sad and sentimental.

Now, what has been hitherto presented in reference to Pierre, concerning
rubbish, as in some cases the unavoidable first-fruits of genius, is in
no wise contradicted by the fact, that the first published works of many
meritorious authors have given mature token of genius; for we do not
know how many they previously published to the flames; or privately
published in their own brains, and suppressed there as quickly. And in
the inferior instances of an immediate literary success, in very young
writers, it will be almost invariably observable, that for that instant
success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience
in life, embodied in a book, which because, for that cause, containing
original matter, the author himself, forsooth, is to be considered
original; in this way, many very original books, being the product of
very unoriginal minds. Indeed, man has only to be but a little
circumspect, and away flies the last rag of his vanity. The world is
forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original
man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who
according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an
original; the only original author being God. Had Milton's been the lot
of Caspar Hauser, Milton would have been vacant as he. For though the
naked soul of man doth assuredly contain one latent element of
intellectual productiveness; yet never was there a child born solely
from one parent; the visible world of experience being that procreative
thing which impregnates the muses; self-reciprocally efficient
hermaphrodites being but a fable.

There is infinite nonsense in the world on all of these matters; hence
blame me not if I contribute my mite. It is impossible to talk or to
write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open; the
Invulnerable Knight wears his visor down. Still, it is pleasant to chat;
for it passes the time ere we go to our beds; and speech is farther
incited, when like strolling improvisatores of Italy, we are paid for
our breath. And we are only too thankful when the gapes of the audience
dismiss us with the few ducats we earn.

II.

It may have been already inferred, that the pecuniary plans of Pierre
touching his independent means of support in the city were based upon
his presumed literary capabilities. For what else could he do? He knew
no profession, no trade. Glad now perhaps might he have been, if Fate
had made him a blacksmith, and not a gentleman, a Glendinning, and a
genius. But here he would have been unpardonably rash, had he not
already, in some degree, actually tested the fact, in his own personal
experience, that it is not altogether impossible for a magazine
contributor to Juvenile American literature to receive a few pence in
exchange for his ditties. Such cases stand upon imperishable record, and
it were both folly and ingratitude to disown them.

But since the fine social position and noble patrimony of Pierre, had
thus far rendered it altogether unnecessary for him to earn the least
farthing of his own in the world, whether by hand or by brain; it may
seem desirable to explain a little here as we go. We shall do so, but
always including, the preamble.

Sometimes every possible maxim or thought seems an old one; yet it is
among the elder of the things in that unaugmentable stock, that never
mind what one's situation may be, however prosperous and happy, he will
still be impatient of it; he will still reach out of himself, and beyond
every present condition. So, while many a poor be-inked galley-slave,
toiling with the heavy oar of a quill, to gain something wherewithal to
stave off the cravings of nature; and in his hours of morbid
self-reproach, regarding his paltry wages, at all events, as an
unavoidable disgrace to him; while this galley-slave of letters would
have leaped with delight--reckless of the feeble seams of his
pantaloons--at the most distant prospect of inheriting the broad farms
of Saddle Meadows, lord of an all-sufficing income, and forever exempt
from wearing on his hands those treacherous plague-spots of
indigence--videlicet, blots from the inkstand;--Pierre himself, the
undoubted and actual possessor of the things only longingly and
hopelessly imagined by the other; the then top of Pierre's worldly
ambition, was the being able to boast that he had written such matters
as publishers would pay something for in the way of a mere business
transaction, which they thought would prove profitable. Yet altogether
weak and silly as this may seem in Pierre, let us preambillically
examine a little further, and see if it be so indeed.

Pierre was proud; and a proud man--proud with the sort of pride now
meant--ever holds but lightly those things, however beneficent, which he
did not for himself procure. Were such pride carried out to its
legitimate end, the man would eat no bread, the seeds whereof he had not
himself put into the soil, not entirely without humiliation, that even
that seed must be borrowed from some previous planter. A proud man likes
to feel himself in himself, and not by reflection in others. He likes to
be not only his own Alpha and Omega, but to be distinctly all the
intermediate gradations, and then to slope off on his own spine either
way, into the endless impalpable ether. What a glory it was then to
Pierre, when first in his two gentlemanly hands he jingled the wages of
labor! Talk of drums and the fife; the echo of coin of one's own earning
is more inspiring than all the trumpets of Sparta. How disdainfully now
he eyed the sumptuousness of his hereditary halls--the hangings, and the
pictures, and the bragging historic armorials and the banners of the
Glendinning renown; confident, that if need should come, he would not be
forced to turn resurrectionist, and dig up his grandfather's
Indian-chief grave for the ancestral sword and shield, ignominiously to
pawn them for a living! He could live on himself. Oh, twice-blessed now,
in the feeling of practical capacity, was Pierre.

The mechanic, the day-laborer, has but one way to live; his body must
provide for his body. But not only could Pierre in some sort, do that;
he could do the other; and letting his body stay lazily at home, send
off his soul to labor, and his soul would come faithfully back and pay
his body her wages. So, some unprofessional gentlemen of the
aristocratic South, who happen to own slaves, give those slaves liberty
to go and seek work, and every night return with their wages, which
constitute those idle gentlemen's income. Both ambidexter and
quadruple-armed is that man, who in a day-laborer's body, possesses a
day-laboring soul. Yet let not such an one be over-confident. Our God is
a jealous God; He wills not that any man should permanently possess the
least shadow of His own self-sufficient attributes. Yoke the body to the
soul, and put both to the plough, and the one or the other must in the
end assuredly drop in the furrow. Keep, then, thy body effeminate for
labor, and thy soul laboriously robust; or else thy soul effeminate for
labor, and thy body laboriously robust. Elect! the two will not
lastingly abide in one yoke. Thus over the most vigorous and soaring
conceits, doth the cloud of Truth come stealing; thus doth the shot,
even of a sixty-two-pounder pointed upward, light at last on the earth;
for strive we how we may, we can not overshoot the earth's orbit, to
receive the attractions of other planets; Earth's law of gravitation
extends far beyond her own atmosphere.

In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already fully provided
with what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who
is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him
even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain,
downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed
only by the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all
transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively
heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their willful
inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing
transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But
if the eminent Jugglarius himself ever advocated in mere words a
doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all
practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally
practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still
more of the superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath
nothing at all, even that which he hath,--then is the truest book in the
world a lie.

Wherefore we see that the so-called Transcendentalists are not the only
people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that
the Utilitarians,--the every-day world's people themselves, far
transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own
incomprehensible worldly maxims. And--what is vastly more--with the one
party, their Transcendentals are but theoretic and inactive, and
therefore harmless; whereas with the other, they are actually clothed in
living deeds.

The highly graveling doctrine and practice of the world, above cited,
had in some small degree been manifested in the case of Pierre. He
prospectively possessed the fee of several hundred farms scattered over
part of two adjoining counties; and now the proprietor of that popular
periodical, the Gazelle Magazine, sent him several additional dollars
for his sonnets. That proprietor (though in sooth, he never read the
sonnets, but referred them to his professional adviser; and was so
ignorant, that, for a long time previous to the periodical's actually
being started, he insisted upon spelling the Gazelle with a _g_ for the
_z_, as thus: _Gagelle_; maintaining, that in the Gazelle connection,
the _z_ was a mere impostor, and that the _g_ was soft; for he was a
judge of softness, and could speak from experience); that proprietor was
undoubtedly a Transcendentalist; for did he not act upon the
Transcendental doctrine previously set forth?

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always
invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his
dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the
sweet leaf of Havanna. So that this highly-celebrated and world-renowned
Pierre--the great author--whose likeness the world had never seen (for
had he not repeatedly refused the world his likeness?), this famous
poet, and philosopher, author of "_The Tropical Summer: a Sonnet_;"
against whose very life several desperadoes were darkly plotting (for
had not the biographers sworn they would have it!); this towering
celebrity--there he would sit smoking, and smoking, mild and
self-festooned as a vapory mountain. It was very involuntarily and
satisfactorily reciprocal. His cigars were lighted in two ways: lighted
by the sale of his sonnets, and lighted by the printed sonnets
themselves.

For even at that early time in his authorial life, Pierre, however vain
of his fame, was not at all proud of his paper. Not only did he make
allumettes of his sonnets when published, but was very careless about
his discarded manuscripts; they were to be found lying all round the
house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went
for kindlings to the fires; and were forever flitting out of the
windows, and under the door-sills, into the faces of people passing the
manorial mansion. In this reckless, indifferent way of his, Pierre
himself was a sort of publisher. It is true his more familiar admirers
often earnestly remonstrated with him, against this irreverence to the
primitive vestments of his immortal productions; saying, that whatever
had once felt the nib of his mighty pen, was thenceforth sacred as the
lips which had but once saluted the great toe of the Pope. But hardened
as he was to these friendly censurings, Pierre never forbade that ardent
appreciation of "The Tear," who, finding a small fragment of the
original manuscript containing a dot (_tear_), over an _i_ (_eye_),
esteemed the significant event providential; and begged the
distinguished favor of being permitted to have it for a brooch; and
ousted a cameo-head of Homer, to replace it with the more invaluable
gem. He became inconsolable, when being caught in a rain, the dot
(_tear_) disappeared from over the _i_ (_eye_); so that the strangeness
and wonderfulness of the sonnet was still conspicuous; in that though
the least fragment of it could weep in a drought, yet did it become all
tearless in a shower.

But this indifferent and supercilious amateur--deaf to the admiration of
the world; the enigmatically merry and renowned author of "The Tear;"
the pride of the Gazelle Magazine, on whose flaunting cover his name
figured at the head of all contributors--(no small men either; for their
lives had all been fraternally written by each other, and they had
clubbed, and had their likenesses all taken by the aggregate job, and
published on paper, all bought at one shop) this high-prestiged
Pierre--whose future popularity and voluminousness had become so
startlingly announced by what he had already written, that certain
speculators came to the Meadows to survey its water-power, if any, with
a view to start a paper-mill expressly for the great author, and so
monopolize his stationery dealings;--this vast being,--spoken of with
awe by all merely youthful aspirants for fame; this age-neutralizing
Pierre;--before whom an old gentleman of sixty-five, formerly librarian
to Congress, on being introduced to him at the Magazine publishers',
devoutly took off his hat, and kept it so, and remained standing, though
Pierre was socially seated with his hat on;--this wonderful, disdainful
genius--but only life-amateur as yet--is now soon to appear in a far
different guise. He shall now learn, and very bitterly learn, that
though the world worship Mediocrity and Common Place, yet hath it fire
and sword for all cotemporary Grandeur; that though it swears that it
fiercely assails all Hypocrisy, yet hath it not always an ear for
Earnestness.

And though this state of things, united with the ever multiplying
freshets of new books, seems inevitably to point to a coming time, when
the mass of humanity reduced to one level of dotage, authors shall be
scarce as alchymists are to-day, and the printing-press be reckoned a
small invention:--yet even now, in the foretaste of this let us hug
ourselves, oh, my Aurelian! that though the age of authors be passing,
the hours of earnestness shall remain!

BOOK XIX.

THE CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES.

I.

In the lower old-fashioned part of the city, in a narrow street--almost
a lane--once filled with demure-looking dwellings, but now chiefly with
immense lofty warehouses of foreign importers; and not far from the
corner where the lane intersected with a very considerable but
contracted thoroughfare for merchants and their clerks, and their carmen
and porters; stood at this period a rather singular and ancient edifice,
a relic of the more primitive time. The material was a grayish stone,
rudely cut and masoned into walls of surprising thickness and strength;
along two of which walls--the side ones--were distributed as many rows
of arched and stately windows. A capacious, square, and wholly
unornamented tower rose in front to twice the height of the body of the
church; three sides of this tower were pierced with small and narrow
apertures. Thus far, in its external aspect, the building--now more than
a century old,--sufficiently attested for what purpose it had originally
been founded. In its rear, was a large and lofty plain brick structure,
with its front to the rearward street, but its back presented to the
back of the church, leaving a small, flagged, and quadrangular vacancy
between. At the sides of this quadrangle, three stories of homely brick
colonnades afforded covered communication between the ancient church,
and its less elderly adjunct. A dismantled, rusted, and forlorn old
railing of iron fencing in a small courtyard in front of the rearward
building, seemed to hint, that the latter had usurped an unoccupied
space formerly sacred as the old church's burial inclosure. Such a fancy
would have been entirely true. Built when that part of the city was
devoted to private residences, and not to warehouses and offices as now,
the old Church of the Apostles had had its days of sanctification and
grace; but the tide of change and progress had rolled clean through its
broad-aisle and side-aisles, and swept by far the greater part of its
congregation two or three miles up town. Some stubborn and elderly old
merchants and accountants, lingered awhile among its dusty pews,
listening to the exhortations of a faithful old pastor, who, sticking to
his post in this flight of his congregation, still propped his
half-palsied form in the worm-eaten pulpit, and occasionally
pounded--though now with less vigorous hand--the moth-eaten covering of
its desk. But it came to pass, that this good old clergyman died; and
when the gray-headed and bald-headed remaining merchants and accountants
followed his coffin out of the broad-aisle to see it reverently
interred; then that was the last time that ever the old edifice
witnessed the departure of a regular worshiping assembly from its walls.
The venerable merchants and accountants held a meeting, at which it was
finally decided, that, hard and unwelcome as the necessity might be, yet
it was now no use to disguise the fact, that the building could no
longer be efficiently devoted to its primitive purpose. It must be
divided into stores; cut into offices; and given for a roost to the
gregarious lawyers. This intention was executed, even to the making
offices high up in the tower; and so well did the thing succeed, that
ultimately the church-yard was invaded for a supplemental edifice,
likewise to be promiscuously rented to the legal crowd. But this new
building very much exceeded the body of the church in height. It was
some seven stories; a fearful pile of Titanic bricks, lifting its tiled
roof almost to a level with the top of the sacred tower.

In this ambitious erection the proprietors went a few steps, or rather a
few stories, too far. For as people would seldom willingly fall into
legal altercations unless the lawyers were always very handy to help
them; so it is ever an object with lawyers to have their offices as
convenient as feasible to the street; on the ground-floor, if possible,
without a single acclivity of a step; but at any rate not in the seventh
story of any house, where their clients might be deterred from employing
them at all, if they were compelled to mount seven long flights of
stairs, one over the other, with very brief landings, in order even to
pay their preliminary retaining fees. So, from some time after its
throwing open, the upper stories of the less ancient attached edifice
remained almost wholly without occupants; and by the forlorn echoes of
their vacuities, right over the head of the business-thriving legal
gentlemen below, must--to some few of them at least--have suggested
unwelcome similitudes, having reference to the crowded state of their
basement-pockets, as compared with the melancholy condition of their
attics;--alas! full purses and empty heads! This dreary posture of
affairs, however, was at last much altered for the better, by the
gradual filling up of the vacant chambers on high, by scores of those
miscellaneous, bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously
professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby black, and
unaccountable foreign-looking fellows in blue spectacles; who,
previously issuing from unknown parts of the world, like storks in
Holland, light on the eaves, and in the attics of lofty old buildings in
most large sea-port towns. Here they sit and talk like magpies; or
descending in quest of improbable dinners, are to be seen drawn up along
the curb in front of the eating-houses, like lean rows of broken-hearted
pelicans on a beach; their pockets loose, hanging down and flabby, like
the pelican's pouches when fish are hard to be caught. But these poor,
penniless devils still strive to make ample amends for their physical
forlornness, by resolutely reveling in the region of blissful ideals.

They are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or
indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive
French politicians, or German philosophers. Their mental tendencies,
however heterodox at times, are still very fine and spiritual upon the
whole; since the vacuity of their exchequers leads them to reject the
coarse materialism of Hobbs, and incline to the airy exaltations of the
Berkelyan philosophy. Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can
not but give in to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of
leisure in their attics (physical and figurative), unite with the
leisure in their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that
undivided attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the
sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can't) is the one
great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives. These are the
glorious paupers, from whom I learn the profoundest mysteries of things;
since their very existence in the midst of such a terrible
precariousness of the commonest means of support, affords a problem on
which many speculative nutcrackers have been vainly employed. Yet let me
here offer up three locks of my hair, to the memory of all such glorious
paupers who have lived and died in this world. Surely, and truly I honor
them--noble men often at bottom--and for that very reason I make bold to
be gamesome about them; for where fundamental nobleness is, and
fundamental honor is due, merriment is never accounted irreverent. The
fools and pretenders of humanity, and the impostors and baboons among
the gods, these only are offended with raillery; since both those gods
and men whose titles to eminence are secure, seldom worry themselves
about the seditious gossip of old apple-women, and the skylarkings of
funny little boys in the street.

When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow. Places once set
apart to lofty purposes, still retain the name of that loftiness, even
when converted to the meanest uses. It would seem, as if forced by
imperative Fate to renounce the reality of the romantic and lofty, the
people of the present would fain make a compromise by retaining some
purely imaginative remainder. The curious effects of this tendency is
oftenest evinced in those venerable countries of the old transatlantic
world; where still over the Thames one bridge yet retains the monastic
tide of Blackfriars; though not a single Black Friar, but many a
pickpocket, has stood on that bank since a good ways beyond the days of
Queen Bess; where still innumerable other historic anomalies sweetly and
sadly remind the present man of the wonderful procession that preceded
him in his new generation. Nor--though the comparative recentness of our
own foundation upon these Columbian shores, excludes any considerable
participation in these attractive anomalies,--yet are we not altogether,
in our more elderly towns, wholly without some touch of them, here and
there. It was thus with the ancient Church of the Apostles--better
known, even in its primitive day, under the abbreviative of The
Apostles--which, though now converted from its original purpose to one
so widely contrasting, yet still retained its majestical name. The
lawyer or artist tenanting its chambers, whether in the new building or
the old, when asked where he was to be found, invariably replied,--_At
the Apostles'_. But because now, at last, in the course of the
inevitable transplantations of the more notable localities of the
various professions in a thriving and amplifying town, the venerable
spot offered not such inducements as before to the legal gentlemen; and
as the strange nondescript adventurers and artists, and indigent
philosophers of all sorts, crowded in as fast as the others left;
therefore, in reference to the metaphysical strangeness of these curious
inhabitants, and owing in some sort to the circumstance, that several of
them were well-known Teleological Theorists, and Social Reformers, and
political propagandists of all manner of heterodoxical tenets;
therefore, I say, and partly, peradventure, from some slight waggishness
in the public; the immemorial popular name of the ancient church itself
was participatingly transferred to the dwellers therein. So it came to
pass, that in the general fashion of the day, he who had chambers in the
old church was familiarly styled an _Apostle_.

But as every effect is but the cause of another and a subsequent one, so
it now happened that finding themselves thus clannishly, and not
altogether infelicitously entitled, the occupants of the venerable
church began to come together out of their various dens, in more social
communion; attracted toward each other by a title common to all.
By-and-by, from this, they went further; and insensibly, at last became
organized in a peculiar society, which, though exceedingly
inconspicuous, and hardly perceptible in its public demonstrations, was
still secretly suspected to have some mysterious ulterior object,
vaguely connected with the absolute overturning of Church and State, and
the hasty and premature advance of some unknown great political and
religious Millennium. Still, though some zealous conservatives and
devotees of morals, several times left warning at the police-office, to
keep a wary eye on the old church; and though, indeed, sometimes an
officer would look up inquiringly at the suspicious narrow window-slits
in the lofty tower; yet, to say the truth, was the place, to all
appearance, a very quiet and decorous one, and its occupants a company
of harmless people, whose greatest reproach was efflorescent coats and
crack-crowned hats all podding in the sun.

Though in the middle of the day many bales and boxes would be trundled
along the stores in front of the Apostles'; and along its critically
narrow sidewalk, the merchants would now and then hurry to meet their
checks ere the banks should close: yet the street, being mostly devoted
to mere warehousing purposes, and not used as a general thoroughfare, it
was at all times a rather secluded and silent place. But from an hour or
two before sundown to ten or eleven o'clock the next morning, it was
remarkably silent and depopulated, except by the Apostles themselves;
while every Sunday it presented an aspect of surprising and startling
quiescence; showing nothing but one long vista of six or seven stories
of inexorable iron shutters on both sides of the way. It was pretty much
the same with the other street, which, as before said, intersected with
the warehousing lane, not very far from the Apostles'. For though that
street was indeed a different one from the latter, being full of cheap
refectories for clerks, foreign restaurants, and other places of
commercial resort; yet the only hum in it was restricted to business
hours; by night it was deserted of every occupant but the lamp-posts;
and on Sunday, to walk through it, was like walking through an avenue of
sphinxes.

Such, then, was the present condition of the ancient Church of the
Apostles; buzzing with a few lingering, equivocal lawyers in the
basement, and populous with all sorts of poets, painters, paupers and
philosophers above. A mysterious professor of the flute was perched in
one of the upper stories of the tower; and often, of silent, moonlight
nights, his lofty, melodious notes would be warbled forth over the roofs
of the ten thousand warehouses around him--as of yore, the bell had
pealed over the domestic gables of a long-departed generation.

II.

On the third night following the arrival of the party in the city,
Pierre sat at twilight by a lofty window in the rear building of the
Apostles'. The chamber was meager even to meanness. No carpet on the
floor, no picture on the wall; nothing but a low, long, and very
curious-looking single bedstead, that might possibly serve for an
indigent bachelor's pallet, a large, blue, chintz-covered chest, a
rickety, rheumatic, and most ancient mahogany chair, and a wide board of
the toughest live-oak, about six feet long, laid upon two upright empty
flour-barrels, and loaded with a large bottle of ink, an unfastened
bundle of quills, a pen-knife, a folder, and a still unbound ream of
foolscap paper, significantly stamped, "Ruled; Blue."

There, on the third night, at twilight, sat Pierre by that lofty window
of a beggarly room in the rear-building of the Apostles'. He was
entirely idle, apparently; there was nothing in his hands; but there
might have been something on his heart. Now and then he fixedly gazes at
the curious-looking, rusty old bedstead. It seemed powerfully symbolical
to him; and most symbolical it was. For it was the ancient dismemberable
and portable camp-bedstead of his grandfather, the defiant defender of
the Fort, the valiant captain in many an unsuccumbing campaign. On that
very camp-bedstead, there, beneath his tent on the field, the glorious
old mild-eyed and warrior-hearted general had slept, and but waked to
buckle his knight-making sword by his side; for it was noble knighthood
to be slain by grand Pierre; in the other world his foes' ghosts bragged
of the hand that had given them their passports.

But has that hard bed of War, descended for an inheritance to the soft
body of Peace? In the peaceful time of full barns, and when the noise of
the peaceful flail is abroad, and the hum of peaceful commerce resounds,
is the grandson of two Generals a warrior too? Oh, not for naught, in
the time of this seeming peace, are warrior grandsires given to Pierre!
For Pierre is a warrior too; Life his campaign, and three fierce allies,
Woe and Scorn and Want, his foes. The wide world is banded against him;
for lo you! he holds up the standard of Right, and swears by the Eternal
and True! But ah, Pierre, Pierre, when thou goest to that bed, how
humbling the thought, that thy most extended length measures not the
proud six feet four of thy grand John of Gaunt sire! The stature of the
warrior is cut down to the dwindled glory of the fight. For more
glorious in real tented field to strike down your valiant foe, than in
the conflicts of a noble soul with a dastardly world to chase a vile
enemy who ne'er will show front.

There, then, on the third night, at twilight, by the lofty window of
that beggarly room, sat Pierre in the rear building of the Apostles'. He
is gazing out from the window now. But except the donjon form of the old
gray tower, seemingly there is nothing to see but a wilderness of tiles,
slate, shingles, and tin;--the desolate hanging wildernesses of tiles,
slate, shingles and tin, wherewith we modern Babylonians replace the
fair hanging-gardens of the fine old Asiatic times when the excellent
Nebuchadnezzar was king.

There he sits, a strange exotic, transplanted from the delectable
alcoves of the old manorial mansion, to take root in this niggard soil.
No more do the sweet purple airs of the hills round about the green
fields of Saddle Meadows come revivingly wafted to his cheek. Like a
flower he feels the change; his bloom is gone from his cheek; his cheek
is wilted and pale.

From the lofty window of that beggarly room, what is it that Pierre is
so intently eying? There is no street at his feet; like a profound black
gulf the open area of the quadrangle gapes beneath him. But across it,
and at the further end of the steep roof of the ancient church, there
looms the gray and grand old tower; emblem to Pierre of an unshakable
fortitude, which, deep-rooted in the heart of the earth, defied all the
howls of the air.

There is a door in Pierre's room opposite the window of Pierre: and now
a soft knock is heard in that direction, accompanied by gentle words,
asking whether the speaker might enter.

"Yes, always, sweet Isabel"--answered Pierre, rising and approaching
the door;--"here: let us drag out the old camp-bed for a sofa; come, sit
down now, my sister, and let us fancy ourselves anywhere thou wilt."

"Then, my brother, let us fancy ourselves in realms of everlasting
twilight and peace, where no bright sun shall rise, because the black
night is always its follower. Twilight and peace, my brother, twilight
and peace!"

"It is twilight now, my sister; and surely, this part of the city at
least seems still."

"Twilight now, but night soon; then a brief sun, and then another long
night. Peace now, but sleep and nothingness soon, and then hard work for
thee, my brother, till the sweet twilight come again."

"Let us light a candle, my sister; the evening is deepening."

"For what light a candle, dear Pierre?--Sit close to me, my brother."

He moved nearer to her, and stole one arm around her; her sweet head
leaned against his breast; each felt the other's throbbing.

"Oh, my dear Pierre, why should we always be longing for peace, and then
be impatient of peace when it comes? Tell me, my brother! Not two hours
ago, thou wert wishing for twilight, and now thou wantest a candle to
hurry the twilight's last lingering away."

But Pierre did not seem to hear her; his arm embraced her tighter; his
whole frame was invisibly trembling. Then suddenly in a low tone of
wonderful intensity he breathed:

"Isabel! Isabel!"

She caught one arm around him, as his was around herself; the tremor ran
from him to her; both sat dumb.

He rose, and paced the room.

"Well, Pierre; thou camest in here to arrange thy matters, thou saidst.
Now what hast thou done? Come, we will light a candle now."

The candle was lighted, and their talk went on.

"How about the papers, my brother? Dost thou find every thing right?
Hast thou decided upon what to publish first, while thou art writing the
new thing thou didst hint of?"

"Look at that chest, my sister. Seest thou not that the cords are yet
untied?"

"Then thou hast not been into it at all as yet?"

"Not at all, Isabel. In ten days I have lived ten thousand years.
Forewarned now of the rubbish in that chest, I can not summon the heart
to open it. Trash! Dross! Dirt!"

"Pierre! Pierre! what change is this? Didst thou not tell me, ere we
came hither, that thy chest not only contained some silver and gold, but
likewise far more precious things, readily convertible into silver and
gold? Ah, Pierre, thou didst swear we had naught to fear!"

"If I have ever willfully deceived thee, Isabel, may the high gods prove
Benedict Arnolds to me, and go over to the devils to reinforce them
against me! But to have ignorantly deceived myself and thee together,
Isabel; that is a very different thing. Oh, what a vile juggler and
cheat is man! Isabel, in that chest are things which in the hour of
composition, I thought the very heavens looked in from the windows in
astonishment at their beauty and power. Then, afterward, when days
cooled me down, and again I took them up and scanned them, some
underlying suspicions intruded; but when in the open air, I recalled the
fresh, unwritten images of the bunglingly written things; then I felt
buoyant and triumphant again; as if by that act of ideal recalling, I
had, forsooth, transferred the perfect ideal to the miserable written
attempt at embodying it. This mood remained. So that afterward how I
talked to thee about the wonderful things I had done; the gold and the
silver mine I had long before sprung for thee and for me, who never were
to come to want in body or mind. Yet all this time, there was the latent
suspicion of folly; but I would not admit it; I shut my soul's door in
its face. Yet now, the ten thousand universal revealings brand me on the
forehead with fool! and like protested notes at the Bankers, all those
written things of mine, are jaggingly cut through and through with the
protesting hammer of Truth!--Oh, I am sick, sick, sick!"

"Let the arms that never were filled but by thee, lure thee back again,
Pierre, to the peace of the twilight, even though it be of the dimmest!"

She blew out the light, and made Pierre sit down by her; and their hands
were placed in each other's.

"Say, are not thy torments now gone, my brother?"

"But replaced by--by--by--Oh God, Isabel, unhand me!" cried Pierre,
starting up. "Ye heavens, that have hidden yourselves in the black hood
of the night, I call to ye! If to follow Virtue to her uttermost vista,
where common souls never go; if by that I take hold on hell, and the
uttermost virtue, after all, prove but a betraying pander to the
monstrousest vice,--then close in and crush me, ye stony walls, and into
one gulf let all things tumble together!"

"My brother! this is some incomprehensible raving," pealed Isabel,
throwing both arms around him;--"my brother, my brother!"

"Hark thee to thy furthest inland soul"--thrilled Pierre in a steeled
and quivering voice. "Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy
brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me?--I am
Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common
humanity,--no more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own
combustibles. If they have put powder-casks in me--let them look to it!
let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and seem to half-see,
somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide of
the mark. The demigods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash!
Isabel, I will write such things--I will gospelize the world anew, and
show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!--I will write it, I will
write it!"

"Pierre, I am a poor girl, born in the midst of a mystery, bred in
mystery, and still surviving to mystery. So mysterious myself, the air
and the earth are unutterable to me; no word have I to express them. But
these are the circumambient mysteries; thy words, thy thoughts, open
other wonder-worlds to me, whither by myself I might fear to go. But
trust to me, Pierre. With thee, with thee, I would boldly swim a
starless sea, and be buoy to thee, there, when thou the strong swimmer
shouldst faint. Thou, Pierre, speakest of Virtue and Vice; life-secluded
Isabel knows neither the one nor the other, but by hearsay. What are
they, in their real selves, Pierre? Tell me first what is
Virtue:--begin!"

"If on that point the gods are dumb, shall a pigmy speak? Ask the air!"

"Then Virtue is nothing."

"Not that!"

"Then Vice?"

"Look: a nothing is the substance, it casts one shadow one way, and
another the other way; and these two shadows cast from one nothing;
these, seems to me, are Virtue and Vice."

"Then why torment thyself so, dearest Pierre?"

"It is the law."

"What?"

"That a nothing should torment a nothing; for I am a nothing. It is all
a dream--we dream that we dreamed we dream."

"Pierre, when thou just hovered on the verge, thou wert a riddle to me;
but now, that thou art deep down in the gulf of the soul,--now, when
thou wouldst be lunatic to wise men, perhaps--now doth poor ignorant
Isabel begin to comprehend thee. Thy feeling hath long been mine,
Pierre. Long loneliness and anguish have opened miracles to me. Yes, it
is all a dream!"

Swiftly he caught her in his arms:--"From nothing proceeds nothing,
Isabel! How can one sin in a dream?"

"First what is sin, Pierre?"

"Another name for the other name, Isabel."

"For Virtue, Pierre?"

"No, for Vice."

"Let us sit down again, my brother."

"I am Pierre."

"Let us sit down again, Pierre; sit close; thy arm!"

And so, on the third night, when the twilight was gone, and no lamp was
lit, within the lofty window of that beggarly room, sat Pierre and
Isabel hushed.

BOOK XX.

CHARLIE MILLTHORPE.

I.

Pierre had been induced to take chambers at the Apostles', by one of the
Apostles themselves, an old acquaintance of his, and a native of Saddle
Meadows.

Millthorpe was the son of a very respectable farmer--now dead--of more
than common intelligence, and whose bowed shoulders and homely garb had
still been surmounted by a head fit for a Greek philosopher, and
features so fine and regular that they would have well graced an opulent
gentleman. The political and social levelings and confoundings of all
manner of human elements in America, produce many striking individual
anomalies unknown in other lands. Pierre well remembered old farmer
Millthorpe:--the handsome, melancholy, calm-tempered, mute, old man; in
whose countenance--refinedly ennobled by nature, and yet coarsely tanned
and attenuated by many a prolonged day's work in the harvest--rusticity
and classicalness were strangely united. The delicate profile of his
face, bespoke the loftiest aristocracy; his knobbed and bony hands
resembled a beggar's.

Though for several generations the Millthorpes had lived on the
Glendinning lands, they loosely and unostentatiously traced their origin
to an emigrating English Knight, who had crossed the sea in the time of
the elder Charles. But that indigence which had prompted the knight to
forsake his courtly country for the howling wilderness, was the only
remaining hereditament left to his bedwindled descendants in the fourth
and fifth remove. At the time that Pierre first recollected this
interesting man, he had, a year or two previous, abandoned an ample farm
on account of absolute inability to meet the manorial rent, and was
become the occupant of a very poor and contracted little place, on which
was a small and half-ruinous house. There, he then harbored with his
wife,--a very gentle and retiring person,--his three little daughters,
and his only son, a lad of Pierre's own age. The hereditary beauty and
youthful bloom of this boy; his sweetness of temper, and something of
natural refinement as contrasted with the unrelieved rudeness, and
oftentimes sordidness, of his neighbors; these things had early
attracted the sympathetic, spontaneous friendliness of Pierre. They were
often wont to take their boyish rambles together; and even the severely
critical Mrs. Glendinning, always fastidiously cautious as to the
companions of Pierre, had never objected to his intimacy with so
prepossessing and handsome a rustic as Charles.

Boys are often very swiftly acute in forming a judgment on character.
The lads had not long companioned, ere Pierre concluded, that however
fine his face, and sweet his temper, young Millthorpe was but little
vigorous in mind; besides possessing a certain constitutional,
sophomorean presumption and egotism; which, however, having nothing to
feed on but his father's meal and potatoes, and his own essentially
timid and humane disposition, merely presented an amusing and harmless,
though incurable, anomalous feature in his character, not at all
impairing the good-will and companionableness of Pierre; for even in his
boyhood, Pierre possessed a sterling charity, which could cheerfully
overlook all minor blemishes in his inferiors, whether in fortune or
mind; content and glad to embrace the good whenever presented, or with
whatever conjoined. So, in youth, do we unconsciously act upon those
peculiar principles, which in conscious and verbalized maxims shall
systematically regulate our maturer lives;--a fact, which forcibly
illustrates the necessitarian dependence of our lives, and their
subordination, not to ourselves, but to Fate.

If the grown man of taste, possess not only some eye to detect the
picturesque in the natural landscape, so also, has he as keen a
perception of what may not unfitly be here styled, the _povertiresque_
in the social landscape. To such an one, not more picturesquely
conspicuous is the dismantled thatch in a painted cottage of
Gainsborough, than the time-tangled and want-thinned locks of a beggar,
_povertiresquely_ diversifying those snug little cabinet-pictures of the
world, which, exquisitely varnished and framed, are hung up in the
drawing-room minds of humane men of taste, and amiable philosophers of
either the "Compensation," or "Optimist" school. They deny that any
misery is in the world, except for the purpose of throwing the fine
_povertiresque_ element into its general picture. Go to! God hath
deposited cash in the Bank subject to our gentlemanly order; he hath
bounteously blessed the world with a summer carpet of green. Begone,
Heraclitus! The lamentations of the rain are but to make us our
rainbows!

Not that in equivocal reference to the _povertiresque_ old farmer
Millthorpe, Pierre is here intended to be hinted at. Still, man can not
wholly escape his surroundings. Unconsciously Mrs. Glendinning had
always been one of these curious Optimists; and in his boyish life
Pierre had not wholly escaped the maternal contagion. Yet often, in
calling at the old farmer's for Charles of some early winter mornings,
and meeting the painfully embarrassed, thin, feeble features of Mrs.
Millthorpe, and the sadly inquisitive and hopelessly half-envious
glances of the three little girls; and standing on the threshold, Pierre
would catch low, aged, life-weary groans from a recess out of sight
from the door; then would Pierre have some boyish inklings of something
else than the pure _povertiresque_ in poverty: some inklings of what it
might be, to be old, and poor, and worn, and rheumatic, with shivering
death drawing nigh, and present life itself but a dull and a chill! some
inklings of what it might be, for him who in youth had vivaciously
leaped from his bed, impatient to meet the earliest sun, and lose no
sweet drop of his life, now hating the beams he once so dearly loved;
turning round in his bed to the wall to avoid them; and still postponing
the foot which should bring him back to the dismal day; when the sun is
not gold, but copper; and the sky is not blue, but gray; and the blood,
like Rhenish wine, too long unquaffed by Death, grows thin and sour in
the veins.

Pierre had not forgotten that the augmented penury of the Millthorpe's
was, at the time we now retrospectively treat of, gravely imputed by the
gossiping frequenters of the Black Swan Inn, to certain insinuated moral
derelictions of the farmer. "The old man tipped his elbow too often,"
once said in Pierre's hearing an old bottle-necked fellow, performing
the identical same act with a half-emptied glass in his hand. But though
the form of old Millthorpe was broken, his countenance, however sad and
thin, betrayed no slightest sign of the sot, either past or present. He
never was publicly known to frequent the inn, and seldom quitted the few
acres he cultivated with his son. And though, alas, indigent enough, yet
was he most punctually honest in paying his little debts of shillings
and pence for his groceries. And though, heaven knows, he had plenty of
occasion for all the money he could possibly earn, yet Pierre
remembered, that when, one autumn, a hog was bought of him for the
servants' hall at the Mansion, the old man never called for his money
till the midwinter following; and then, as with trembling fingers he
eagerly clutched the silver, he unsteadily said, "I have no use for it
now; it might just as well have stood over." It was then, that chancing
to overhear this, Mrs. Glendinning had looked at the old man, with a
kindly and benignantly interested eye to the _povertiresque_; and
murmured, "Ah! the old English Knight is not yet out of his blood.
Bravo, old man!"

One day, in Pierre's sight, nine silent figures emerged from the door of
old Millthorpe; a coffin was put into a neighbor's farm-wagon; and a
procession, some thirty feet long, including the elongated pole and box
of the wagon, wound along Saddle Meadows to a hill, where, at last, old
Millthorpe was laid down in a bed, where the rising sun should affront
him no more. Oh, softest and daintiest of Holland linen is the motherly
earth! There, beneath the sublime tester of the infinite sky, like
emperors and kings, sleep, in grand state, the beggars and paupers of
earth! I joy that Death is this Democrat; and hopeless of all other real
and permanent democracies, still hug the thought, that though in life
some heads are crowned with gold, and some bound round with thorns, yet
chisel them how they will, head-stones are all alike.

This somewhat particular account of the father of young Millthorpe, will
better set forth the less immature condition and character of the son,
on whom had now descended the maintenance of his mother and sisters.
But, though the son of a farmer, Charles was peculiarly averse to hard
labor. It was not impossible that by resolute hard labor he might
eventually have succeeded in placing his family in a far more
comfortable situation than he had ever remembered them. But it was not
so fated; the benevolent State had in its great wisdom decreed
otherwise.

In the village of Saddle Meadows there was an institution, half
common-school and half academy, but mainly supported by a general
ordinance and financial provision of the government Here, not only were
the rudiments of an English education taught, but likewise some touch of
belles lettres, and composition, and that great American bulwark and
bore--elocution. On the high-raised, stage platform of the Saddle
Meadows Academy, the sons of the most indigent day-laborers were wont to
drawl out the fiery revolutionary rhetoric of Patrick Henry, or
gesticulate impetuously through the soft cadences of Drake's "Culprit
Fay." What wonder, then, that of Saturdays, when there was no elocution
and poesy, these boys should grow melancholy and disdainful over the
heavy, plodding handles of dung-forks and hoes?

At the age of fifteen, the ambition of Charles Millthorpe was to be
either an orator, or a poet; at any rate, a great genius of one sort or
other. He recalled the ancestral Knight, and indignantly spurned the
plow. Detecting in him the first germ of this inclination, old
Millthorpe had very seriously reasoned with his son; warning him against
the evils of his vagrant ambition. Ambition of that sort was either for
undoubted genius, rich boys, or poor boys, standing entirely alone in
the world, with no one relying upon them. Charles had better consider
the case; his father was old and infirm; he could not last very long; he
had nothing to leave behind him but his plow and his hoe; his mother was
sickly; his sisters pale and delicate; and finally, life was a fact, and
the winters in that part of the country exceedingly bitter and long.
Seven months out of the twelve the pastures bore nothing, and all cattle
must be fed in the barns. But Charles was a boy; advice often seems the
most wantonly wasted of all human breath; man will not take wisdom on
trust; may be, it is well; for such wisdom is worthless; we must find
the true gem for ourselves; and so we go groping and groping for many
and many a day.

Yet was Charles Millthorpe as affectionate and dutiful a boy as ever
boasted of his brain, and knew not that he possessed a far more
excellent and angelical thing in the possession of a generous heart. His
father died; to his family he resolved to be a second father, and a
careful provider now. But not by hard toil of his hand; but by gentler
practices of his mind. Already he had read many books--history, poetry,
romance, essays, and all. The manorial book-shelves had often been
honored by his visits, and Pierre had kindly been his librarian. Not to
lengthen the tale, at the age of seventeen, Charles sold the horse, the
cow, the pig, the plow, the hoe, and almost every movable thing on the
premises; and, converting all into cash, departed with his mother and
sisters for the city; chiefly basing his expectations of success on some
vague representations of an apothecary relative there resident. How he
and his mother and sisters battled it out; how they pined and
half-starved for a while; how they took in sewing; and Charles took in
copying; and all but scantily sufficed for a livelihood; all this may be
easily imagined. But some mysterious latent good-will of Fate toward
him, had not only thus far kept Charles from the Poor-House, but had
really advanced his fortunes in a degree. At any rate, that certain
harmless presumption and innocent egotism which have been previously
adverted to as sharing in his general character, these had by no means
retarded him; for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that
they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that
nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once
overboard it must down.

II.

When arrived in the city, and discovering the heartless neglect of Glen,
Pierre,--looking about him for whom to apply to in this
strait,--bethought him of his old boy-companion Charlie, and went out to
seek him, and found him at last; he saw before him, a tall, well-grown,
but rather thin and pale yet strikingly handsome young man of
two-and-twenty; occupying a small dusty law-office on the third floor
of the older building of the Apostles; assuming to be doing a very
large, and hourly increasing business among empty pigeon-holes, and
directly under the eye of an unopened bottle of ink; his mother and
sisters dwelling in a chamber overhead; and himself, not only following
the law for a corporeal living, but likewise inter-linked with the
peculiar secret, theologico-politico-social schemes of the masonic order
of the seedy-coated Apostles; and pursuing some crude, transcendental
Philosophy, for both a contributory means of support, as well as for his
complete intellectual aliment.

Pierre was at first somewhat startled by his exceedingly frank and
familiar manner; all old manorial deference for Pierre was clean gone
and departed; though at the first shock of their encounter, Charlie
could not possibly have known that Pierre was cast off.

"Ha, Pierre! glad to see you, my boy! Hark ye, next month I am to
deliver an address before the Omega order of the Apostles. The Grand
Master, Plinlimmon, will be there. I have heard on the best authority
that he once said of me--'That youth has the Primitive Categories in
him; he is destined to astonish the world.' Why, lad, I have received
propositions from the Editors of the Spinozaist to contribute a weekly
column to their paper, and you know how very few can understand the
Spinozaist; nothing is admitted there but the Ultimate Transcendentals.
Hark now, in your ear; I think of throwing off the Apostolic disguise
and coming boldly out; Pierre! I think of stumping the State, and
preaching our philosophy to the masses.--When did you arrive in town?"

Spite of all his tribulations, Pierre could not restrain a smile at this
highly diverting reception; but well knowing the youth, he did not
conclude from this audacious burst of enthusiastic egotism that his
heart had at all corroded; for egotism is one thing, and selfishness
another. No sooner did Pierre intimate his condition to him, than
immediately, Charlie was all earnest and practical kindness; recommended
the Apostles as the best possible lodgment for him,--cheap, snug, and
convenient to most public places; he offered to procure a cart and see
himself to the transport of Pierre's luggage; but finally thought it
best to mount the stairs and show him the vacant rooms. But when these
at last were decided upon; and Charlie, all cheerfulness and alacrity,
started with Pierre for the hotel, to assist him in the removal;
grasping his arm the moment they emerged from the great arched door
under the tower of the Apostles; he instantly launched into his amusing
heroics, and continued the strain till the trunks were fairly in sight.

"Lord! my law-business overwhelms me! I must drive away some of my
clients; I must have my exercise, and this ever-growing business denies
it to me. Besides, I owe something to the sublime cause of the general
humanity; I must displace some of my briefs for my metaphysical
treatises. I can not waste all my oil over bonds and mortgages.--You
said you were married, I think?"

But without stopping for any reply, he rattled on. "Well, I suppose it
is wise after all. It settles, centralizes, and confirms a man, I have
heard.--No, I didn't; it is a random thought of my own, that!--Yes, it
makes the world definite to him; it removes his morbid _sub_jectiveness,
and makes all things _ob_jective; nine small children, for instance, may
be considered _ob_jective. Marriage, hey!--A fine thing, no doubt, no
doubt:--domestic--pretty--nice, all round. But I owe something to the
world, my boy! By marriage, I might contribute to the population of men,
but not to the census of mind. The great men are all bachelors, you
know. Their family is the universe: I should say the planet Saturn was
their elder son; and Plato their uncle.--So you are married?"

But again, reckless of answers, Charlie went on. "Pierre, a thought, my
boy;--a thought for you! You do not say it, but you hint of a low
purse. Now I shall help you to fill it--Stump the State on the Kantian
Philosophy! A dollar a head, my boy! Pass round your beaver, and you'll
get it. I have every confidence in the penetration and magnanimousness
of the people! Pierre, hark in your ear;--it's my opinion the world is
all wrong. Hist, I say--an entire mistake. Society demands an Avatar,--a
Curtius, my boy! to leap into the fiery gulf, and by perishing himself,
save the whole empire of men! Pierre, I have long renounced the
allurements of life and fashion. Look at my coat, and see how I spurn
them! Pierre! but, stop, have you ever a shilling! let's take a cold cut
here--it's a cheap place; I go here sometimes. Come, let's in."

BOOK XXI.

PIERRE IMMATURELY ATTEMPTS A MATURE WORK. TIDINGS FROM THE MEADOWS.
PLINLIMMON.

I.

We are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three lofty adjoining
chambers of the Apostles. And passing on a little further in time, and
overlooking the hundred and one domestic details, of how their internal
arrangements were finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly,
now giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter
occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel, the only
practical relief from the memories of her miserable past; how Isabel
herself in the otherwise occupied hours of Pierre, passed some of her
time in mastering the chirographical incoherencies of his manuscripts,
with a view to eventually copying them out in a legible hand for the
printer; or went below stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in
the modest and amiable society of the three young ladies and their
excellent mother, found some little solace for the absence of Pierre;
or, when his day's work was done, sat by him in the twilight, and played
her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its
wondrous suggestiveness; but alas! eternally incapable of being
translated into words; for where the deepest words end, there music
begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.

Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning in scorn
even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, which, written at Saddle
Meadows in the sweet legendary time of Lucy and her love, he had
jealously kept from the publishers, as too true and good to be
published; renouncing all his foregone self, Pierre was now engaged in a
comprehensive compacted work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous
motives unitedly impelled;--the burning desire to deliver what he
thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world;
and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the
sale of his book, he could realize money. Swayed to universality of
thought by the widely-explosive mental tendencies of the profound events
which had lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which
he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that most grand
productions of the best human intellects ever are built round a circle,
as atolls (_i. e._ the primitive coral islets which, raising themselves
in the depths of profoundest seas, rise funnel-like to the surface, and
present there a hoop of white rock, which though on the outside
everywhere lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet
lagoon within), digestively including the whole range of all that can be
known or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book, which
the world should hail with surprise and delight. A varied scope of
reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a
random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course of the multifarious,
incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilized young
inquirer after Truth; this poured one considerable contributary stream
into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and
time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself
upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality
to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all
mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not
an accelerator helpingly pushing him along.

While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new
and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one
of the stages of the transition. That ultimate element once fairly
gained, then books no more are needed for buoys to our souls; our own
strong limbs support us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a
jeering impunity. He did not see,--or if he did, he could not yet name
the true cause for it,--that already, in the incipiency of his work, the
heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge would not congenially
weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal airiness of spontaneous
creative thought. He would climb Parnassus with a pile of folios on his
back. He did not see, that it was nothing at all to him, what other men
had written; that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in
himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him (Pierre), so
long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently
great. He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the
creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately
regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the
creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in
the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and
then,--without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it
any way,--thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and
provocative to him. He did not see, that even when thus combined, all
was but one small mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and
inexhaustibility in himself; that all the great books in the world are
but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied
images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly
reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be,
if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not
at its reflection.

But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do never in
one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously reveal their full
awfulness of amplitude--their overawing extent of peak crowded on peak,
and spur sloping on spur, and chain jammed behind chain, and all their
wonderful battalionings of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that
on first entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at
once perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such an
encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost snows.
Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God, does man come at last to
gain his Mont Blanc and take an overtopping view of these Alps; and even
then, the tithe is not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the
Rocky Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the soul of
a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond
the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in
himself!

But not now to consider these ulterior things, Pierre, though strangely
and very newly alive to many before unregarded wonders in the general
world; still, had he not as yet procured for himself that enchanter's
wand of the soul, which but touching the humblest experiences in one's
life, straightway it starts up all eyes, in every one of which are
endless significancies. Not yet had he dropped his angle into the well
of his childhood, to find what fish might be there; for who dreams to
find fish in a well? the running stream of the outer world, there
doubtless swim the golden perch and the pickerel! Ten million things
were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy lies buried in cloth on
cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth,
because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the
world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far
as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to
consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the
world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine
into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with
joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid--and no body is
there!--appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!

II.

He had been engaged some weeks upon his book--in pursuance of his
settled plan avoiding all contact with any of his city-connections or
friends, even as in his social downfall they sedulously avoided seeking
him out--nor ever once going or sending to the post-office, though it
was but a little round the corner from where he was, since having
dispatched no letters himself, he expected none; thus isolated from the
world, and intent upon his literary enterprise, Pierre had passed some
weeks, when verbal tidings came to him, of three most momentous events.

