Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Minna," said Seraphita, returning to the young girl, "the eagle swoops where the carrion lies, but the dove seeks the mountain spring beneath the peaceful greenery of the glades. The eagle soars to heaven, the dove descends from it. Cease to venture into regions where thou canst find no spring of waters, no umbrageous shade.
In one of the chapters of Seraphita, he says: "Wilfred arrived at Seraphita's house to relate his life, to paint the grandeur of his soul by the greatness of his faults; but, when he found himself in the zone embraced by those eyes whose azure scintillations met with no horizon in front, and offered none behind, he became calm again and submissive as the lion who, bounding on his prey in an African plain, receives, on the wing of the winds, a message of love, and stops.
If we wish to understand the mystery of Balzac's life or, more truly, the mystery of the life of the woman whom he married take up and read once more the pages of Seraphita, one of his poorest novels and yet a singularly illuminating story, shedding light upon a secret of the soul.
However, in 1834, when Pichot retired from the management, the new directors, MM. Anthoine de Saint-Joseph, Bonnaire, and Achille Brindeau, tried to satisfy their readers by recalling Balzac; and "Seraphita" began to appear in the pages of the Revue.
She understood it sympathetically in Spiridion, for instance, she describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in any other work of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of deeper or purer mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in Seraphita, attempted something of the kind, but the result was never more than a tour de force.
"But Love is there, like the bee in the calyx of the flower," replied Wilfrid, perceiving for the first time a trace of earthly sentiment in her words, and fancying the moment favorable for an expression of his passionate tenderness. "Always there?" said Seraphita, smiling. Minna had left them for a moment to gather the blue saxifrages growing on a rock above. "Always," repeated Wilfrid.
For instance, in a Viennese concert-room, where the whole audience had risen to do honour to the great author, a young man seized his hand and put it to his lips, saying, "I kiss the hand that wrote 'Seraphita," and Balzac said afterwards to his sister, "They may deny my talent, if they choose, but the memory of that student will always comfort me."
Though she does not appear to have been strait-laced in her reading, he is terribly afraid of falling in her estimation by what he writes, and he explains anxiously that such books as "Le Medecin de Campagne" or "Seraphita" show him in his true light, and that the "Physiologie du Mariage" is really written in defence of women.
"Since we have returned to the regions of Jarvis," said Wilfrid, whose eyes were fastened on Seraphita as those of a robber, lurking in the darkness, fasten on the spot where he knows the jewels lie, "tell me why you do not marry?" "You are all born widows and widowers," she replied; "but my marriage was arranged at my birth. I am betrothed." "To whom?" they cried.
These productions, which prove the incontestable knowledge of Swedenborg, were given to me by Monsieur Seraphitus, his cousin and the father of Seraphita.
Word Of The Day