He was unrelenting too, for he never dreamed that mercy might be combined with justice. He would never have pleaded for himself, and he could not be expected to feel for others.
His youth passed away as the flowing of some undiscovered river, whose strange waters are never fretted by the barks of far-exploring man. He knew nothing of any world but the world of his own mind; and his only commune was with his own feelings, which were as things apart.
And yet there was a bitterness in standing thus alone. There was a pain even in, the solitude of his own thoughts: and he strove to assimilate them to something which at least had been. He was fond to pore over the records of ancient virtue, and the history of those firm inflexible beings, who rooted out from their bosom all the soft verdure of the heart's kinder feelings, and raised in its place a cold shrine to unrelenting justice. Here only he seemed to have imagination: and here would he ponder and dream, till he wondered that such a state of things did not still exist. He would fain have thought that virtues like these contained within themselves the principles of immortality.
He forgot that historians, even when they do not augment the worth of what they relate, to render it the more worthy of relation, do not seek to commemorate what is petty. So that the few great actions alone are recorded, while the multitude of meannesses are forgotten. Like the fabled eagle, that is fond to gaze upon the sun, he fixed his eyes alone on what was bright. He would ask himself, Why might not France produce a Brutus or a Cato? Was the soul of man degenerate? Had it lost that power which sustained it in the inspiring days of ancient glory? No! He felt the same spirit stirring within his bosom, and he resolved that he, at least, would live a Roman.
Such were the aspirations of his youth; but they were mixed with little of that wild warm glow which animates the enthusiast. His feelings, like the waters of a deep mountain-lake, were calm and cold, though they were clear and profound. When he did feel, he felt strongly; but the lighter things of the world passed him by as if they had not been.
In the same old ill-fashioned town of Arles, which gave birth to Armand Villars, lived another youth, somewhat elder in point of years, but far younger in character. We will call him Durand. He was one out of the many--a gay, brave, thoughtless boy, with a touch of pride, a good deal of vanity, and an infinity of good-nature. He was one of those pieces of unmoulded clay, which the world forms and hardens. He might have been any thing; but in that same school of the world, he that at first may be any thing generally, at last, learns to be bad. I have said he was thoughtless; but he was by no means without talents, and those which he had were suited to his character. He was penetrating, but not profound; he was active but not industrious; he had more quickness than wit; more imagination than judgment.
As we generally over-estimate that which we do not possess, we are inclined to admire qualities opposite to our own. Durand had early fallen into society with Armand Villars. Habit did much to unite them, but the very difference of their minds did more; and dissimilar tastes often led them to the same pursuits.
They would wander together through all the remains of antiquity, with which the neighbourhood of Arles is enriched. Sometimes they would linger for hours in the Champs Élysées, poring over the tombs and sarcophagi: sometimes they would, stray near St. Jean, along the banks of the Rhone, trying to trace out the ancient palace of Constantine; and sometimes they would stand and gaze upon the river itself, and almost worship it, as it rolled on in proud magnificence towards the ocean.
But still the objects which led them, and the combinations produced in the mind Of each, were very very different. Durand did not look upon the Rhone merely as an object of picturesque beauty. He loved it as a mountaineer loves his mountains: he loved it with that instinctive affection which we feel towards all objects associated with the earlier and brighter hours of our existence, connected with the first expansion of our feelings, and commingled with all our youngest ideas. The grand and the great, in nature, are always matter for remembrance. They are the landmarks in the waste of years, that guide our memory back to every thing that is pleasing in the past.
The scene where it happened is still intimately mixed with every circumstance of happiness, and we love the spot, even when the pleasure has passed away. The Rhone was the grandest object connected with any of his infant recollections, and as such he loved it, without any further combination, or any endeavour to know why.