Pierre; or The Ambiguities

deeper down in the more secret chambers of his unsuspecting soul, the smiling Lucy, now as dead and ashy pale, was being bound a ransom for Isabel's salvation.

"Ah! how dost thou change, Agnello! See! thou art not double now, Nor only one!"

melody—all this had bewitched him, and enchanted him, till he had sat motionless and bending over, as a tree-transformed and mystery-laden visitant, caught and fast bound in some necromancer's garden.

Two or three very plain and practical plannings of desirable procedures in reference to some possible homely explication of all this nonsense—so he would momentarily denominate it—now and then flittingly intermitted his pervading mood of semi-madness.

the long-passed unconscious movements of his then youthful heart seemed now prophetic to him, and allegorically verified by the subsequent events.

letter!—Isabel,—sister,—brother,—me, me—my sacred father!—This is some accursed dream!—nay,

THIS history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls. Nimble center, circumference elastic you must have. Now we return to Pierre, wending homeward from his reveries beneath the pine-tree.

But the vague revelation was now in him, that the visible world, some of which before had seemed but too common and prosaic to him; and but too intelligible; he now vaguely felt, that all the world, and every misconceivedly common and prosaic thing in it, was steeped a million fathoms in a mysteriousness wholly hopeless of solution.

if once he should permit the distracting thought of Lucy to dispute with Isabel's the pervading possession of his soul?