 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
VII.
As Pierre drove through the silent village, beneath the vertical
shadows of the noon-day trees, the sweet chamber scene
abandoned him, and the mystical face recurred to him, and
kept with him. At last, arrived at home, he found his mother
absent; so passing straight through the wide middle hall of the
away in reveries down to the river bank.
Here one primeval pine-tree had been luckily left standing
by the otherwise unsparing woodmen, who long ago had cleared
that meadow. It was once crossing to this noble pine, from a
clump of hemlocks far across the river, that Pierre had first
noticed the significant fact, that while the hemlock and the pine
are trees of equal growth and stature, and are so similar in
their general aspect, that people unused to woods sometimes
confound them; and while both trees are proverbially trees of
sadness, yet the dark hemlock hath no music in its thoughtful
boughs; but the gentle pine-tree drops melodious mournfulness.
At its half-bared roots of sadness, Pierre sat down, and
marked the mighty bulk and far out-reaching length of one
particular root, which, straying down the bank, the storms and
rains had years ago exposed.
“How wide, how strong these roots must spread! Sure,
this pine-tree takes powerful hold of this fair earth! Yon
bright flower hath not so deep a root. This tree hath outlived
a century of that gay flower's generations, and will outlive a
century of them yet to come. This is most sad. Hark, now
I hear the pyramidical and numberless, flame-like complainings
of this Eolean pine;—the wind breathes now upon it:—the
wind,—that is God's breath! Is He so sad? Oh, tree! so
mighty thou, so lofty, yet so mournful! This is most strange!
Hark! as I look up into thy high secrecies, oh, tree, the face,
the face, peeps down on me!—`Art thou Pierre? Come to
me'—oh, thou mysterious girl,—what an ill-matched pendant
thou, to that other countenance of sweet Lucy, which also
hangs, and first did hang within my heart! Is grief a pendant
then to pleasantness? Is grief a self-willed guest that will
come in? Yet I have never known thee, Grief;—thou art a
legend to me. I have known some fiery broils of glorious
whence comes sadness; whence all delicious poetic presentiments;—but
thou, Grief! art still a ghost-story to me.
I know thee not,—do half disbelieve in thee. Not that I
would be without my too little cherished fits of sadness now
and then; but God keep me from thee, thou other shape of
far profounder gloom! I shudder at thee! The face!—the
face!—forth again from thy high secrecies, oh, tree! the face
steals down upon me. Mysterious girl! who art thou? by
what right snatchest thou thus my deepest thoughts? Take
thy thin fingers from me;—I am affianced, and not to thee.
Leave me!—what share hast thou in me? Surely, thou lovest
not me?—that were most miserable for thee, and me, and
Lucy. It can not be. What, who art thou? Oh! wretched
vagueness—too familiar to me, yet inexplicable,—unknown,
utterly unknown! I seem to founder in this perplexity. Thou
seemest to know somewhat of me, that I know not of myself,
—what is it then? If thou hast a secret in thy eyes of
mournful mystery, out with it; Pierre demands it; what is
that thou hast veiled in thee so imperfectly, that I seem to see
its motion, but not its form? It visibly rustles behind the
concealing screen. Now, never into the soul of Pierre, stole
there before, a muffledness like this! If aught really lurks
in it, ye sovereign powers that claim all my leal worshipings,
I conjure ye to lift the veil; I must see it face to face. Tread
I on a mine, warn me; advance I on a precipice, hold me
back; but abandon me to an unknown misery, that it shall
suddenly seize me, and possess me, wholly,—that ye will never
do; else, Pierre's fond faith in ye—now clean, untouched—
may clean depart; and give me up to be a railing atheist!
Ah, now the face departs. Pray heaven it hath not only
stolen back, and hidden again in thy high secrecies, oh tree!
But 'tis gone—gone—entirely gone; and I thank God, and I
feel joy again; joy, which I also feel to be my right as man;
with things invisible. Ha! a coat of iron-mail seems to grow
round, and husk me now; and I have heard, that the bitterest
winters are foretold by a thicker husk upon the Indian corn;
so our old farmers say. But 'tis a dark similitude. Quit thy
analogies; sweet in the orator's mouth, bitter in the thinker's
belly. Now, then, I'll up with my own joyful will; and with
my joy's face scare away all phantoms:—so, they go; and
Pierre is Joy's, and Life's again. Thou pine-tree!—henceforth
I will resist thy too treacherous persuasiveness. Thou'lt not
so often woo me to thy airy tent, to ponder on the gloomy
rooted stakes that bind it. Hence now I go; and peace be
with thee, pine! That blessed sereneness which lurks ever at
the heart of sadness—mere sadness—and remains when all
the rest has gone;—that sweet feeling is now mine, and
cheaply mine. I am not sorry I was sad, I feel so blessed
now. Dearest Lucy!—well, well;—'twill be a pretty time
we'll have this evening; there's the book of Flemish prints—
that first we must look over; then, second, is Flaxman's
Homer—clear-cut outlines, yet full of unadorned barbaric
nobleness. Then Flaxman's Dante;—Dante! Night's and
Hell's poet he. No, we will not open Dante. Methinks now
the face—the face—minds me a little of pensive, sweet Francesca's
face—or, rather, as it had been Francesca's daughter's
face—wafted on the sad dark wind, toward observant Virgil
and the blistered Florentine. No, we will not open Flaxman's
Dante. Francesca's mournful face is now ideal to me. Flaxman
might evoke it wholly,—make it present in lines of misery
—bewitching power. No! I will not open Flaxman's Dante!
Damned be the hour I read in Dante! more damned than
that wherein Palola and Francesca read in fatal Launcelot!”
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |