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 agonising 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 cannot live, and be continually remembering that the loved one is no more? If it be thus then in cases where entire
