University of Virginia Library

I.

In their precise tracings-out and subtile causations, the strongest
and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight. We
see the cloud, and feel its bolt; but meteorology only idly essays
a critical scrutiny as to how that cloud became charged,
and how this bolt so stuns. The metaphysical writers confess,
that the most impressive, sudden, and overwhelming event, as
well as the minutest, is but the product of an infinite series of
infinitely involved and untraceable foregoing occurrences. Just
so with every motion of the heart. Why this cheek kindles
with a noble enthusiasm; why that lip curls in scorn; these
are things not wholly imputable to the immediate apparent
cause, which is only one link in the chain; but to a long line
of dependencies whose further part is lost in the mid-regions of
the impalpable air.

Idle then would it be to attempt by any winding way so to
penetrate into the heart, and memory, and inmost life, and nature
of Pierre, as to show why it was that a piece of intelligence
which, in the natural course of things, many amiable
gentlemen, both young and old, have been known to receive
with a momentary feeling of surprise, and then a little curiosity
to know more, and at last an entire unconcern; idle would it
be, to attempt to show how to Pierre it rolled down on his soul

like melted lava, and left so deep a deposit of desolation, that
all his subsequent endeavors never restored the original temples
to the soil, nor all his culture completely revived its buried
bloom.

But some random hints may suffice to deprive a little of its
strangeness, that tumultuous mood, into which so small a note
had thrown him.

There had long stood a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of
Pierre, up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance;
and around which annually he had hung fresh
wreaths of a sweet and holy affection. Made one green bower
of at last, by such successive votive offerings of his being; this
shrine seemed, and was indeed, a place for the celebration of a
chastened joy, rather than for any melancholy rites. But
though thus mantled, and tangled with garlands, this shrine
was of marble—a niched pillar, deemed solid and eternal, and
from whose top radiated all those innumerable sculptured scrolls
and branches, which supported the entire one-pillared temple
of his moral life; as in some beautiful gothic oratories, one central
pillar, trunk-like, upholds the roof. In this shrine, in this
niche of this pillar, stood the perfect marble form of his departed
father; without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene;
Pierre's fond personification of perfect human goodness and virtue.
Before this shrine, Pierre poured out the fullness of all
young life's most reverential thoughts and beliefs. Not to God
had Pierre ever gone in his heart, unless by ascending the steps
of that shrine, and so making it the vestibule of his abstractest
religion.

Blessed and glorified in his tomb beyond Prince Mausolus is
that mortal sire, who, after an honorable, pure course of life,
dies, and is buried, as in a choice fountain, in the filial breast of
a tender-hearted and intellectually appreciative child. For at
that period, the Solomonic insights have not poured their turbid
tributaries into the pure-flowing well of the childish life. Rare

preservative virtue, too, have those heavenly waters. Thrown
into that fountain, all sweet recollections become marbleized;
so that things which in themselves were evanescent, thus became
unchangeable and eternal. So, some rare waters in Derbyshire
will petrify birds'-nests. But if fate preserves the father
to a later time, too often the filial obsequies are less profound;
the canonization less ethereal. The eye-expanded boy perceives,
or vaguely thinks he perceives, slight specks and flaws in the
character he once so wholly reverenced.

When Pierre was twelve years old, his father had died, leaving
behind him, in the general voice of the world, a marked
reputation as a gentleman and a Christian; in the heart of his
wife, a green memory of many healthy days of unclouded and
joyful wedded life, and in the inmost soul of Pierre, the impression
of a bodily form of rare manly beauty and benignity,
only rivaled by the supposed perfect mould in which his virtuous
heart had been cast. Of pensive evenings, by the wide
winter fire, or in summer, in the southern piazza, when that
mystical night-silence so peculiar to the country would summon
up in the minds of Pierre and his mother, long trains of the
images of the past; leading all that spiritual procession, majestically
and holily walked the venerated form of the departed
husband and father. Then their talk would be reminiscent and
serious, but sweet; and again, and again, still deep and deeper,
was stamped in Pierre's soul the cherished conceit, that his virtuous
father, so beautiful on earth, was now uncorruptibly
sainted in heaven. So choicely, and in some degree, secludedly
nurtured, Pierre, though now arrived at the age of nineteen,
had never yet become so thoroughly initiated into that darker,
though truer aspect of things, which an entire residence in the
city from the earliest period of life, almost inevitably engraves
upon the mind of any keenly observant and reflective youth of
Pierre's present years. So that up to this period, in his breast,
all remained as it had been; and to Pierre, his father's shrine

seemed spotless, and still new as the marble of the tomb of him
of Arimathea.

Judge, then, how all-desolating and withering the blast, that
for Pierre, in one night, stripped his holiest shrine of all over-laid
bloom, and buried the mild statue of the saint beneath the
prostrated ruins of the soul's temple itself.