Pierre; or The Ambiguities

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

For swiftly to be extinguished is that race, whose only heir but so much as impends upon a deed of shame. And some deed of shame, or something most dubious and most dark, is in thy soul, or else some belying specter, with a cloudy, shame-faced front, sat at yon seat but now!

"How strange," said little Pierre, "I think it begins to look at me now, aunt. Hark! aunt, it's so silent all round in this old-fashioned room, that I think I hear a little jingling in the picture, as if the watch-seal was striking against the key—Hark! aunt." "Bless me, don't talk so strangely, my child."

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.

Doth Truth come in the dark, and steal on us, and rob us so, and then depart, deaf to all pursuing invocations?

"The mother deserves it," said the lady, inflexibly—"and the child—Reverend sir, what are the words of the Bible?" "'The sins of the father shall be visited upon the children to the third generation,'" said Mr. Falsgrave, with some slight reluctance in his tones.

Again the sweet, wild power of the musicalness of the voice, and some soft, strange touch of foreignness in the accent,—so it fancifully seemed to Pierre, thrills through and through his soul.

Fly to me, Pierre;—nay, I could tear what I now write,—as

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.