First: his mother was dead.

Second: all Saddle Meadows was become Glen Stanly's.

Third: Glen Stanly was believed to be the suitor of Lucy; who,
convalescent from an almost mortal illness, was now dwelling at her
mother's house in town.

It was chiefly the first-mentioned of these events which darted a sharp
natural anguish into Pierre. No letter had come to him; no smallest ring
or memorial been sent him; no slightest mention made of him in the will;
and yet it was reported that an inconsolable grief had induced his
mother's mortal malady, and driven her at length into insanity, which
suddenly terminated in death; and when he first heard of that event,
she had been cold in the ground for twenty-five days.

How plainly did all this speak of the equally immense pride and grief of
his once magnificent mother; and how agonizedly now did it hint of her
mortally-wounded love for her only and best-beloved Pierre! In vain he
reasoned with himself; in vain remonstrated with himself; in vain sought
to parade all his stoic arguments to drive off the onslaught of natural
passion. Nature prevailed; and with tears that like acid burned and
scorched as they flowed, he wept, he raved, at the bitter loss of his
parent; whose eyes had been closed by unrelated hands that were hired;
but whose heart had been broken, and whose very reason been ruined, by
the related hands of her son.

For some interval it almost seemed as if his own heart would snap; his
own reason go down. Unendurable grief of a man, when Death itself gives
the stab, and then snatches all availments to solacement away. For in
the grave is no help, no prayer thither may go, no forgiveness thence
come; so that the penitent whose sad victim lies in the ground, for that
useless penitent his doom is eternal, and though it be Christmas-day
with all Christendom, with him it is Hell-day and an eaten liver
forever.

With what marvelous precision and exactitude he now went over in his
mind all the minutest details of his old joyous life with his mother at
Saddle Meadows. He began with his own toilet in the morning; then his
mild stroll into the fields; then his cheerful return to call his mother
in her chamber; then the gay breakfast--and so on, and on, all through
the sweet day, till mother and son kissed, and with light, loving hearts
separated to their beds, to prepare themselves for still another day of
affectionate delight. This recalling of innocence and joy in the hour of
remorsefulness and woe; this is as heating red-hot the pincers that tear
us. But in this delirium of his soul, Pierre could not define where
that line was, which separated the natural grief for the loss of a
parent from that other one which was born of compunction. He strove hard
to define it, but could not. He tried to cozen himself into believing
that all his grief was but natural, or if there existed any other, that
must spring--not from the consciousness of having done any possible
wrong--but from the pang at what terrible cost the more exalted virtues
are gained. Nor did he wholly fail in this endeavor. At last he
dismissed his mother's memory into that same profound vault where
hitherto had reposed the swooned form of his Lucy. But, as sometimes men
are coffined in a trance, being thereby mistaken for dead; so it is
possible to bury a tranced grief in the soul, erroneously supposing that
it hath no more vitality of suffering. Now, immortal things only can
beget immortality. It would almost seem one presumptive argument for the
endless duration of the human soul, that it is impossible in time and
space to kill any compunction arising from having cruelly injured a
departed fellow-being.

Ere he finally committed his mother to the profoundest vault of his
soul, fain would he have drawn one poor alleviation from a circumstance,
which nevertheless, impartially viewed, seemed equally capable either of
soothing or intensifying his grief. His mother's will, which without the
least mention of his own name, bequeathed several legacies to her
friends, and concluded by leaving all Saddle Meadows and its rent-rolls
to Glendinning Stanly; this will bore the date of the day immediately
succeeding his fatal announcement on the landing of the stairs, of his
assumed nuptials with Isabel. It plausibly pressed upon him, that as all
the evidences of his mother's dying unrelentingness toward him were
negative; and the only positive evidence--so to speak--of even that
negativeness, was the will which omitted all mention of Pierre;
therefore, as that will bore so significant a date, it must needs be
most reasonable to conclude, that it was dictated in the not yet
subsided transports of his mother's first indignation. But small
consolation was this, when he considered the final insanity of his
mother; for whence that insanity but from a hate-grief unrelenting, even
as his father must have become insane from a sin-grief irreparable? Nor
did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail to impress
his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate--his own hereditary
liability to madness. Presentiment, I say; but what is a presentiment?
how shall you coherently define a presentiment, or how make any thing
out of it which is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is
but a judgment in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet
possessing this preternaturalness of prophecy, how then shall you escape
the fateful conclusion, that you are helplessly held in the six hands of
the Sisters? For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet
how foreknow and dread in one breath, unless with this divine seeming
power of prescience, you blend the actual slimy powerlessness of
defense?

That his cousin, Glen Stanly, had been chosen by his mother to inherit
the domain of the Meadows, was not entirely surprising to Pierre. Not
only had Glen always been a favorite with his mother by reason of his
superb person and his congeniality of worldly views with herself, but
excepting only Pierre, he was her nearest surviving blood relation; and
moreover, in his christian name, bore the hereditary syllables,
Glendinning. So that if to any one but Pierre the Meadows must descend,
Glen, on these general grounds, seemed the appropriate heir.

But it is not natural for a man, never mind who he may be, to see a
noble patrimony, rightfully his, go over to a soul-alien, and that alien
once his rival in love, and now his heartless, sneering foe; for so
Pierre could not but now argue of Glen; it is not natural for a man to
see this without singular emotions of discomfort and hate. Nor in Pierre
were these feelings at all soothed by the report of Glen's renewed
attentions to Lucy. For there is something in the breast of almost
every man, which at bottom takes offense at the attentions of any other
man offered to a woman, the hope of whose nuptial love he himself may
have discarded. Fain would a man selfishly appropriate all the hearts
which have ever in any way confessed themselves his. Besides, in
Pierre's case, this resentment was heightened by Glen's previous
hypocritical demeanor. For now all his suspicions seemed abundantly
verified; and comparing all dates, he inferred that Glen's visit to
Europe had only been undertaken to wear off the pang of his rejection by
Lucy, a rejection tacitly consequent upon her not denying her affianced
relation to Pierre.

But now, under the mask of profound sympathy--in time, ripening into
love--for a most beautiful girl, ruffianly deserted by her betrothed,
Glen could afford to be entirely open in his new suit, without at all
exposing his old scar to the world. So at least it now seemed to Pierre.
Moreover, Glen could now approach Lucy under the most favorable possible
auspices. He could approach her as a deeply sympathizing friend, all
wishful to assuage her sorrow, but hinting nothing, at present, of any
selfish matrimonial intent; by enacting this prudent and unclamorous
part, the mere sight of such tranquil, disinterested, but indestructible
devotedness, could not but suggest in Lucy's mind, very natural
comparisons between Glen and Pierre, most deplorably abasing to the
latter. Then, no woman--as it would sometimes seem--no woman is utterly
free from the influence of a princely social position in her suitor,
especially if he be handsome and young. And Glen would come to her now
the master of two immense fortunes, and the heir, by voluntary election,
no less than by blood propinquity, to the ancestral bannered hall, and
the broad manorial meadows of the Glendinnings. And thus, too, the
spirit of Pierre's own mother would seem to press Glen's suit. Indeed,
situated now as he was Glen would seem all the finest part of Pierre,
without any of Pierre's shame; would almost seem Pierre himself--what
Pierre had once been to Lucy. And as in the case of a man who has lost a
sweet wife, and who long refuses the least consolation; as this man at
last finds a singular solace in the companionship of his wife's sister,
who happens to bear a peculiar family resemblance to the dead; and as
he, in the end, proposes marriage to this sister, merely from the force
of such magical associative influences; so it did not seem wholly out of
reason to suppose, that the great manly beauty of Glen, possessing a
strong related similitude to Pierre's, might raise in Lucy's heart
associations, which would lead her at least to seek--if she could not
find--solace for one now regarded as dead and gone to her forever, in
the devotedness of another, who would notwithstanding almost seem as
that dead one brought back to life.

Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out
the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral
stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only
concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the
shaft.

As Pierre conjured up this phantom of Glen transformed into the seeming
semblance of himself; as he figured it advancing toward Lucy and raising
her hand in devotion; an infinite quenchless rage and malice possessed
him. Many commingled emotions combined to provoke this storm. But chief
of all was something strangely akin to that indefinable detestation
which one feels for any impostor who has dared to assume one's own name
and aspect in any equivocal or dishonorable affair; an emotion greatly
intensified if this impostor be known for a mean villain at bottom, and
also, by the freak of nature to be almost the personal duplicate of the
man whose identity he assumes. All these and a host of other distressful
and resentful fancies now ran through the breast of Pierre. All his
Faith-born, enthusiastic, high-wrought, stoic, and philosophic defenses,
were now beaten down by this sudden storm of nature in his soul. For
there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man
can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real
impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. Then all the fair
philosophic or Faith-phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away
and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air,
but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon
a man like a morning.

While this mood was on him, Pierre cursed himself for a heartless
villain and an idiot fool;--heartless villain, as the murderer of his
mother--idiot fool, because he had thrown away all his felicity; because
he had himself, as it were, resigned his noble birthright to a cunning
kinsman for a mess of pottage, which now proved all but ashes in his
mouth.

Resolved to hide these new, and--as it latently seemed to him--unworthy
pangs, from Isabel, as also their cause, he quitted his chamber,
intending a long vagabond stroll in the suburbs of the town, to wear off
his sharper grief, ere he should again return into her sight.

III.

As Pierre, now hurrying from his chamber, was rapidly passing through
one of the higher brick colonnades connecting the ancient building with
the modern, there advanced toward him from the direction of the latter,
a very plain, composed, manly figure, with a countenance rather pale if
any thing, but quite clear and without wrinkle. Though the brow and the
beard, and the steadiness of the head and settledness of the step
indicated mature age, yet the blue, bright, but still quiescent eye
offered a very striking contrast. In that eye, the gay immortal youth
Apollo, seemed enshrined; while on that ivory-throned brow, old Saturn
cross-legged sat. The whole countenance of this man, the whole air and
look of this man, expressed a cheerful content. Cheerful is the
adjective, for it was the contrary of gloom; content--perhaps
acquiescence--is the substantive, for it was not Happiness or Delight.
But while the personal look and air of this man were thus winning, there
was still something latently visible in him which repelled. That
something may best be characterized as non-Benevolence. Non-Benevolence
seems the best word, for it was neither Malice nor Ill-will; but
something passive. To crown all, a certain floating atmosphere seemed to
invest and go along with this man. That atmosphere seems only renderable
in words by the term Inscrutableness. Though the clothes worn by this
man were strictly in accordance with the general style of any
unobtrusive gentleman's dress, yet his clothes seemed to disguise this
man. One would almost have said, his very face, the apparently natural
glance of his very eye disguised this man.

Now, as this person deliberately passed by Pierre, he lifted his hat,
gracefully bowed, smiled gently, and passed on. But Pierre was all
confusion; he flushed, looked askance, stammered with his hand at his
hat to return the courtesy of the other; he seemed thoroughly upset by
the mere sight of this hat-lifting, gracefully bowing, gently-smiling,
and most miraculously self-possessed, non-benevolent man.

Now who was this man? This man was Plotinus Plinlimmon. Pierre had read
a treatise of his in a stage-coach coming to the city, and had heard him
often spoken of by Millthorpe and others as the Grand Master of a
certain mystic Society among the Apostles. Whence he came, no one could
tell. His surname was Welsh, but he was a Tennesseean by birth. He
seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort. He never was known
to work with his hands; never to write with his hands (he would not even
write a letter); he never was known to open a book. There were no books
in his chamber. Nevertheless, some day or other he must have read books,
but that time seemed gone now; as for the sleazy works that went under
his name, they were nothing more than his verbal things, taken down at
random, and bunglingly methodized by his young disciples.

Finding Plinlimmon thus unfurnished either with books or pen and paper,
and imputing it to something like indigence, a foreign scholar, a rich
nobleman, who chanced to meet him once, sent him a fine supply of
stationery, with a very fine set of volumes,--Cardan, Epictetus, the
Book of Mormon, Abraham Tucker, Condorcet and the Zenda-Vesta. But this
noble foreign scholar calling next day--perhaps in expectation of some
compliment for his great kindness--started aghast at his own package
deposited just without the door of Plinlimmon, and with all fastenings
untouched.

"Missent," said Plotinus Plinlimmon placidly: "if any thing, I looked
for some choice Curaçoa from a nobleman like you. I should be very
happy, my dear Count, to accept a few jugs of choice Curaçoa."

"I thought that the society of which you are the head, excluded all
things of that sort"--replied the Count.

"Dear Count, so they do; but Mohammed hath his own dispensation."

"Ah! I see," said the noble scholar archly.

"I am afraid you do not see, dear Count"--said Plinlimmon; and instantly
before the eyes of the Count, the inscrutable atmosphere eddied and
eddied roundabout this Plotinus Plinlimmon.

His chance brushing encounter in the corridor was the first time that
ever Pierre had without medium beheld the form or the face of
Plinlimmon. Very early after taking chambers at the Apostles', he had
been struck by a steady observant blue-eyed countenance at one of the
loftiest windows of the old gray tower, which on the opposite side of
the quadrangular space, rose prominently before his own chamber. Only
through two panes of glass--his own and the stranger's--had Pierre
hitherto beheld that remarkable face of repose,--repose neither divine
nor human, nor any thing made up of either or both--but a repose
separate and apart--a repose of a face by itself. One adequate look at
that face conveyed to most philosophical observers a notion of something
not before included in their scheme of the Universe.

Now as to the mild sun, glass is no hindrance at all, but he transmits
his light and life through the glass; even so through Pierre's panes did
the tower face transmit its strange mystery.

Becoming more and more interested in this face, he had questioned
Millthorpe concerning it "Bless your soul"--replied Millthorpe--"that is
Plotinus Plinlimmon! our Grand Master, Plotinus Plinlimmon! By gad, you
must know Plotinus thoroughly, as I have long done. Come away with me,
now, and let me introduce you instanter to Plotinus Plinlimmon."

But Pierre declined; and could not help thinking, that though in all
human probability Plotinus well understood Millthorpe, yet Millthorpe
could hardly yet have wound himself into Plotinus;--though indeed
Plotinus--who at times was capable of assuming a very off-hand,
confidential, and simple, sophomorean air--might, for reasons best known
to himself, have tacitly pretended to Millthorpe, that he (Millthorpe)
had thoroughly wriggled himself into his (Plotinus') innermost soul.

A man will be given a book, and when the donor's back is turned, will
carelessly drop it in the first corner; he is not over-anxious to be
bothered with the book. But now personally point out to him the author,
and ten to one he goes back to the corner, picks up the book, dusts the
cover, and very carefully reads that invaluable work. One does not
vitally believe in a man till one's own two eyes have beheld him. If
then, by the force of peculiar circumstances, Pierre while in the
stage, had formerly been drawn into an attentive perusal of the work on
"Chronometricals and Horologicals;" how then was his original interest
heightened by catching a subsequent glimpse of the author. But at the
first reading, not being able--as he thought--to master the pivot-idea
of the pamphlet; and as every incomprehended idea is not only a
perplexity but a taunting reproach to one's mind, Pierre had at last
ceased studying it altogether; nor consciously troubled himself further
about it during the remainder of the journey. But still thinking now it
might possibly have been mechanically retained by him, he searched all
the pockets of his clothes, but without success. He begged Millthorpe to
do his best toward procuring him another copy; but it proved impossible
to find one. Plotinus himself could not furnish it.

Among other efforts, Pierre in person had accosted a limping half-deaf
old book-stall man, not very far from the Apostles'. "Have you the
'_Chronometrics_,' my friend?" forgetting the exact title.

"Very bad, very bad!" said the old man, rubbing his back;--"has had the
_chronic-rheumatics_ ever so long; what's good for 'em?"

Perceiving his mistake, Pierre replied that he did not know what was the
infallible remedy.

"Whist! let me tell ye, then, young 'un," said the old cripple, limping
close up to him, and putting his mouth in Pierre's ear--"Never catch
'em!--now's the time, while you're young:--never catch 'em!"

By-and-by the blue-eyed, mystic-mild face in the upper window of the old
gray tower began to domineer in a very remarkable manner upon Pierre.
When in his moods of peculiar depression and despair; when dark thoughts
of his miserable condition would steal over him; and black doubts as to
the integrity of his unprecedented course in life would most
malignantly suggest themselves; when a thought of the vanity of his
deep book would glidingly intrude; if glancing at his closet-window that
mystic-mild face met Pierre's; under any of these influences the effect
was surprising, and not to be adequately detailed in any possible words.

Vain! vain! vain! said the face to him. Fool! fool! fool! said the face
to him. Quit! quit! quit! said the face to him. But when he mentally
interrogated the face as to why it thrice said Vain! Fool! Quit! to him;
here there was no response. For that face did not respond to any thing.
Did I not say before that that face was something separate, and apart; a
face by itself? Now, any thing which is thus a thing by itself never
responds to any other thing. If to affirm, be to expand one's isolated
self; and if to deny, be to contract one's isolated self; then to
respond is a suspension of all isolation. Though this face in the tower
was so clear and so mild; though the gay youth Apollo was enshrined in
that eye, and paternal old Saturn sat cross-legged on that ivory brow;
yet somehow to Pierre the face at last wore a sort of malicious leer to
him. But the Kantists might say, that this was a _subjective_ sort of
leer in Pierre. Any way, the face seemed to leer upon Pierre. And now it
said to him--_Ass! ass! ass!_ This expression was insufferable. He
procured some muslin for his closet-window; and the face became
curtained like any portrait. But this did not mend the leer. Pierre knew
that still the face leered behind the muslin. What was most terrible was
the idea that by some magical means or other the face had got hold of
his secret. "Ay," shuddered Pierre, "the face knows that Isabel is not
my wife! And that seems the reason it leers."

Then would all manner of wild fancyings float through his soul, and
detached sentences of the "Chronometrics" would vividly recur to
him--sentences before but imperfectly comprehended, but now shedding a
strange, baleful light upon his peculiar condition, and emphatically
denouncing it. Again he tried his best to procure the pamphlet, to read
it now by the commentary of the mystic-mild face; again he searched
through the pockets of his clothes for the stage-coach copy, but in
vain.

And when--at the critical moment of quitting his chambers that morning
of the receipt of the fatal tidings--the face itself--the man
himself--this inscrutable Plotinus Plinlimmon himself--did visibly brush
by him in the brick corridor, and all the trepidation he had ever before
felt at the mild-mystic aspect in the tower window, now redoubled upon
him, so that, as before said, he flushed, looked askance, and stammered
with his saluting hand to his hat;--then anew did there burn in him the
desire of procuring the pamphlet. "Cursed fate that I should have lost
it"--he cried;--"more cursed, that when I did have it, and did read it,
I was such a ninny as not to comprehend; and now it is all too late!"

Yet--to anticipate here--when years after, an old Jew Clothesman
rummaged over a surtout of Pierre's--which by some means had come into
his hands--his lynx-like fingers happened to feel something foreign
between the cloth and the heavy quilted bombazine lining. He ripped open
the skirt, and found several old pamphlet pages, soft and worn almost to
tissue, but still legible enough to reveal the title--"Chronometricals
and Horologicals." Pierre must have ignorantly thrust it into his
pocket, in the stage, and it had worked through a rent there, and worked
its way clean down into the skirt, and there helped pad the padding. So
that all the time he was hunting for this pamphlet, he himself was
wearing the pamphlet. When he brushed past Plinlimmon in the brick
corridor, and felt that renewed intense longing for the pamphlet, then
his right hand was not two inches from the pamphlet.

Possibly this curious circumstance may in some sort illustrate his
self-supposed non-understanding of the pamphlet, as first read by him
in the stage. Could he likewise have carried about with him in his mind
the thorough understanding of the book, and yet not be aware that he so
understood it? I think that--regarded in one light--the final career of
Pierre will seem to show, that he _did_ understand it. And here it may
be randomly suggested, by way of bagatelle, whether some things that men
think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by
them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a
secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.

BOOK XXII.

THE FLOWER-CURTAIN LIFTED FROM BEFORE A TROPICAL AUTHOR, WITH SOME
REMARKS ON THE TRANSCENDENTAL FLESH-BRUSH PHILOSOPHY.

I.

Some days passed after the fatal tidings from the Meadows, and at
length, somewhat mastering his emotions, Pierre again sits down in his
chamber; for grieve how he will, yet work he must. And now day succeeds
day, and week follows week, and Pierre still sits in his chamber. The
long rows of cooled brick-kilns around him scarce know of the change;
but from the fair fields of his great-great-great-grandfather's manor,
Summer hath flown like a swallow-guest; the perfidious wight, Autumn,
hath peeped in at the groves of the maple, and under pretense of
clothing them in rich russet and gold, hath stript them at last of the
slightest rag, and then ran away laughing; prophetic icicles depend from
the arbors round about the old manorial mansion--now locked up and
abandoned; and the little, round, marble table in the viny summer-house
where, of July mornings, he had sat chatting and drinking negus with his
gay mother, is now spread with a shivering napkin of frost; sleety
varnish hath encrusted that once gay mother's grave, preparing it for
its final cerements of wrapping snow upon snow; wild howl the winds in
the woods: it is Winter. Sweet Summer is done; and Autumn is done; but
the book, like the bitter winter, is yet to be finished.

That season's wheat is long garnered, Pierre; that season's ripe apples
and grapes are in; no crop, no plant, no fruit is out; the whole harvest
is done. Oh, woe to that belated winter-overtaken plant, which the
summer could not bring to maturity! The drifting winter snows shall
whelm it. Think, Pierre, doth not thy plant belong to some other and
tropical clime? Though transplanted to northern Maine, the orange-tree
of the Floridas will put forth leaves in that parsimonious summer, and
show some few tokens of fruitage; yet November will find no golden
globes thereon; and the passionate old lumber-man, December, shall peel
the whole tree, wrench it off at the ground, and toss it for a fagot to
some lime-kiln. Ah, Pierre, Pierre, make haste! make haste! force thy
fruitage, lest the winter force thee.

Watch yon little toddler, how long it is learning to stand by itself!
First it shrieks and implores, and will not try to stand at all, unless
both father and mother uphold it; then a little more bold, it must, at
least, feel one parental hand, else again the cry and the tremble; long
time is it ere by degrees this child comes to stand without any support.
But, by-and-by, grown up to man's estate, it shall leave the very mother
that bore it, and the father that begot it, and cross the seas, perhaps,
or settle in far Oregon lands. There now, do you see the soul. In its
germ on all sides it is closely folded by the world, as the husk folds
the tenderest fruit; then it is born from the world-husk, but still now
outwardly clings to it;--still clamors for the support of its mother the
world, and its father the Deity. But it shall yet learn to stand
independent, though not without many a bitter wail, and many a miserable
fall.

That hour of the life of a man when first the help of humanity fails
him, and he learns that in his obscurity and indigence humanity holds
him a dog and no man: that hour is a hard one, but not the hardest.
There is still another hour which follows, when he learns that in his
infinite comparative minuteness and abjectness, the gods do likewise
despise him, and own him not of their clan. Divinity and humanity then
are equally willing that he should starve in the street for all that
either will do for him. Now cruel father and mother have both let go his
hand, and the little soul-toddler, now you shall hear his shriek and his
wail, and often his fall.

When at Saddle Meadows, Pierre had wavered and trembled in those first
wretched hours ensuing upon the receipt of Isabel's letter; then
humanity had let go the hand of Pierre, and therefore his cry; but when
at last inured to this, Pierre was seated at his book, willing that
humanity should desert him, so long as he thought he felt a far higher
support; then, ere long, he began to feel the utter loss of that other
support, too; ay, even the paternal gods themselves did now desert
Pierre; the toddler was toddling entirely alone, and not without
shrieks.

If man must wrestle, perhaps it is well that it should be on the
nakedest possible plain.

The three chambers of Pierre at the Apostles' were connecting ones. The
first--having a little retreat where Delly slept--was used for the more
exacting domestic purposes: here also their meals were taken; the second
was the chamber of Isabel; the third was the closet of Pierre. In the
first--the dining room, as they called it--there was a stove which
boiled the water for their coffee and tea, and where Delly concocted
their light repasts. This was their only fire; for, warned again and
again to economize to the uttermost, Pierre did not dare to purchase any
additional warmth. But by prudent management, a very little warmth may
go a great way. In the present case, it went some forty feet or more. A
horizontal pipe, after elbowing away from above the stove in the
dining-room, pierced the partition wall, and passing straight through
Isabel's chamber, entered the closet of Pierre at one corner, and then
abruptly disappeared into the wall, where all further caloric--if
any--went up through the chimney into the air, to help warm the
December sun. Now, the great distance of Pierre's calorical stream from
its fountain, sadly impaired it, and weakened it. It hardly had the
flavor of heat. It would have had but very inconsiderable influence in
raising the depressed spirits of the most mercurial thermometer;
certainly it was not very elevating to the spirits of Pierre. Besides,
this calorical stream, small as it was, did not flow through the room,
but only entered it, to elbow right out of it, as some coquettish
maidens enter the heart; moreover, it was in the furthest corner from
the only place where, with a judicious view to the light, Pierre's
desk-barrels and board could advantageously stand. Often, Isabel
insisted upon his having a separate stove to himself; but Pierre would
not listen to such a thing. Then Isabel would offer her own room to him;
saying it was of no indispensable use to her by day; she could easily
spend her time in the dining-room; but Pierre would not listen to such a
thing; he would not deprive her of the comfort of a continually
accessible privacy; besides, he was now used to his own room, and must
sit by that particular window there, and no other. Then Isabel would
insist upon keeping her connecting door open while Pierre was employed
at his desk, that so the heat of her room might bodily go into his; but
Pierre would not listen to such a thing: because he must be religiously
locked up while at work; outer love and hate must alike be excluded
then. In vain Isabel said she would make not the slightest noise, and
muffle the point of the very needle she used. All in vain. Pierre was
inflexible here.

Yes, he was resolved to battle it out in his own solitary closet; though
a strange, transcendental conceit of one of the more erratic and
non-conforming Apostles,--who was also at this time engaged upon a
profound work above stairs, and who denied himself his full sufficiency
of food, in order to insure an abundant fire;--the strange conceit of
this Apostle, I say,--accidentally communicated to Pierre,--that,
through all the kingdoms of Nature, caloric was the great universal
producer and vivifyer, and could not be prudently excluded from the spot
where great books were in the act of creation; and therefore, he (the
Apostle) for one, was resolved to plant his head in a hot-bed of
stove-warmed air, and so force his brain to germinate and blossom, and
bud, and put forth the eventual, crowning, victorious flower;--though
indeed this conceit rather staggered Pierre--for in truth, there was no
small smack of plausible analogy in it--yet one thought of his purse
would wholly expel the unwelcome intrusion, and reinforce his own
previous resolve.

However lofty and magnificent the movements of the stars; whatever
celestial melodies they may thereby beget; yet the astronomers assure us
that they are the most rigidly methodical of all the things that exist.
No old housewife goes her daily domestic round with one millionth part
the precision of the great planet Jupiter in his stated and unalterable
revolutions. He has found his orbit, and stays in it; he has timed
himself, and adheres to his periods. So, in some degree with Pierre, now
revolving in the troubled orbit of his book.

Pierre rose moderately early; and the better to inure himself to the
permanent chill of his room, and to defy and beard to its face, the
cruelest cold of the outer air; he would--behind the curtain--throw down
the upper sash of his window; and on a square of old painted canvas,
formerly wrapping some bale of goods in the neighborhood, treat his
limbs, of those early December mornings, to a copious ablution, in water
thickened with incipient ice. Nor, in this stoic performance, was he at
all without company,--not present, but adjoiningly sympathetic; for
scarce an Apostle in all those scores and scores of chambers, but
undeviatingly took his daily December bath. Pierre had only to peep out
of his pane and glance round the multi-windowed, inclosing walls of the
quadrangle, to catch plentiful half-glimpses, all round him, of many a
lean, philosophical nudity, refreshing his meager bones with crash-towel
and cold water. "Quick be the play," was their motto: "Lively our
elbows, and nimble all our tenuities." Oh, the dismal echoings of the
raspings of flesh-brushes, perverted to the filing and polishing of the
merest ribs! Oh, the shuddersome splashings of pails of ice-water over
feverish heads, not unfamiliar with aches! Oh, the rheumatical
cracklings of rusted joints, in that defied air of December! for every
thick-frosted sash was down, and every lean nudity courted the zephyr!

Among all the innate, hyena-like repellants to the reception of any set
form of a spiritually-minded and pure archetypical faith, there is
nothing so potent in its skeptical tendencies, as that inevitable
perverse ridiculousness, which so often bestreaks some of the
essentially finest and noblest aspirations of those men, who disgusted
with the common conventional quackeries, strive, in their clogged
terrestrial humanities, after some imperfectly discerned, but heavenly
ideals: ideals, not only imperfectly discerned in themselves, but the
path to them so little traceable, that no two minds will entirely agree
upon it.

Hardly a new-light Apostle, but who, in superaddition to his
revolutionary scheme for the minds and philosophies of men, entertains
some insane, heterodoxical notions about the economy of his body. His
soul, introduced by the gentlemanly gods, into the supernal
society,--practically rejects that most sensible maxim of men of the
world, who chancing to gain the friendship of any great character, never
make that the ground of boring him with the supplemental acquaintance of
their next friend, who perhaps, is some miserable ninny. Love me, love
my dog, is only an adage for the old country-women who affectionately
kiss their cows. The gods love the soul of a man; often, they will
frankly accost it; but they abominate his body; and will forever cut it
dead, both here and hereafter. So, if thou wouldst go to the gods,
leave thy dog of a body behind thee. And most impotently thou strivest
with thy purifying cold baths, and thy diligent scrubbings with
flesh-brushes, to prepare it as a meet offering for their altar. Nor
shall all thy Pythagorean and Shellian dietings on apple-parings, dried
prunes, and crumbs of oat-meal cracker, ever fit thy body for heaven.
Feed all things with food convenient for them,--that is, if the food be
procurable. The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on
light and space. But the food of thy body is champagne and oysters; feed
it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful
resurrection, if there is any to be. Say, wouldst thou rise with a
lantern jaw and a spavined knee? Rise with brawn on thee, and a most
royal corporation before thee; so shalt thou in that day claim
respectful attention. Know this: that while many a consumptive dietarian
has but produced the merest literary flatulencies to the world;
convivial authors have alike given utterance to the sublimest wisdom,
and created the least gross and most ethereal forms. And for men of
demonstrative muscle and action, consider that right royal epitaph which
Cyrus the Great caused to be engraved on his tomb--"I could drink a
great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good." Ah, foolish! to
think that by starving thy body, thou shalt fatten thy soul! Is yonder
ox fatted because yonder lean fox starves in the winter wood? And prate
not of despising thy body, while still thou flourisheth thy flesh-brush!
The finest houses are most cared for within; the outer walls are freely
left to the dust and the soot. Put venison in thee, and so wit shall
come out of thee. It is one thing in the mill, but another in the sack.

Now it was the continual, quadrangular example of those forlorn fellows,
the Apostles, who, in this period of his half-developments and
transitions, had deluded Pierre into the Flesh-Brush Philosophy, and had
almost tempted him into the Apple-Parings Dialectics. For all the long
wards, corridors, and multitudinous chambers of the Apostles' were
scattered with the stems of apples, the stones of prunes, and the shells
of peanuts. They went about huskily muttering the Kantian Categories
through teeth and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with the crumbs of
Graham crackers. A tumbler of cold water was the utmost welcome to their
reception rooms; at the grand supposed Sanhedrim presided over by one of
the deputies of Plotinus Plinlimmon, a huge jug of Adam's Ale, and a
bushel-basket of Graham crackers were the only convivials. Continually
bits of cheese were dropping from their pockets, and old shiny apple
parchments were ignorantly exhibited every time they drew out a
manuscript to read you. Some were curious in the vintages of waters; and
in three glass decanters set before you, Fairmount, Croton, and
Cochituate; they held that Croton was the most potent, Fairmount a
gentle tonic, and Cochituate the mildest and least inebriating of all.
Take some more of the Croton, my dear sir! Be brisk with the Fairmount!
Why stops that Cochituate? So on their philosophical tables went round
their Port, their Sherry, and their Claret.

Some, further advanced, rejected mere water in the bath, as altogether
too coarse an element; and so, took to the Vapor-baths, and steamed
their lean ribs every morning. The smoke which issued from their heads,
and overspread their pages, was prefigured in the mists that issued from
under their door-sills and out of their windows. Some could not sit down
of a morning until after first applying the Vapor-bath outside and then
thoroughly rinsing out their interiors with five cups of cold Croton.
They were as faithfully replenished fire-buckets; and could they,
standing in one cordon, have consecutively pumped themselves into each
other, then the great fire of 1835 had been far less wide-spread and
disastrous.

Ah! ye poor lean ones! ye wretched Soakites and Vaporites! have not your
niggardly fortunes enough rinsed ye out, and wizened ye, but ye must
still be dragging the hose-pipe, and throwing still more cold Croton on
yourselves and the world? Ah! attach the screw of your hose-pipe to some
fine old butt of Madeira! pump us some sparkling wine into the world!
see, see, already, from all eternity, two-thirds of it have lain
helplessly soaking!

II.

With cheek rather pale, then, and lips rather blue, Pierre sits down to
his plank.

But is Pierre packed in the mail for St. Petersburg this morning? Over
his boots are his moccasins; over his ordinary coat is his surtout; and
over that, a cloak of Isabel's. Now he is squared to his plank; and at
his hint, the affectionate Isabel gently pushes his chair closer to it,
for he is so muffled, he can hardly move of himself. Now Delly comes in
with bricks hot from the stove; and now Isabel and she with devoted
solicitude pack away these comforting stones in the folds of an old blue
cloak, a military garment of the grandfather of Pierre, and tenderly
arrange it both over and under his feet; but putting the warm flagging
beneath. Then Delly brings still another hot brick to put under his
inkstand, to prevent the ink from thickening. Then Isabel drags the
camp-bedstead nearer to him, on which are the two or three books he may
possibly have occasion to refer to that day, with a biscuit or two, and
some water, and a clean towel, and a basin. Then she leans against the
plank by the elbow of Pierre, a crook-ended stick. Is Pierre a shepherd,
or a bishop, or a cripple? No, but he has in effect, reduced himself to
the miserable condition of the last. With the crook-ended cane,
Pierre--unable to rise without sadly impairing his manifold
intrenchments, and admitting the cold air into their innermost
nooks,--Pierre, if in his solitude, he should chance to need any thing
beyond the reach of his arm, then the crook-ended cane drags it to his
immediate vicinity.

Pierre glances slowly all round him; every thing seems to be right; he
looks up with a grateful, melancholy satisfaction at Isabel; a tear
gathers in her eye; but she conceals it from him by coming very close to
him, stooping over, and kissing his brow. 'Tis her lips that leave the
warm moisture there; not her tears, she says.

"I suppose I must go now, Pierre. Now don't, don't be so long to-day. I
will call thee at half-past four. Thou shalt not strain thine eyes in
the twilight."

"We will _see_ about that," says Pierre, with an unobserved attempt at a
very sad pun. "Come, thou must go. Leave me."

And there he is left.

Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man;
put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm,
and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing, upbubbling, universal life in him
everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that
most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the
place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety
chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black
ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a
dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap of the Texan Camanche, as at
this moment he goes crashing like a wild deer through the green
underbrush; I hear his glorious whoop of savage and untamable health;
and then I look in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the
savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your
victim!

III.

Some hours pass. Let us peep over the shoulder of Pierre, and see what
it is he is writing there, in that most melancholy closet. Here, topping
the reeking pile by his side, is the last sheet from his hand, the
frenzied ink not yet entirely dry. It is much to our purpose; for in
this sheet, he seems to have directly plagiarized from his own
experiences, to fill out the mood of his apparent author-hero, Vivia,
who thus soliloquizes: "A deep-down, unutterable mournfulness is in me.
Now I drop all humorous or indifferent disguises, and all philosophical
pretensions. I own myself a brother of the clod, a child of the Primeval
Gloom. Hopelessness and despair are over me, as pall on pall. Away, ye
chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all
but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a tickle. Explain
this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye can not. Tell me not, thou
inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe can not spare thee
and thy immortality, so long as--like a hired waiter--thou makest
thyself 'generally useful.' Already the universe gets on without thee,
and could still spare a million more of the same identical kidney.
Corporations have no souls, and thy Pantheism, what was that? Thou wert
but the pretensious, heartless part of a man. Lo! I hold thee in this
hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from which the meat hath
been sucked."

Here is a slip from the floor.

"Whence flow the panegyrical melodies that precede the march of these
heroes? From what but from a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal!"

And here is a second.

"Cast thy eye in there on Vivia; tell me why those four limbs should be
clapt in a dismal jail--day out, day in--week out, week in--month out,
month in--and himself the voluntary jailer! Is this the end of
philosophy? This the larger, and spiritual life? This your boasted
empyrean? Is it for this that a man should grow wise, and leave off his
most excellent and calumniated folly?"

And here is a third.

"Cast thy eye in there on Vivia; he, who in the pursuit of the highest
health of virtue and truth, shows but a pallid cheek! Weigh his heart in
thy hand, oh, thou gold-laced, virtuoso Goethe! and tell me whether it
does not exceed thy standard weight!"

And here is a fourth.

