discussion of friends and enemies. The biographer, who wishes to be
exact, and yet set down nought in malice, is forced to the contemplation
of his errors. The secret of many of these, as well as of his miseries,
seems revealed by himself in this sentence: "I experience more pain from
a single thorn, than pleasure from a thousand roses." And elsewhere,
"The best society seems to me bad, if I find in it one troublesome,
wicked, slanderous, envious, or perfidious person." Now, taking into
consideration that St. Pierre sometimes imagined persons who were really
good, to be deserving of these strong and very contumacious epithets,
it would have been difficult indeed to find a society in which he could
have been happy. He was, therefore, wise, in seeking retirement, and
indulging in solitude. His mistakes,--for they were mistakes,--arose
from a too quick perception of evil, united to an exquisite and diffuse
sensibility. When he felt wounded by a thorn, he forgot the beauty and
perfume of the rose to which it belonged, and from which perhaps it
could not be separated. And he was exposed (as often happens) to the
very description of trials that were least in harmony with his defects.
Few dispositions could have run a career like his, and have remained
unscathed. But one less tender than his own would have been less soured
by it. For many years, he bore about with him the consciousness of
unacknowledged talent. The world cannot be blamed for not appreciating
that which had never been revealed. But we know not what the jostling
and elbowing of that world, in the meantime, may have been to him--how
often he may have felt himself unworthily treated--or how far that
treatment may have preyed upon and corroded his heart. Who shall
say that with this consciousness there did not mingle a quick and
instinctive perception of the hidden motives of action,--that he did
not sometimes detect, where others might have been blind, the
under-shuffling of the hands, in the by-play of the world?