The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 50, December, 1861 by Various
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page 25 of 283 (08%)
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familiarity with society and early habits of command may give even to
an ordinary man, but that elevation of manner which springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe. In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that in which he comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed by quick sympathies. His method of life was very regular,--the regularity of thirty years of comparative retirement, following close upon fifteen years of active public life, begun at twenty in the army of Washington, and ending in a Prussian and Austrian dungeon at thirty-five. His private apartments consisted of two rooms on the second floor. The first was his bed-room, a cheerful, though not a large room, nearly square, with a comfortable fireplace, and a window looking out upon the lawn and woods behind the castle. Just outside of the bed-room, and the first object that struck your eye on approaching it from the gallery, was a picture by one of his daughters, representing the burly turnkey of Olmütz in the act of unlocking his dungeon-door. "It is a good likeness," said the General to me, the first time that he took me to his rooms,--"a very good likeness. I remember the features well." From the bed-room a door opened into a large turret-room, well lighted and airy, and which, taking its shape from the tower in which it stood, was almost a perfect circle. This was the General's library. The books were arranged in open cases, filling the walls from floor to ceiling, and with a neatness and order which revealed an artistic appreciation of their effect. It was lighted by two windows, one opening on the lawn, the other on the farm-yards, and both, from the thickness of the |
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