
recognized in matured man,--very slow to feel, deliberate even in love,
and statistical even in piety. During the sway of this peculiar period,
the boy shall still make some strenuous efforts to retrieve his
departing spontaneities; but so alloyed are all such endeavors with the
incipiencies of selfishness, that they were best not made at all; since
too often they seem but empty and self-deceptive sallies, or still
worse, the merest hypocritical assumptions.
Upon the return of Glen from abroad, the commonest courtesy, not to say
the blood-relation between them, prompted Pierre to welcome him home,
with a letter, which though not over-long, and little enthusiastic,
still breathed a spirit of cousinly consideration and kindness,
pervadingly touched by the then naturally frank and all-attractive
spirit of Pierre. To this, the less earnest and now Europeanized Glen
had replied in a letter all sudden suavity; and in a strain of artistic
artlessness, mourned the apparent decline of their friendship; yet
fondly trusted that now, notwithstanding their long separation, it
would revive with added sincerity. Yet upon accidentally fixing his
glance upon the opening salutation of this delicate missive, Pierre
thought he perceived certain, not wholly disguisable chirographic
tokens, that the "My very dear Pierre," with which the letter seemed to
have been begun, had originally been written "Dear Pierre;" but that
when all was concluded, and Glen's signature put to it, then the ardent
words "My very" had been prefixed to the reconsidered "Dear Pierre;" a
casual supposition, which possibly, however unfounded, materially
retarded any answering warmth in Pierre, lest his generous flame should
only embrace a flaunted feather. Nor was this idea altogether
unreinforced, when on the reception of a second, and now half-business
letter (of which mixed sort nearly all the subsequent ones were), from
Glen, he found that the "My very dear Pierre" had already retreated into
"My dear Pierre;" and on a third occasion, into "Dear Pierre;" and on a
fourth, had made a forced and very spirited advanced march up to "My
dearest Pierre." All of which fluctuations augured ill for the
determinateness of that love, which, however immensely devoted to one
cause, could yet hoist and sail under the flags of all nations. Nor
could he but now applaud a still subsequent letter from Glen, which
abruptly, and almost with apparent indecorousness, under the
circumstances, commenced the strain of friendship without any overture
of salutation whatever; as if at last, owing to its infinite
delicateness, entirely hopeless of precisely defining the nature of
their mystical love, Glen chose rather to leave that precise definition
to the sympathetical heart and imagination of Pierre; while he himself
would go on to celebrate the general relation, by many a sugared
sentence of miscellaneous devotion. It was a little curious and rather
sardonically diverting, to compare these masterly, yet not wholly
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