All this from me to me, but not less from me to those who were still
me, who loved me, or made me, or, so long as I lived, whom I made.
These, too, have been, or will be, my metamorphoses. Sometimes, a certain intonation or gesture which I detect makes me exclaim:—"Ah! this is a gesture or a tone of my father." I had not foreseen it, and if I had foreseen it, it would not have occurred; reflection had changed all; but, not thinking of it, I employed it. A tender emotion, a holy impulse seized me, when I felt my father thus living in myself. Are we two? Were we one? Oh! it was my chrysalis. And I—I play the same part for those who shall follow me, my children, or the children of my thought. I know, I feel, that besides the bases which I derived from my father, my ancestors and masters, besides the inheritance of artist-historian which I shall bequeath to others, germs existed within me which were never developed. Another, and perchance a better, man was within me, who has not arisen. Why were not the loftier germs which might have made me great, and the powerful wings of which I have sometimes felt myself possessed, displayed in life and action?
These germs, though put aside, remain to me; too late for expansion in this life, perhaps, but in another,—who knows?
An ingenious philosopher has remarked that if the human embryo, while imprisoned in the maternal bosom, might reason, it would say:—"I see myself endowed with organs of which here I can make no use,—limbs which do not move, a stomach and teeth which do not eat. Patience! these organs convince me that nature calls me elsewhere; a time will come when I shall have another residence, a life in which all these implements will find employment. They are standing still, they are waiting. I am but the chrysalis of a man!"
VII.—THE PHŒNIX.