Pierre, Or The Ambiguities - pg. 29

It has been said that the beautiful country round about Pierre
appealed to very proud memories. But not only through the mere chances of
things, had that fine country become ennobled by the deeds of his sires, but in
Pierre's eyes, all its hills and swales seemed as sanctified through their very
long uninterrupted possession of his race.

That ond ideality which, in the eyes of affection, hallows the
least trinket once familiar to the person of a departed love; with Pierre that
talisman touched the whole earthly landscape about him; for remembering that on
those hills his own fine fathers had gazed; through those woods, over these
lawns, by that stream, along these tangled paths; many a grand-dame of his had
merrily strolled when a girl; vividly recalling these things, Pierre deemed all
that part of the earth a love-token; so that his very horizon was to him as a
memorial ring.

The monarchical world very generally imagines, that in demagogical
America the sacred Past hath no fixed statues erected to it, but all things
irreverently seethe and boil in the vulgar cauldron of an everlasting
uncrystalizing Present. This conceit would seem peculiarly applicable to the
social condition. With no chartered aristocracy, and no law of entail, how can
any family in America imposingly perpetuate itself? Certainly that common saying
among u, which declares, that be a family conspicuous as it may, a single
half-century shall see it abased; that maxim undoubtedly holds true with the
commonality. In our cities families rise and burst like bubbles in a vat. For
indeed the democratic element operates as a subtile acid among us; as in the
south of France verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is
produced by grape-vinegar poured upon copper plates. Now in general nothing
can be more significant of decay than the idea of corrosion; yet on the
other hand, nothing can more vividly suggest luxuriance of life, than the idea
of green as a color; for green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile Nature
herself. Herein by apt analogy we behold the marked anomalousness of
America; whose character abroad, we need not be surprised is misconceived, when
we consider how strangely it contradicts all prior notions of human things; and
how wonderfully to her, Death itself becomes transmuted into Life. So that
political institutions, which in other lands seem above all things intensely
artificial, with America seem to possess the divine virtue of a natural
law; for the most mighty of natures laws is this, that out of death she brings
Life.