"Oh God, that man should spoil and rust on the stalk, and be wilted and
threshed ere the harvest hath come! And oh God, that men that call
themselves men should still insist on a laugh! I hate the world, and
could trample all lungs of mankind as grapes, and heel them out of their
breath, to think of the woe and the cant,--to think of the Truth and the
Lie! Oh! blessed be the twenty-first day of December, and cursed be the
twenty-first day of June!"

From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious
of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that
is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal
condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his
condition. Conclusive proof that he has no power over his condition. For
in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough
they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that
peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do
drown.

IV.

From eight o'clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening,
Pierre sits there in his room;--eight hours and a half!

From throbbing neck-bands, and swinging belly-bands of gay-hearted
horses, the sleigh-bells chimingly jingle;--but Pierre sits there in his
room; Thanksgiving comes, with its glad thanks, and crisp turkeys;--but
Pierre sits there in his room; soft through the snows, on tinted Indian
moccasin, Merry Christmas comes stealing;--but Pierre sits there in his
room; it is New-Year's, and like a great flagon, the vast city overbrims
at all curb-stones, wharves, and piers, with bubbling jubilations;--but
Pierre sits there in his room:--Nor jingling sleigh-bells at throbbing
neck-band, or swinging belly-band; nor glad thanks, and crisp turkeys of
Thanksgiving; nor tinted Indian moccasin of Merry Christmas softly
stealing through the snows; nor New-Year's curb-stones, wharves, and
piers, over-brimming with bubbling jubilations:--Nor jingling
sleigh-bells, nor glad Thanksgiving, nor Merry Christmas, nor jubilating
New Year's:--Nor Bell, Thank, Christ, Year;--none of these are for
Pierre. In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre
hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak
inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Piko, stands
unassaultable in the midst of waves.

He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. Sometimes the intent
ear of Isabel in the next room, overhears the alternate silence, and
then the long lonely scratch of his pen. It is, as if she heard the busy
claw of some midnight mole in the ground. Sometimes, she hears a low
cough, and sometimes the scrape of his crook-handled cane.

Here surely is a wonderful stillness of eight hours and a half, repeated
day after day. In the heart of such silence, surely something is at
work. Is it creation, or destruction? Builds Pierre the noble world of
a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life
in him?--Unutterable, that a man should be thus!

When in the meridian flush of the day, we recall the black apex of
night; then night seems impossible; this sun can never go down. Oh that
the memory of the uttermost gloom as an already tasted thing to the
dregs, should be no security against its return. One may be passibly
well one day, but the next, he may sup at black broth with Pluto.

Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very
few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and
which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?

Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not
the book, but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which
in the act of attempting that book, have upheaved and upgushed in his
soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one,
and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is
for Pierre's own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings
drink his blood; the other only demands his ink. But circumstances have
so decreed, that the one can not be composed on the paper, but only as
the other is writ down in his soul. And the one of the soul is
elephantinely sluggish, and will not budge at a breath. Thus Pierre is
fastened on by two leeches;--how then can the life of Pierre last? Lo!
he is fitting himself for the highest life, by thinning his blood and
collapsing his heart. He is learning how to live, by rehearsing the part
of death.

Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate
and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and
the profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened the
chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the
window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a
month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both
appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities, now opened up in
him, consume all his vigor; would he, he could not now be entertainingly
and profitably shallow in some pellucid and merry romance. Now he sees,
that with every accession of the personal divine to him, some great
land-slide of the general surrounding divineness slips from him, and
falls crashing away. Said I not that the gods, as well as mankind, had
unhanded themselves from this Pierre? So now in him you behold the baby
toddler I spoke of; forced now to stand and toddle alone.

Now and then he turns to the camp-bed, and wetting his towel in the
basin, presses it against his brow. Now he leans back in his chair, as
if to give up; but again bends over and plods.

Twilight draws on, the summons of Isabel is heard from the door; the
poor, frozen, blue-lipped, soul-shivering traveler for St. Petersburg is
unpacked; and for a moment stands toddling on the floor. Then his hat,
and his cane, and out he sallies for fresh air. A most comfortless
staggering of a stroll! People gaze at him passing, as at some imprudent
sick man, willfully burst from his bed. If an acquaintance is met, and
would say a pleasant newsmonger's word in his ear, that acquaintance
turns from him, affronted at his hard aspect of icy discourtesy.
"Bad-hearted," mutters the man, and goes on.

He comes back to his chambers, and sits down at the neat table of Delly;
and Isabel soothingly eyes him, and presses him to eat and be strong.
But his is the famishing which loathes all food. He can not eat but by
force. He has assassinated the natural day; how then can he eat with an
appetite? If he lays him down, he can not sleep; he has waked the
infinite wakefulness in him; then how can he slumber? Still his book,
like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. He can not
command the thing out of its orbit; fain would he behead himself, to
gain one night's repose. At last the heavy hours move on; and sheer
exhaustion overtakes him, and he lies still--not asleep as children and
day-laborers sleep--but he lies still from his throbbings, and for that
interval holdingly sheaths the beak of the vulture in his hand, and lets
it not enter his heart.

Morning comes; again the dropt sash, the icy water, the flesh-brush, the
breakfast, the hot bricks, the ink, the pen, the
from-eight-o'clock-to-half-past-four, and the whole general inclusive
hell of the same departed day.

Ah! shivering thus day after day in his wrappers and cloaks, is this the
warm lad that once sung to the world of the Tropical Summer?

BOOK XXIII.

A LETTER FOR PIERRE. ISABEL. ARRIVAL OF LUCY'S EASEL AND TRUNKS AT THE
APOSTLES'.

I.

If a frontier man be seized by wild Indians, and carried far and deep
into the wilderness, and there held a captive, with no slightest
probability of eventual deliverance; then the wisest thing for that man
is to exclude from his memory by every possible method, the least images
of those beloved objects now forever reft from him. For the more
delicious they were to him in the now departed possession, so much the
more agonizing shall they be in the present recalling. And though a
strong man may sometimes succeed in strangling such tormenting memories;
yet, if in the beginning permitted to encroach upon him unchecked, the
same man shall, in the end, become as an idiot. With a continent and an
ocean between him and his wife--thus sundered from her, by whatever
imperative cause, for a term of long years;--the husband, if
passionately devoted to her, and by nature broodingly sensitive of soul,
is wise to forget her till he embrace her again;--is wise never to
remember her if he hear of her death. And though such complete suicidal
forgettings prove practically impossible, yet is it the shallow and
ostentatious affections alone which are bustling in the offices of
obituarian memories. _The love deep as death_--what mean those five
words, but that such love can not live, and be continually remembering
that the loved one is no more? If it be thus then in cases where entire
unremorsefulness as regards the beloved absent objects is presumed, how
much more intolerable, when the knowledge of their hopeless wretchedness
occurs, attended by the visitations of before latent upbraidings in the
rememberer as having been any way--even unwillingly--the producers of
their sufferings. There seems no other sane recourse for some moody
organizations on whom such things, under such circumstances intrude, but
right and left to flee them, whatever betide.

If little or nothing hitherto has been said of Lucy Tartan in reference
to the condition of Pierre after his departure from the Meadows, it has
only been because her image did not willingly occupy his soul. He had
striven his utmost to banish it thence; and only once--on receiving the
tidings of Glen's renewed attentions--did he remit the intensity of
those strivings, or rather feel them, as impotent in him in that hour of
his manifold and overwhelming prostration.

Not that the pale form of Lucy, swooning on her snow-white bed; not that
the inexpressible anguish of the shriek--"My heart! my heart!" would not
now at times force themselves upon him, and cause his whole being to
thrill with a nameless horror and terror. But the very thrillingness of
the phantom made him to shun it, with all remaining might of his spirit.

Nor were there wanting still other, and far more wonderful, though but
dimly conscious influences in the breast of Pierre, to meet as
repellants the imploring form. Not to speak of his being devoured by the
all-exacting theme of his book, there were sinister preoccupations in
him of a still subtler and more fearful sort, of which some inklings
have already been given.

It was while seated solitary in his room one morning; his flagging
faculties seeking a momentary respite; his head sideways turned toward
the naked floor, following the seams in it, which, as wires, led
straight from where he sat to the connecting door, and disappeared
beneath it into the chamber of Isabel; that he started at a tap at that
very door, followed by the wonted, low, sweet voice,--

"Pierre! a letter for thee--dost thou hear? a letter,--may I come in?"

At once he felt a dart of surprise and apprehension; for he was
precisely in that general condition with respect to the outer world,
that he could not reasonably look for any tidings but disastrous, or at
least, unwelcome ones. He assented; and Isabel entered, holding out the
billet in her hand.

"'Tis from some lady, Pierre; who can it be?--not thy mother though, of
that I am certain;--the expression of her face, as seen by me, not at
all answering to the expression of this handwriting here."

"My mother? from my mother?" muttered Pierre, in wild vacancy--"no! no!
it can scarce be from her.--Oh, she writes no more, even in her own
private tablets now! Death hath stolen the last leaf, and rubbed all
out, to scribble his own ineffaceable _hic jacet_ there!"

"Pierre!" cried Isabel, in affright.

"Give it me!" he shouted, vehemently, extending his hand. "Forgive me,
sweet, sweet Isabel, I have wandered in my mind; this book makes me mad.
There; I have it now"--in a tone of indifference--"now, leave me again.
It is from some pretty aunt, or cousin, I suppose," carelessly balancing
the letter in his hand.

Isabel quitted the room; the moment the door closed upon her, Pierre
eagerly split open the letter, and read:--

II.

"This morning I vowed it, my own dearest, dearest Pierre I feel stronger
to-day; for to-day I have still more thought of thine own superhuman,
angelical strength; which so, has a very little been transferred to me.
Oh, Pierre, Pierre, with what words shall I write thee now;--now, when
still knowing nothing, yet something of thy secret I, as a seer,
suspect. Grief,--deep, unspeakable grief, hath made me this seer. I
could murder myself, Pierre, when I think of my previous blindness; but
that only came from my swoon. It was horrible and most murdersome; but
now I see thou wert right in being so instantaneous with me, and in
never afterward writing to me, Pierre; yes, now I see it, and adore thee
the more.

"Ah! thou too noble and angelical Pierre, now I feel that a being like
thee, can possibly have no love as other men love; but thou lovest as
angels do; not for thyself, but wholly for others. But still are we one,
Pierre; thou art sacrificing thyself, and I hasten to re-tie myself to
thee, that so I may catch thy fire, and all the ardent multitudinous
arms of our common flames may embrace. I will ask of thee nothing,
Pierre; thou shalt tell me no secret. Very right wert thou, Pierre,
when, in that ride to the hills, thou wouldst not swear the fond,
foolish oath I demanded. Very right, very right; now I see it.

"If then I solemnly vow, never to seek from thee any slightest thing
which thou wouldst not willingly have me know; if ever I, in all outward
actions, shall recognize, just as thou dost, the peculiar position of
that mysterious, and ever-sacred being;--then, may I not come and live
with thee? I will be no encumbrance to thee. I know just where thou art,
and how thou art living; and only just there, Pierre, and only just so,
is any further life endurable, or possible for me. She will never
know--for thus far I am sure thou thyself hast never disclosed it to
her what I once was to thee. Let it seem, as though I were some
nun-like cousin immovably vowed to dwell with thee in thy strange exile.
Show not to me,--never show more any visible conscious token of love. I
will never to thee. Our mortal lives, oh, my heavenly Pierre, shall
henceforth be one mute wooing of each other; with no declaration; no
bridal; till we meet in the pure realms of God's final blessedness for
us;--till we meet where the ever-interrupting and ever-marring world can
not and shall not come; where all thy hidden, glorious unselfishness
shall be gloriously revealed in the full splendor of that heavenly
light; where, no more forced to these cruelest disguises, she, _she_ too
shall assume her own glorious place, nor take it hard, but rather feel
the more blessed, when, there, thy sweet heart, shall be openly and
unreservedly mine. Pierre, Pierre, my Pierre!--only this thought, this
hope, this sublime faith now supports me. Well was it, that the swoon,
in which thou didst leave me, that long eternity ago--well was it, dear
Pierre, that though I came out of it to stare and grope, yet it was only
to stare and grope, and then I swooned again, and then groped again, and
then again swooned. But all this was vacancy; little I clutched; nothing
I knew; 'twas less than a dream, my Pierre, I had no conscious thought
of thee, love; but felt an utter blank, a vacancy;--for wert thou not
then utterly gone from me? and what could there then be left of poor
Lucy?--But now, this long, long swoon is past; I come out again into
life and light; but how could I come out, how could I any way _be_, my
Pierre, if not in thee? So the moment I came out of the long, long
swoon, straightway came to me the immortal faith in thee, which though