Letters of Peregrine Pickle

by George P. Upton

In one place he says:

"I think I have but one regret in leaving this world. When I look into the past and see what is doing, I would like to live into the future some centuries, to see what a magnificent world this will be."

Again he says:

"Every man carries in his breast an aspiration and a skeleton. The one is a yearning for an ideal which is never realized here. He will never find it, be his search ever so long or so faithful. It must always end in the fate of the Prince who sought the fountain of perpetual youth, and the alchemists who wasted their lives and energies looking for the philosopher's stone. And yet it seems to me this unattainable ideal is one of the surest proofs of immortality. The other is the reverse of the ideal—a fearful secret—a chained tiger—a terrible power. Sometimes it assumes only the form of a melancholy. Sometimes of a despair which kills."

Again:

"The keen, earnest love of Nature always involves the warmer love of man as the noblest type of Nature, and yet the love of Nature is the compensation for the loss of man. When all men forget you—when the bright hues with which you have invested the ideal of the soul fade like a morning mist—when the heart in its lowest depths of despair finds only artificial instead of real men, when you even despair of humanity—vivifying Nature remains a faithful friend, and brings compensation in her flowers and birds, her mountains and cataracts."

Again:

"Sympathy with anything that is beautiful can never be completely exercised when you are alone. It must find expression, and there must be the presence of another who shall be the recipient of that expression. Worship demands isolation, which begets reverence. Sympathy demands the presence of another, and begets friendship or love, according to the nature of the object and the companion. Either in the presence of nature, which inspires friendship, or of music and some forms of art, which inspire love, the presence of the second person is essential to complete sympathy; and he who has sought either love or friendship, and lost both, is richer than he who has never sought either."

Blobbs' diary contains also some pretty severe strictures, which I might be tempted to give you were it not for the fact that he will now soon be with us again and speak for himself. I saw him this morning, and he is quite like himself again. He took me by the hand and said: "Well, my dear boy, they say the old ship is going to weather the storm."

I congratulated him upon his improvement, and he added: