The Blithedale Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne




Table of Contents

I.  OLD MOODIE
II.  BLITHEDALE
III.  A KNOT OF DREAMERS
IV.  THE SUPPER-TABLE
V.  UNTIL BEDTIME
VI.  COVERDALE'S SICK CHAMBER
VII.  THE CONVALESCENT
VIII.  A MODERN ARCADIA
IX.  HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA
X.  A VISITOR FROM TOWN
XI.  THE WOOD-PATH
XII.  COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE
XIII.  ZENOBIA'S LEGEND
XIV.  ELIOT'S PULPIT
XV.  A CRISIS
XVI.  LEAVE-TAKINGS
XVII.  THE HOTEL
XVIII.  THE BOARDING-HOUSE
XIX.  ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM
XX.  THEY VANISH
XXI.  AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
XXII.  FAUNTLEROY
XXIII.  A VILLAGE HALL
XXIV.  THE MASQUERADERS
XXV.  THE THREE TOGETHER
XXVI.  ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE
XXVII.  MIDNIGHT
XXVIII.  BLITHEDALE PASTURE
XXIX.  MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION




The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne



I.  OLD MOODIE

The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my
bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the
Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in an
obscure part of the street.

"Mr. Coverdale," said he softly, "can I speak with you a moment?"

As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to
mention, for the benefit of such of my readers as are unacquainted with
her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric
line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science,
or the revival of an old humbug.  Since those times her sisterhood have
grown too numerous to attract much individual notice; nor, in fact, has
any one of them come before the public under such skilfully contrived
circumstances of stage effect as those which at once mystified and
illuminated the remarkable performances of the lady in question.
Nowadays, in the management of his "subject," "clairvoyant," or "medium,"
the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness of scientific
experiment; and even if he profess to tread a step or two across the
boundaries of the spiritual world, yet carries with him the laws of our
actual life and extends them over his preternatural conquests.  Twelve or
fifteen years ago, on the contrary, all the arts of mysterious
arrangement, of picturesque disposition, and artistically contrasted
light and shade, were made available, in order to set the apparent
miracle in the strongest attitude of opposition to ordinary facts.  In
the case of the Veiled Lady, moreover, the interest of the spectator was
further wrought up by the enigma of her identity, and an absurd rumor
(probably set afloat by the exhibitor, and at one time very prevalent)
that a beautiful young lady, of family and fortune, was enshrouded within
the misty drapery of the veil.  It was white, with somewhat of a subdued
silver sheen, like the sunny side of a cloud; and, falling over the
wearer from head to foot, was supposed to insulate her from the material
world, from time and space, and to endow her with many of the privileges
of a disembodied spirit.

Her pretensions, however, whether miraculous or otherwise, have little to
do with the present narrative--except, indeed, that I had propounded, for
the Veiled Lady's prophetic solution, a query as to the success of our
Blithedale enterprise.  The response, by the bye, was of the true
Sibylline stamp,--nonsensical in its first aspect, yet on closer study
unfolding a variety of interpretations, one of which has certainly
accorded with the event.  I was turning over this riddle in my mind, and
trying to catch its slippery purport by the tail, when the old man above
mentioned interrupted me.

"Mr. Coverdale!--Mr. Coverdale!"  said he, repeating my name twice, in
order to make up for the hesitating and ineffectual way in which he
uttered it.  "I ask your pardon, sir, but I hear you are going to
Blithedale tomorrow."

I knew the pale, elderly face, with the redtipt nose, and the patch over
one eye; and likewise saw something characteristic in the old fellow's
way of standing under the arch of a gate, only revealing enough of
himself to make me recognize him as an acquaintance.  He was a very shy
personage, this Mr. Moodie; and the trait was the more singular, as his
mode of getting his bread necessarily brought him into the stir and
hubbub of the world more than the generality of men.

"Yes, Mr. Moodie," I answered, wondering what interest he could take in
the fact, "it is my intention to go to Blithedale to-morrow.  Can I be of
any service to you before my departure?"

"If you pleased, Mr. Coverdale," said he, "you might do me a very great
favor."

"A very great one?"  repeated I, in a tone that must have expressed but
little alacrity of beneficence, although I was ready to do the old man
any amount of kindness involving no special trouble to myself.  "A very
great favor, do you say?  My time is brief, Mr. Moodie, and I have a good
many preparations to make.  But be good enough to tell me what you wish."

"Ah, sir," replied Old Moodie, "I don't quite like to do that; and, on
further thoughts, Mr. Coverdale, perhaps I had better apply to some older
gentleman, or to some lady, if you would have the kindness to make me
known to one, who may happen to be going to Blithedale.  You are a young
man, sir!"

"Does that fact lessen my availability for your purpose?"  asked I.
"However, if an older man will suit you better, there is Mr.
Hollingsworth, who has three or four years the advantage of me in age,
and is a much more solid character, and a philanthropist to boot.  I am
only a poet, and, so the critics tell me, no great affair at that!  But
what can this business be, Mr. Moodie?  It begins to interest me;
especially since your hint that a lady's influence might be found
desirable.  Come, I am really anxious to be of service to you."

But the old fellow, in his civil and demure manner, was both freakish and
obstinate; and he had now taken some notion or other into his head that
made him hesitate in his former design.

"I wonder, sir," said he, "whether you know a lady whom they call
Zenobia?"

"Not personally," I answered, "although I expect that pleasure to-morrow,
as she has got the start of the rest of us, and is already a resident at
Blithedale.  But have you a literary turn, Mr. Moodie?  or have you taken
up the advocacy of women's rights?  or what else can have interested you
in this lady?  Zenobia, by the bye, as I suppose you know, is merely her
public name; a sort of mask in which she comes before the world,
retaining all the privileges of privacy,--a contrivance, in short, like
the white drapery of the Veiled Lady, only a little more transparent.
But it is late.  Will you tell me what I can do for you?"

"Please to excuse me to-night, Mr. Coverdale," said Moodie.  "You are
very kind; but I am afraid I have troubled you, when, after all, there
may be no need.  Perhaps, with your good leave, I will come to your
lodgings to-morrow morning, before you set out for Blithedale.  I wish
you a good-night, sir, and beg pardon for stopping you."

And so he slipt away; and, as he did not show himself the next morning,
it was only through subsequent events that I ever arrived at a plausible
conjecture as to what his business could have been.  Arriving at my room,
I threw a lump of cannel coal upon the grate, lighted a cigar, and spent
an hour in musings of every hue, from the brightest to the most sombre;
being, in truth, not so very confident as at some former periods that
this final step, which would mix me up irrevocably with the Blithedale
affair, was the wisest that could possibly be taken.  It was nothing
short of midnight when I went to bed, after drinking a glass of
particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride myself in those days.
It was the very last bottle; and I finished it, with a friend, the next
forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.



II.  BLITHEDALE

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty
bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache),
there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as
that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale.  It was a wood fire,
in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but with the
fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.  Vividly does
that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes from the embers
in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of more inspiring
breath.  Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the dimmest gleam, and
with just as little fervency for my heart as for my finger-ends!  The
staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out.  Their genial glow must be
represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric glimmer, like that which
exudes, rather than shines, from damp fragments of decayed trees,
deluding the benighted wanderer through a forest.  Around such chill
mockery of a fire some few of us might sit on the withered leaves,
spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary warmth, and talk over our
exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed!  Nobody else in the world, I am bold to affirm--nobody,
at least, in our bleak little world of New England,--had dreamed of
Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the tropic.  Nor, with such
materials as were at hand, could the most skilful architect have
constructed any better imitation of Eve's bower than might be seen in the
snow hut of an Esquimaux.  But we made a summer of it, in spite of the
wild drifts.

It was an April day, as already hinted, and well towards the middle of
the month.  When morning dawned upon me, in town, its temperature was
mild enough to be pronounced even balmy, by a lodger, like myself, in one
of the midmost houses of a brick block,--each house partaking of the
warmth of all the rest, besides the sultriness of its individual
furnace--heat.  But towards noon there had come snow, driven along the
street by a northeasterly blast, and whitening the roofs and sidewalks
with a business-like perseverance that would have done credit to our
severest January tempest.  It set about its task apparently as much in
earnest as if it had been guaranteed from a thaw for months to come.  The
greater, surely, was my heroism, when, puffing out a final whiff of
cigar-smoke, I quitted my cosey pair of bachelor-rooms,--with a good fire
burning in the grate, and a closet right at hand, where there was still a
bottle or two in the champagne basket and a residuum of claret in a box,
--quitted, I say, these comfortable quarters, and plunged into the heart
of the pitiless snowstorm, in quest of a better life.

The better life!  Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough if
it looked so then.  The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt
whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest
heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when
it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to
follow out one's daydream to its natural consummation, although, if the
vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated
otherwise than by a failure.  And what of that?  Its airiest fragments,
impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that lurks not in the
most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme.  They are not the
rubbish of the mind.  Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be
reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and
force enough to form generous hopes of the world's destiny--yes!--and to
do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even to the extent of
quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and
travelling far beyond the strike of city clocks, through a drifting
snowstorm.

There were four of us who rode together through the storm; and
Hollingsworth, who had agreed to be of the number, was accidentally
delayed, and set forth at a later hour alone.  As we threaded the streets,
I remember how the buildings on either side seemed to press too closely
upon us, insomuch that our mighty hearts found barely room enough to
throb between them.  The snowfall, too, looked inexpressibly dreary (I
had almost called it dingy), coming down through an atmosphere of city
smoke, and alighting on the sidewalk only to be moulded into the impress
of somebody's patched boot or overshoe.  Thus the track of an old
conventionalism was visible on what was freshest from the sky.  But when
we left the pavements, and our muffled hoof-tramps beat upon a desolate
extent of country road, and were effaced by the unfettered blast as soon
as stamped, then there was better air to breathe.  Air that had not been
breathed once and again!  air that had not been spoken into words of
falsehood, formality, and error, like all the air of the dusky city!

"How pleasant it is!"  remarked I, while the snowflakes flew into my
mouth the moment it was opened.  "How very mild and balmy is this country
air!"

"Ah, Coverdale, don't laugh at what little enthusiasm you have left!"
said one of my companions.  "I maintain that this nitrous atmosphere is
really exhilarating; and, at any rate, we can never call ourselves
regenerated men till a February northeaster shall be as grateful to us as
the softest breeze of June!"

So we all of us took courage, riding fleetly and merrily along, by stone
fences that were half buried in the wave-like drifts; and through patches
of woodland, where the tree-trunks opposed a snow-incrusted side towards
the northeast; and within ken of deserted villas, with no footprints in
their avenues; and passed scattered dwellings, whence puffed the smoke of
country fires, strongly impregnated with the pungent aroma of burning
peat.  Sometimes, encountering a traveller, we shouted a friendly
greeting; and he, unmuffling his ears to the bluster and the snow-spray,
and listening eagerly, appeared to think our courtesy worth less than the
trouble which it cost him.  The churl!  He understood the shrill whistle
of the blast, but had no intelligence for our blithe tones of brotherhood.
This lack of faith in our cordial sympathy, on the traveller's part,
was one among the innumerable tokens how difficult a task we had in hand
for the reformation of the world.  We rode on, however, with still
unflagging spirits, and made such good companionship with the tempest
that, at our journey's end, we professed ourselves almost loath to bid
the rude blusterer good-by.  But, to own the truth, I was little better
than an icicle, and began to be suspicious that I had caught a fearful
cold.

And now we were seated by the brisk fireside of the old farmhouse, the
same fire that glimmers so faintly among my reminiscences at the
beginning of this chapter.  There we sat, with the snow melting out of
our hair and beards, and our faces all ablaze, what with the past
inclemency and present warmth.  It was, indeed, a right good fire that we
found awaiting us, built up of great, rough logs, and knotty limbs, and
splintered fragments of an oak-tree, such as farmers are wont to keep for
their own hearths, since these crooked and unmanageable boughs could
never be measured into merchantable cords for the market.  A family of
the old Pilgrims might have swung their kettle over precisely such a fire
as this, only, no doubt, a bigger one; and, contrasting it with my
coal-grate, I felt so much the more that we had transported ourselves a
world-wide distance from the system of society that shackled us at
breakfast-time.

Good, comfortable Mrs. Foster (the wife of stout Silas Foster, who was to
manage the farm at a fair stipend, and be our tutor in the art of
husbandry) bade us a hearty welcome.  At her back--a back of generous
breadth--appeared two young women, smiling most hospitably, but looking
rather awkward withal, as not well knowing what was to be their position
in our new arrangement of the world.  We shook hands affectionately all
round, and congratulated ourselves that the blessed state of brotherhood
and sisterhood, at which we aimed, might fairly be dated from this moment.
Our greetings were hardly concluded when the door opened, and
Zenobia--whom I had never before seen, important as was her place in our
enterprise--Zenobia entered the parlor.

This (as the reader, if at all acquainted with our literary biography,
need scarcely be told) was not her real name.  She had assumed it, in the
first instance, as her magazine signature; and, as it accorded well with
something imperial which her friends attributed to this lady's figure and
deportment, they half-laughingly adopted it in their familiar intercourse
with her.  She took the appellation in good part, and even encouraged its
constant use; which, in fact, was thus far appropriate, that our Zenobia,
however humble looked her new philosophy, had as much native pride as any
queen would have known what to do with.



III.  A KNOT OF DREAMERS

Zenobia bade us welcome, in a fine, frank, mellow voice, and gave each of
us her hand, which was very soft and warm.  She had something appropriate,
I recollect, to say to every individual; and what she said to myself was
this :--"I have long wished to know you, Mr. Coverdale, and to thank you
for your beautiful poetry, some of which I have learned by heart; or
rather it has stolen into my memory, without my exercising any choice or
volition about the matter.  Of course--permit me to say you do not think
of relinquishing an occupation in which you have done yourself so much
credit.  I would almost rather give you up as an associate, than that the
world should lose one of its true poets!"

"Ah, no; there will not be the slightest danger of that, especially after
this inestimable praise from Zenobia," said I, smiling, and blushing, no
doubt, with excess of pleasure.  "I hope, on the contrary, now to produce
something that shall really deserve to be called poetry,--true, strong,
natural, and sweet, as is the life which we are going to lead,--something
that shall have the notes of wild birds twittering through it, or a
strain like the wind anthems in the woods, as the case may be."

"Is it irksome to you to hear your own verses sung?"  asked Zenobia, with
a gracious smile.  "If so, I am very sorry, for you will certainly hear
me singing them sometimes, in the summer evenings."

"Of all things," answered I, "that is what will delight me most."

While this passed, and while she spoke to my companions, I was taking
note of Zenobia's aspect; and it impressed itself on me so distinctly,
that I can now summon her up, like a ghost, a little wanner than the life
but otherwise identical with it.  She was dressed as simply as possible,
in an American print (I think the dry-goods people call it so), but with
a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was one glimpse of a
white shoulder.  It struck me as a great piece of good fortune that there
should be just that glimpse.  Her hair, which was dark, glossy, and of
singular abundance, was put up rather soberly and primly--without curls,
or other ornament, except a single flower.  It was an exotic of rare
beauty, and as fresh as if the hothouse gardener had just clipt it from
the stem.  That flower has struck deep root into my memory.  I can both
see it and smell it, at this moment.  So brilliant, so rare, so costly as
it must have been, and yet enduring only for a day, it was more
indicative of the pride and pomp which had a luxuriant growth in
Zenobia's character than if a great diamond had sparkled among her hair.

Her hand, though very soft, was larger than most women would like to have,
or than they could afford to have, though not a whit too large in
proportion with the spacious plan of Zenobia's entire development.  It
did one good to see a fine intellect (as hers really was, although its
natural tendency lay in another direction than towards literature) so
fitly cased.  She was, indeed, an admirable figure of a woman, just on the
hither verge of her richest maturity, with a combination of features
which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some fastidious
persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness and delicacy.
But we find enough of those attributes everywhere.  Preferable--by way of
variety, at least--was Zenobia's bloom, health, and vigor, which she
possessed in such overflow that a man might well have fallen in love with
her for their sake only.  In her quiet moods, she seemed rather indolent;
but when really in earnest, particularly if there were a spice of bitter
feeling, she grew all alive to her finger-tips.

"I am the first comer," Zenobia went on to say, while her smile beamed
warmth upon us all; "so I take the part of hostess for to-day, and
welcome you as if to my own fireside.  You shall be my guests, too, at
supper.  Tomorrow, if you please, we will be brethren and sisters, and
begin our new life from daybreak."

"Have we our various parts assigned?" asked some one.

"Oh, we of the softer sex," responded Zenobia, with her mellow, almost
broad laugh,--most delectable to hear, but not in the least like an
ordinary woman's laugh,--"we women (there are four of us here already)
will take the domestic and indoor part of the business, as a matter of
course.  To bake, to boil, to roast, to fry, to stew,--to wash, and iron,
and scrub, and sweep,--and, at our idler intervals, to repose ourselves
on knitting and sewing,--these, I suppose, must be feminine occupations,
for the present.  By and by, perhaps, when our individual adaptations
begin to develop themselves, it may be that some of us who wear the
petticoat will go afield, and leave the weaker brethren to take our
places in the kitchen."

"What a pity," I remarked, "that the kitchen, and the housework generally,
cannot be left out of our system altogether!  It is odd enough that the
kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly
distinguishes artificial life--the life of degenerated mortals--from the
life of Paradise.  Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no
washing-day."

"I am afraid," said Zenobia, with mirth gleaming out of her eyes, "we
shall find some difficulty in adopting the paradisiacal system for at
least a month to come.  Look at that snowdrift sweeping past the window!
Are there any figs ripe, do you think?  Have the pineapples been gathered
to-day?  Would you like a bread-fruit, or a cocoanut?  Shall I run out
and pluck you some roses?  No, no, Mr. Coverdale; the only flower
hereabouts is the one in my hair, which I got out of a greenhouse this
morning.  As for the garb of Eden," added she, shivering playfully, "I
shall not assume it till after May-day!"

Assuredly Zenobia could not have intended it,--the fault must have been
entirely in my imagination.  But these last words, together with
something in her manner, irresistibly brought up a picture of that fine,
perfectly developed figure, in Eve's earliest garment.  Her free, careless,
generous modes of expression often had this effect of creating images
which, though pure, are hardly felt to be quite decorous when born of a
thought that passes between man and woman.  I imputed it, at that time,
to Zenobia's noble courage, conscious of no harm, and scorning the petty
restraints which take the life and color out of other women's
conversation.  There was another peculiarity about her.  We seldom meet
with women nowadays, and in this country, who impress us as being women
at all,--their sex fades away and goes for nothing, in ordinary
intercourse.  Not so with Zenobia.  One felt an influence breathing out
of her such as we might suppose to come from Eve, when she was just made,
and her Creator brought her to Adam, saying, "Behold!  here is a woman!"
Not that I would convey the idea of especial gentleness, grace, modesty,
and shyness, but of a certain warm and rich characteristic, which seems,
for the most part, to have been refined away out of the feminine system.

"And now," continued Zenobia, "I must go and help get supper.  Do you
think you can be content, instead of figs, pineapples, and all the other
delicacies of Adam's supper-table, with tea and toast, and a certain
modest supply of ham and tongue, which, with the instinct of a housewife,
I brought hither in a basket? And there shall be bread and milk, too, if
the innocence of your taste demands it."

The whole sisterhood now went about their domestic avocations, utterly
declining our offers to assist, further than by bringing wood for the
kitchen fire from a huge pile in the back yard.  After heaping up more
than a sufficient quantity, we returned to the sitting-room, drew our
chairs close to the hearth, and began to talk over our prospects.  Soon,
with a tremendous stamping in the entry, appeared Silas Foster, lank,
stalwart, uncouth, and grizzly-bearded.  He came from foddering the cattle
in the barn, and from the field, where he had been ploughing, until the
depth of the snow rendered it impossible to draw a furrow.  He greeted us
in pretty much the same tone as if he were speaking to his oxen, took a
quid from his iron tobacco-box, pulled off his wet cowhide boots, and sat
down before the fire in his stocking-feet.  The steam arose from his
soaked garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous and
spectre-like.

"Well, folks," remarked Silas, "you'll be wishing yourselves back to
town again, if this weather holds."

And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell
silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes intermingling
themselves with the fast-descending snow.  The storm, in its evening
aspect, was decidedly dreary.  It seemed to have arisen for our especial
behoof,--a symbol of the cold, desolate, distrustful phantoms that
invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of adventurous enterprises, to warn
us back within the boundaries of ordinary life.

But our courage did not quail.  We would not allow ourselves to be
depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if it
had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs.  There have
been few brighter seasons for us than that.  If ever men might lawfully
dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions without dread of
laughter or scorn on the part of the audience,--yes, and speak of
earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an object to be
hopefully striven for, and probably attained, we who made that little
semicircle round the blazing fire were those very men.  We had left the
rusty iron framework of society behind us; we had broken through many
hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary
treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness
almost as intolerable as we did.  We had stepped down from the pulpit; we
had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off
that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all,
than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp.  It was our purpose--a
generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with
its generosity--to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the
sake of showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the
false and cruel principles on which human society has all along been
based.

And, first of all, we had divorced ourselves from pride, and were
striving to supply its place with familiar love.  We meant to lessen the
laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share of it at
the cost of our own thews and sinews.  We sought our profit by mutual aid,
instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy, or filching it
craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves (if, indeed, there were
any such in New England), or winning it by selfish competition with a
neighbor; in one or another of which fashions every son of woman both
perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil, whether he chooses
it or no.  And, as the basis of our institution, we purposed to offer up
the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no less than an effort for
the advancement of our race.

Therefore, if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they might
be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes, among the fervid
coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to
rack with the crumbling embers and have never since arisen out of the
ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame.  In my own behalf, I rejoice
that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it
deserved.  It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime;
or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus
magnanimously persist in error.

Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation; but when he did
speak, it was very much to some practical purpose.  For instance:--"Which
man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of swine?  Some of us must
go to the next Brighton fair, and buy half a dozen pigs."

Pigs!  Good heavens!  had we come out from among the swinish multitude
for this?  And again, in reference to some discussion about raising early
vegetables for the market:--"We shall never make any hand at market
gardening," said Silas Foster, "unless the women folks will undertake to
do all the weeding.  We haven't team enough for that and the regular
farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth one common
field-hand.  No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a little too
early in the morning, to compete with the market gardeners round Boston."

It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after
our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should
relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside
barbarians in their own field of labor.  But, to own the truth, I very
soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a
position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood.  Nor could this
fail to be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and better half of
society should range itself on our side.  Constituting so pitiful a
minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest of mankind in
pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual bond among
ourselves.

This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner consciousness
by the entrance of Zenobia.  She came with the welcome intelligence that
supper was on the table.  Looking at herself in the glass, and perceiving
that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid (probably by
being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she flung it on the
floor, as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw away a faded violet.
The action seemed proper to her character, although, methought, it
would still more have befitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful
woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded ones by
her touch.  Nevertheless, it was a singular but irresistible effect; the
presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion,
a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up
men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us to
live in.  I tried to analyze this impression, but not with much success.

"It really vexes me," observed Zenobia, as we left the room, "that Mr.
Hollingsworth should be such a laggard.  I should not have thought him at
all the sort of person to be turned back by a puff of contrary wind, or a
few snowflakes drifting into his face."

"Do you know Hollingsworth personally?" I inquired.

"No; only as an auditor--auditress, I mean--of some of his lectures,"
said she.  "What a voice he has!  and what a man he is!  Yet not so much an
intellectual man, I should say, as a great heart; at least, he moved me
more deeply than I think myself capable of being moved, except by the
stroke of a true, strong heart against my own.  It is a sad pity that he
should have devoted his glorious powers to such a grimy, unbeautiful, and
positively hopeless object as this reformation of criminals, about which
he makes himself and his wretchedly small audiences so very miserable.
To tell you a secret, I never could tolerate a philanthropist before.
Could you?"

"By no means," I answered; "neither can I now."

"They are, indeed, an odiously disagreeable set of mortals," continued
Zenobia.  "I should like Mr. Hollingsworth a great deal better if the
philanthropy had been left out.  At all events, as a mere matter of taste,
I wish he would let the bad people alone, and try to benefit those who
are not already past his help.  Do you suppose he will be content to spend
his life, or even a few months of it, among tolerably virtuous and
comfortable individuals like ourselves?"

"Upon my word, I doubt it," said I.  "If we wish to keep him with us, we
must systematically commit at least one crime apiece!  Mere peccadillos
will not satisfy him."

Zenobia turned, sidelong, a strange kind of a glance upon me; but, before
I could make out what it meant, we had entered the kitchen, where, in
accordance with the rustic simplicity of our new life, the supper-table
was spread.



IV.  THE SUPPER-TABLE

The pleasant firelight!  I must still keep harping on it.  The kitchen
hearth had an old-fashioned breadth, depth, and spaciousness, far within
which lay what seemed the butt of a good-sized oak-tree, with the
moisture bubbling merrily out at both ends.  It was now half an hour
beyond dusk.  The blaze from an armful of substantial sticks, rendered
more combustible by brushwood and pine, flickered powerfully on the
smoke-blackened walls, and so cheered our spirits that we cared not what
inclemency might rage and roar on the other side of our illuminated
windows.  A yet sultrier warmth was bestowed by a goodly quantity of peat,
which was crumbling to white ashes among the burning brands, and
incensed the kitchen with its not ungrateful fragrance.  The exuberance
of this household fire would alone have sufficed to bespeak us no true
farmers; for the New England yeoman, if he have the misfortune to dwell
within practicable distance of a wood-market, is as niggardly of each
stick as if it were a bar of California gold.

But it was fortunate for us, on that wintry eve of our untried life, to
enjoy the warm and radiant luxury of a somewhat too abundant fire.  If it
served no other purpose, it made the men look so full of youth, warm
blood, and hope, and the women--such of them, at least, as were anywise
convertible by its magic--so very beautiful, that I would cheerfully have
spent my last dollar to prolong the blaze.  As for Zenobia, there was a
glow in her cheeks that made me think of Pandora, fresh from Vulcan's
workshop, and full of the celestial warmth by dint of which he had
tempered and moulded her.

"Take your places, my dear friends all," cried she; "seat yourselves
without ceremony, and you shall be made happy with such tea as not many
of the world's working-people, except yourselves, will find in their cups
to-night.  After this one supper, you may drink buttermilk, if you please.
To-night we will quaff this nectar, which, I assure you, could not be
bought with gold."

We all sat down,--grizzly Silas Foster, his rotund helpmate, and the two
bouncing handmaidens, included,--and looked at one another in a friendly
but rather awkward way.  It was the first practical trial of our theories
of equal brotherhood and sisterhood; and we people of superior
cultivation and refinement (for as such, I presume, we unhesitatingly
reckoned ourselves) felt as if something were already, accomplished
towards the millennium of love.  The truth is, however, that the laboring
oar was with our unpolished companions; it being far easier to condescend
than to accept of condescension.  Neither did I refrain from questioning,
in secret, whether some of us--and Zenobia among the rest--would so
quietly have taken our places among these good people, save for the
cherished consciousness that it was not by necessity but choice.  Though
we saw fit to drink our tea out of earthen cups to-night, and in earthen
company, it was at our own option to use pictured porcelain and handle
silver forks again to-morrow.  This same salvo, as to the power of
regaining our former position, contributed much, I fear, to the
equanimity with which we subsequently bore many of the hardships and
humiliations of a life of toil.  If ever I have deserved (which has not
often been the case, and, I think, never), but if ever I did deserve to
be soundly cuffed by a fellow mortal, for secretly putting weight upon
some imaginary social advantage, it must have been while I was striving
to prove myself ostentatiously his equal and no more.  It was while I sat
beside him on his cobbler's bench, or clinked my hoe against his own in
the cornfield, or broke the same crust of bread, my earth-grimed hand to
his, at our noontide lunch.  The poor, proud man should look at both
sides of sympathy like this.

The silence which followed upon our sitting down to table grew rather
oppressive; indeed, it was hardly broken by a word, during the first
round of Zenobia's fragrant tea.

"I hope," said I, at last, "that our blazing windows will be visible a
great way off.  There is nothing so pleasant and encouraging to a
solitary traveller, on a stormy night, as a flood of firelight seen amid
the gloom.  These ruddy window panes cannot fail to cheer the hearts of
all that look at them.  Are they not warm with the beacon-fire which we
have kindled for humanity?"

"The blaze of that brushwood will only last a minute or two longer,"
observed Silas Foster; but whether he meant to insinuate that our moral
illumination would have as brief a term, I cannot say.

"Meantime," said Zenobia, "it may serve to guide some wayfarer to a
shelter."

And, just as she said this, there came a knock at the house door.

"There is one of the world's wayfarers," said I.  "Ay, ay, just so!"
quoth Silas Foster.  "Our firelight will draw stragglers, just as a
candle draws dorbugs on a summer night."

Whether to enjoy a dramatic suspense, or that we were selfishly
contrasting our own comfort with the chill and dreary situation of the
unknown person at the threshold, or that some of us city folk felt a
little startled at the knock which came so unseasonably, through night
and storm, to the door of the lonely farmhouse,--so it happened that
nobody, for an instant or two, arose to answer the summons.  Pretty soon
there came another knock.  The first had been moderately loud; the second
was smitten so forcibly that the knuckles of the applicant must have left
their mark in the door panel.

"He knocks as if he had a right to come in," said Zenobia, laughing.
"And what are we thinking of?--It must be Mr. Hollingsworth!"

Hereupon I went to the door, unbolted, and flung it wide open.  There,
sure enough, stood Hollingsworth, his shaggy greatcoat all covered with
snow, so that he looked quite as much like a polar bear as a modern
philanthropist.

"Sluggish hospitality this!"  said he, in those deep tones of his, which
seemed to come out of a chest as capacious as a barrel.  "It would have
served you right if I had lain down and spent the night on the doorstep,
just for the sake of putting you to shame.  But here is a guest who will
need a warmer and softer bed."

And, stepping back to the wagon in which he had journeyed hither,
Hollingsworth received into his arms and deposited on the doorstep a
figure enveloped in a cloak.  It was evidently a woman; or, rather,
--judging from the ease with which he lifted her, and the little space
which she seemed to fill in his arms, a slim and unsubstantial girl.  As
she showed some hesitation about entering the door, Hollingsworth, with
his usual directness and lack of ceremony, urged her forward not merely
within the entry, but into the warm and strongly lighted kitchen.

"Who is this?"  whispered I, remaining behind with him, while he was
taking off his greatcoat.

"Who?  Really, I don't know," answered Hollingsworth, looking at me with
some surprise.  "It is a young person who belongs here, however; and no
doubt she had been expected.  Zenobia, or some of the women folks, can
tell you all about it."

"I think not," said I, glancing towards the new-comer and the other
occupants of the kitchen.  "Nobody seems to welcome her.  I should hardly
judge that she was an expected guest."

"Well, well," said Hollingsworth quietly, "We'll make it right."

The stranger, or whatever she were, remained standing precisely on that
spot of the kitchen floor to which Hollingsworth's kindly hand had
impelled her.  The cloak falling partly off, she was seen to be a very
young woman dressed in a poor but decent gown, made high in the neck, and
without any regard to fashion or smartness.  Her brown hair fell down
from beneath a hood, not in curls but with only a slight wave; her face
was of a wan, almost sickly hue, betokening habitual seclusion from the
sun and free atmosphere, like a flower-shrub that had done its best to
blossom in too scanty light.  To complete the pitiableness of her aspect,
she shivered either with cold, or fear, or nervous excitement, so that
you might have beheld her shadow vibrating on the fire-lighted wall.  In
short, there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this
young girl's; and it was hardly possible to help being angry with her,
from mere despair of doing anything for her comfort.  The fantasy occurred
to me that she was some desolate kind of a creature, doomed to wander
about in snowstorms; and that, though the ruddiness of our window panes
had tempted her into a human dwelling, she would not remain long enough
to melt the icicles out of her hair.  Another conjecture likewise came
into my mind.  Recollecting Hollingsworth's sphere of philanthropic
action, I deemed it possible that he might have brought one of his guilty
patients, to be wrought upon and restored to spiritual health by the pure
influences which our mode of life would create.

As yet the girl had not stirred.  She stood near the door, fixing a pair
of large, brown, melancholy eyes upon Zenobia--only upon Zenobia!--she
evidently saw nothing else in the room save that bright, fair, rosy,
beautiful woman.  It was the strangest look I ever witnessed; long a
mystery to me, and forever a memory.  Once she seemed about to move
forward and greet her,--I know not with what warmth or with what words,
--but, finally, instead of doing so, she dropped down upon her knees,
clasped her hands, and gazed piteously into Zenobia's face.  Meeting no
kindly reception, her head fell on her bosom.

I never thoroughly forgave Zenobia for her conduct on this occasion.  But
women are always more cautious in their casual hospitalities than men.

"What does the girl mean?"  cried she in rather a sharp tone.  "Is she
crazy?  Has she no tongue?"

And here Hollingsworth stepped forward.

"No wonder if the poor child's tongue is frozen in her mouth," said he;
and I think he positively frowned at Zenobia.  "The very heart will be
frozen in her bosom, unless you women can warm it, among you, with the
warmth that ought to be in your own!"

Hollingsworth's appearance was very striking at this moment.  He was then
about thirty years old, but looked several years older, with his great
shaggy head, his heavy brow, his dark complexion, his abundant beard, and
the rude strength with which his features seemed to have been hammered
out of iron, rather than chiselled or moulded from any finer or softer
material.  His figure was not tall, but massive and brawny, and well
befitting his original occupation; which as the reader probably
knows--was that of a blacksmith.  As for external polish, or mere
courtesy of manner, he never possessed more than a tolerably educated
bear; although, in his gentler moods, there was a tenderness in his voice,
eyes, mouth, in his gesture, and in every indescribable manifestation,
which few men could resist and no woman.  But he now looked stern and
reproachful; and it was with that inauspicious meaning in his glance that
Hollingsworth first met Zenobia's eyes, and began his influence upon her
life.

To my surprise, Zenobia--of whose haughty spirit I had been told so many
examples--absolutely changed color, and seemed mortified and confused.

"You do not quite do me justice, Mr. Hollingsworth," said she almost
humbly.  "I am willing to be kind to the poor girl.  Is she a protegee of
yours?  What can I do for her?"

"Have you anything to ask of this lady?" said Hollingsworth kindly to the
girl.  "I remember you mentioned her name before we left town."

"Only that she will shelter me," replied the girl tremulously.  "Only
that she will let me be always near her."

"Well, indeed," exclaimed Zenobia, recovering herself and laughing, "this
is an adventure, and well-worthy to be the first incident in our life of
love and free-heartedness!  But I accept it, for the present, without
further question, only," added she, "it would be a convenience if we knew
your name."

"Priscilla," said the girl; and it appeared to me that she hesitated
whether to add anything more, and decided in the negative.  "Pray do not
ask me my other name,--at least not yet,--if you will be so kind to a
forlorn creature."

Priscilla!--Priscilla!  I repeated the name to myself three or four times;
and in that little space, this quaint and prim cognomen had so
amalgamated itself with my idea of the girl, that it seemed as if no
other name could have adhered to her for a moment.  Heretofore the poor
thing had not shed any tears; but now that she found herself received,
and at least temporarily established, the big drops began to ooze out
from beneath her eyelids as if she were full of them.  Perhaps it showed
the iron substance of my heart, that I could not help smiling at this odd
scene of unknown and unaccountable calamity, into which our cheerful
party had been entrapped without the liberty of choosing whether to
sympathize or no.  Hollingsworth's behavior was certainly a great deal
more creditable than mine.

"Let us not pry further into her secrets," he said to Zenobia and the
rest of us, apart; and his dark, shaggy face looked really beautiful with
its expression of thoughtful benevolence.  "Let us conclude that
Providence has sent her to us, as the first-fruits of the world, which we
have undertaken to make happier than we find it.  Let us warm her poor,
shivering body with this good fire, and her poor, shivering heart with
our best kindness.  Let us feed her, and make her one of us.  As we do by
this friendless girl, so shall we prosper.  And, in good time, whatever
is desirable for us to know will be melted out of her, as inevitably as
those tears which we see now."

"At least," remarked I, "you may tell us how and where you met with her."

"An old man brought her to my lodgings," answered Hollingsworth, "and
begged me to convey her to Blithedale, where--so I understood him--she
had friends; and this is positively all I know about the matter."

Grim Silas Foster, all this while, had been busy at the supper-table,
pouring out his own tea and gulping it down with no more sense of its
exquisiteness than if it were a decoction of catnip; helping himself to
pieces of dipt toast on the flat of his knife blade, and dropping half of
it on the table-cloth; using the same serviceable implement to cut slice
after slice of ham; perpetrating terrible enormities with the butterplate;
and in all other respects behaving less like a civilized Christian than
the worst kind of an ogre.  Being by this time fully gorged, he crowned
his amiable exploits with a draught from the water pitcher, and then
favored us with his opinion about the business in hand.  And, certainly,
though they proceeded out of an unwiped mouth, his expressions did him
honor.

"Give the girl a hot cup of tea and a thick slice of this first-rate
bacon," said Silas, like a sensible man as he was.  "That's what she
wants.  Let her stay with us as long as she likes, and help in the
kitchen, and take the cow-breath at milking time; and, in a week or two,
she'll begin to look like a creature of this world."

So we sat down again to supper, and Priscilla along with us.



V.  UNTIL BEDTIME

Silas Foster, by the time we concluded our meal, had stript off his coat,
and planted himself on a low chair by the kitchen fire, with a lapstone,
a hammer, a piece of sole leather, and some waxed-ends, in order to
cobble an old pair of cowhide boots; he being, in his own phrase,
"something of a dab" (whatever degree of skill that may imply) at the
shoemaking business.  We heard the tap of his hammer at intervals for the
rest of the evening.  The remainder of the party adjourned to the
sitting-room.  Good Mrs. Foster took her knitting-work, and soon fell
fast asleep, still keeping her needles in brisk movement, and, to the
best of my observation, absolutely footing a stocking out of the texture
of a dream.  And a very substantial stocking it seemed to be.  One of the
two handmaidens hemmed a towel, and the other appeared to be making a
ruffle, for her Sunday's wear, out of a little bit of embroidered muslin
which Zenobia had probably given her.

It was curious to observe how trustingly, and yet how timidly, our poor
Priscilla betook herself into the shadow of Zenobia's protection.  She sat
beside her on a stool, looking up every now and then with an expression
of humble delight at her new friend's beauty.  A brilliant woman is often
an object of the devoted admiration--it might almost be termed worship,
or idolatry--of some young girl, who perhaps beholds the cynosure only at
an awful distance, and has as little hope of personal intercourse as of
climbing among the stars of heaven.  We men are too gross to comprehend
it.  Even a woman, of mature age, despises or laughs at such a passion.
There occurred to me no mode of accounting for Priscilla's behavior,
except by supposing that she had read some of Zenobia's stories (as such
literature goes everywhere), or her tracts in defence of the sex, and had
come hither with the one purpose of being her slave.  There is nothing
parallel to this, I believe,---nothing so foolishly disinterested, and
hardly anything so beautiful,--in the masculine nature, at whatever epoch
of life; or, if there be, a fine and rare development of character might
reasonably be looked for from the youth who should prove himself capable
of such self-forgetful affection.

Zenobia happening to change her seat, I took the opportunity, in an
undertone, to suggest some such notion as the above.

"Since you see the young woman in so poetical a light," replied she in
the same tone, "you had better turn the affair into a ballad.  It is a
grand subject, and worthy of supernatural machinery.  The storm, the
startling knock at the door, the entrance of the sable knight
Hollingsworth and this shadowy snow-maiden, who, precisely at the stroke
of midnight, shall melt away at my feet in a pool of ice-cold water and
give me my death with a pair of wet slippers!  And when the verses are
written, and polished quite to your mind, I will favor you with my idea
as to what the girl really is."

"Pray let me have it now," said I; "it shall be woven into the ballad."

"She is neither more nor less," answered Zenobia, "than a seamstress from
the city; and she has probably no more transcendental purpose than to do
my miscellaneous sewing, for I suppose she will hardly expect to make my
dresses."

"How can you decide upon her so easily?" I inquired.

"Oh, we women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness of
masculine perceptions!"  said Zenobia.  "There is no proof which you
would be likely to appreciate, except the needle marks on the tip of her
forefinger.  Then, my supposition perfectly accounts for her paleness, her
nervousness, and her wretched fragility.  Poor thing!  She has been
stifled with the heat of a salamander stove, in a small, close room, and
has drunk coffee, and fed upon doughnuts, raisins, candy, and all such
trash, till she is scarcely half alive; and so, as she has hardly any
physique, a poet like Mr. Miles Coverdale may be allowed to think her
spiritual."



"Look at her now!"  whispered I.

Priscilla was gazing towards us with an inexpressible sorrow in her wan
face and great tears running down her cheeks.  It was difficult to resist
the impression that, cautiously as we had lowered our voices, she must
have overheard and been wounded by Zenobia's scornful estimate of her
character and purposes.

"What ears the girl must have!"  whispered Zenobia, with a look of
vexation, partly comic and partly real.  "I will confess to you that I
cannot quite make her out.  However, I am positively not an ill-natured
person, unless when very grievously provoked,--and as you, and especially
Mr. Hollingsworth, take so much interest in this odd creature, and as she
knocks with a very slight tap against my own heart likewise,--why, I mean
to let her in.  From this moment I will be reasonably kind to her.  There
is no pleasure in tormenting a person of one's own sex, even if she do
favor one with a little more love than one can conveniently dispose of;
and that, let me say, Mr. Coverdale, is the most troublesome offence you
can offer to a woman."

"Thank you," said I, smiling; "I don't mean to be guilty of it."

She went towards Priscilla, took her hand, and passed her own rosy
finger-tips, with a pretty, caressing movement, over the girl's hair.
The touch had a magical effect.  So vivid a look of joy flushed up
beneath those fingers, that it seemed as if the sad and wan Priscilla had
been snatched away, and another kind of creature substituted in her place.
This one caress, bestowed voluntarily by Zenobia, was evidently
received as a pledge of all that the stranger sought from her, whatever
the unuttered boon might be.  From that instant, too, she melted in
quietly amongst us, and was no longer a foreign element.  Though always
an object of peculiar interest, a riddle, and a theme of frequent
discussion, her tenure at Blithedale was thenceforth fixed.  We no more
thought of questioning it, than if Priscilla had been recognized as a
domestic sprite, who had haunted the rustic fireside of old, before we
had ever been warmed by its blaze.

She now produced, out of a work-bag that she had with her, some little
wooden instruments (what they are called I never knew), and proceeded to
knit, or net, an article which ultimately took the shape of a silk purse.
As the work went on, I remembered to have seen just such purses before;
indeed, I was the possessor of one.  Their peculiar excellence, besides
the great delicacy and beauty of the manufacture, lay in the almost
impossibility that any uninitiated person should discover the aperture;
although, to a practised touch, they would open as wide as charity or
prodigality might wish.  I wondered if it were not a symbol of Priscilla's
own mystery.

Notwithstanding the new confidence with which Zenobia had inspired her,
our guest showed herself disquieted by the storm.  When the strong puffs
of wind spattered the snow against the windows and made the oaken frame
of the farmhouse creak, she looked at us apprehensively, as if to inquire
whether these tempestuous outbreaks did not betoken some unusual mischief
in the shrieking blast.  She had been bred up, no doubt, in some close
nook, some inauspiciously sheltered court of the city, where the
uttermost rage of a tempest, though it might scatter down the slates of
the roof into the bricked area, could not shake the casement of her
little room.  The sense of vast, undefined space, pressing from the
outside against the black panes of our uncurtained windows, was fearful
to the poor girl, heretofore accustomed to the narrowness of human limits,
with the lamps of neighboring tenements glimmering across the street.
The house probably seemed to her adrift on the great ocean of the night.
A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of
nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its
limitless extent.  Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught hold
of Zenobia's robe, with precisely the air of one who hears her own name
spoken at a distance, but is unutterably reluctant to obey the call.

We spent rather an incommunicative evening.  Hollingsworth hardly said a
word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed.  Then, indeed,
he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations like a
tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and betake
himself back into the solitude of his heart and mind.  The poor fellow
had contracted this ungracious habit from the intensity with which he
contemplated his own ideas, and the infrequent sympathy which they met
with from his auditors,--a circumstance that seemed only to strengthen
the implicit confidence that he awarded to them.  His heart, I imagine,
was never really interested in our socialist scheme, but was forever busy
with his strange, and, as most people thought it, impracticable plan, for
the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts.

Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him on
this point.  He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject
by perpetrating some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the
condition of his higher instincts afterwards.

The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our infant
community with an appropriate name,--a matter of greatly more difficulty
than the uninitiated reader would suppose.  Blithedale was neither good
nor bad.  We should have resumed the old Indian name of the premises, had
it possessed the oil-and--honey flow which the aborigines were so often
happy in communicating to their local appellations; but it chanced to be
a harsh, ill-connected, and interminable word, which seemed to fill the
mouth with a mixture of very stiff clay and very crumbly pebbles.
Zenobia suggested "Sunny Glimpse," as expressive of a vista into a better
system of society.  This we turned over and over for a while,
acknowledging its prettiness, but concluded it to be rather too fine and
sentimental a name (a fault inevitable by literary ladies in such
attempts) for sunburnt men to work under.  I ventured to whisper "Utopia,"
which, however, was unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very
harshly maltreated, as if he had intended a latent satire.  Some were for
calling our institution "The Oasis," in view of its being the one green
spot in the moral sand-waste of the world; but others insisted on a
proviso for reconsidering the matter at a twelvemonths' end, when a final
decision might be had, whether to name it "The Oasis" or "Sahara."   So,
at last, finding it impracticable to hammer out anything better, we
resolved that the spot should still be Blithedale, as being of good
augury enough.

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through the
windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another state of existence, close
beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the
prattlers and bustlers of a moment.  By and by the door was opened by
Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow
candle in his hand.

"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great, broad,
bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you can.  I shall sound the
horn at daybreak; and we've got the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to
milk, and a dozen other things to do, before breakfast."

Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale.  I went shivering to my
fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been
growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous
cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit subject
for a hospital.  The night proved a feverish one.  During the greater
part of it, I was in that vilest of states when a fixed idea remains in
the mind, like the nail in Sisera's brain, while innumerable other ideas
go and come, and flutter to and fro, combining constant transition with
intolerable sameness.  Had I made a record of that night's half-waking
dreams, it is my belief that it would have anticipated several of the
chief incidents of this narrative, including a dim shadow of its
catastrophe.  Starting up in bed at length, I saw that the storm was past,
and the moon was shining on the snowy landscape, which looked like a
lifeless copy of the world in marble.

From the bank of the distant river, which was shimmering in the moonlight,
came the black shadow of the only cloud in heaven, driven swiftly by the
wind, and passing over meadow and hillock, vanishing amid tufts of
leafless trees, but reappearing on the hither side, until it swept across
our doorstep.

How cold an Arcadia was this!



VI.  COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER

The horn sounded at daybreak, as Silas Foster had forewarned us, harsh,
uproarious, inexorably drawn out, and as sleep-dispelling as if this
hard-hearted old yeoman had got hold of the trump of doom.

On all sides I could hear the creaking of the bedsteads, as the brethren
of Blithedale started from slumber, and thrust themselves into their
habiliments, all awry, no doubt, in their haste to begin the reformation
of the world.  Zenobia put her head into the entry, and besought Silas
Foster to cease his clamor, and to be kind enough to leave an armful of
firewood and a pail of water at her chamber door.  Of the whole household,
--unless, indeed, it were Priscilla, for whose habits, in this particular,
I cannot vouch,--of all our apostolic society, whose mission was to
bless mankind, Hollingsworth, I apprehend, was the only one who began the
enterprise with prayer.  My sleeping-room being but thinly partitioned
from his, the solemn murmur of his voice made its way to my ears,
compelling me to be an auditor of his awful privacy with the Creator.  It
affected me with a deep reverence for Hollingsworth, which no familiarity
then existing, or that afterwards grew more intimate between us,--no, nor
my subsequent perception of his own great errors,--ever quite effaced.
It is so rare, in these times, to meet with a man of prayerful habits
(except, of course, in the pulpit), that such an one is decidedly marked
out by the light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine
interview from which he passes into his daily life.

As for me, I lay abed; and if I said my prayers, it was backward, cursing
my day as bitterly as patient Job himself.  The truth was, the hot-house
warmth of a town residence, and the luxurious life in which I indulged
myself, had taken much of the pith out of my physical system; and the
wintry blast of the preceding day, together with the general chill of our
airy old farmhouse, had got fairly into my heart and the marrow of my
bones.  In this predicament, I seriously wished--selfish as it may
appear--that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a
century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my
intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society
than I had always lived in?  It had satisfied me well enough.  My pleasant
bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the
bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals;
my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of my own
contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture gallery; my
noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession
of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which I shared; my
dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at command, and could
banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott when the Devil fed him
from the king of France's kitchen; my evening at the billiard club, the
concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased,--what could
be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil
amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke
of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of
my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth,

into whose vocation I had thrust myself?  Above all, was it better to
have a fever and die blaspheming, as I was like to do?

In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into the
icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time, when
Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.

"Well, Coverdale," cried he, "you bid fair to make an admirable farmer!
Don't you mean to get up to-day?"

"Neither to-day nor to-morrow," said I hopelessly.  "I doubt if I ever
rise again!"

"What is the matter now?"  he asked.

I told him my piteous case, and besought him to send me back to town in a
close carriage.

"No, no!"  said Hollingsworth with kindly seriousness.  "If you are
really sick, we must take care of you."

Accordingly he built a fire in my chamber, and, having little else to do
while the snow lay on the ground, established himself as my nurse.  A
doctor was sent for, who, being homaeopathic, gave me as much medicine,
in the course of a fortnight's attendance, as would have laid on the
point of a needle.  They fed me on water-gruel, and I speedily became a
skeleton above ground.  But, after all, I have many precious
recollections connected with that fit of sickness.

Hollingsworth's more than brotherly attendance gave me inexpressible
comfort.  Most men--and certainly I could not always claim to be one of
the exceptions--have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile
feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind
causes to falter and faint amid the rude jostle of our selfish existence.
The education of Christianity, it is true, the sympathy of a like
experience and the example of women, may soften and, possibly, subvert
this ugly characteristic of our sex; but it is originally there, and has
likewise its analogy in the practice of our brute brethren, who hunt the
sick or disabled member of the herd from among them, as an enemy.  It is
for this reason that the stricken deer goes apart, and the sick lion
grimly withdraws himself into his den.  Except in love, or the
attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we
really have no tenderness.  But there was something of the woman moulded
into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it,
as men often are of what is best in them, nor seemed ever to know that
there was such a soft place in his heart.  I knew it well, however, at
that time, although afterwards it came nigh to be forgotten.  Methought
there could not be two such men alive as Hollingsworth.  There never was
any blaze of a fireside that warmed and cheered me, in the down-sinkings
and shiverings of my spirit, so effectually as did the light out of those
eyes, which lay so deep and dark under his shaggy brows.

Happy the man that has such a friend beside him when he comes to die!
and unless a friend like Hollingsworth be at hand,--as most probably
there will not,--he had better make up his mind to die alone.  How many
men, I wonder, does one meet with in a lifetime, whom he would choose for
his deathbed companions!  At the crisis of my fever I besought
Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to make
me sensible of his own presence by a grasp of the hand, a word, a prayer,
if he thought good to utter it; and that then he should be the witness
how courageously I would encounter the worst.  It still impresses me as
almost a matter of regret that I did not die then, when I had tolerably
made up my mind to it; for Hollingsworth would have gone with me to the
hither verge of life, and have sent his friendly and hopeful accents far
over on the other side, while I should be treading the unknown path.  Now,
were I to send for him, he would hardly come to my bedside, nor should I
depart the easier for his presence.

"You are not going to die, this time," said he, gravely smiling.  "You
know nothing about sickness, and think your case a great deal more
desperate than it is."

"Death should take me while I am in the mood," replied I, with a little
of my customary levity.

"Have you nothing to do in life," asked Hollingsworth, "that you fancy
yourself so ready to leave it?"

"Nothing," answered I; "nothing that I know of, unless to make pretty
verses, and play a part, with Zenobia and the rest of the amateurs, in
our pastoral.  It seems but an unsubstantial sort of business, as viewed
through a mist of fever.  But, dear Hollingsworth, your own vocation is
evidently to be a priest, and to spend your days and nights in helping
your fellow creatures to draw peaceful dying breaths."

"And by which of my qualities," inquired he, "can you suppose me fitted
for this awful ministry?"

"By your tenderness," I said.  " It seems to me the reflection of God's
own love."

"And you call me tender!"  repeated Hollingsworth thoughtfully.  "I
should rather say that the most marked trait in my character is an
inflexible severity of purpose.  Mortal man has no right to be so
inflexible as it is my nature and necessity to be."

"I do not believe it," I replied.

But, in due time, I remembered what he said.

Probably, as Hollingsworth suggested, my disorder was never so serious as,
in my ignorance of such matters, I was inclined to consider it.  After
so much tragical preparation, it was positively rather mortifying to find
myself on the mending hand.

All the other members of the Community showed me kindness, according to
the full measure of their capacity.  Zenobia brought me my gruel every
day, made by her own hands (not very skilfully, if the truth must be
told), and, whenever I seemed inclined to converse, would sit by my
bedside, and talk with so much vivacity as to add several gratuitous
throbs to my pulse.  Her poor little stories and tracts never half did
justice to her intellect.  It was only the lack of a fitter avenue that
drove her to seek development in literature.  She was made (among a
thousand other things that she might have been) for a stump oratress.  I
recognized no severe culture in Zenobia; her mind was full of weeds.  It
startled me sometimes, in my state of moral as well as bodily
faint-heartedness, to observe the hardihood of her philosophy.  She made
no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as
with a breeze from her fan.  A female reformer, in her attacks upon
society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined
to aim directly at that spot.  Especially the relation between the sexes
is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.

Zenobia was truly a magnificent woman.  The homely simplicity of her dress
could not conceal, nor scarcely diminish, the queenliness of her presence.
The image of her form and face should have been multiplied all over the
earth.  It was wronging the rest of mankind to retain her as the
spectacle of only a few.  The stage would have been her proper sphere.
She should have made it a point of duty, moreover, to sit endlessly to
painters and sculptors, and preferably to the latter; because the cold
decorum of the marble would consist with the utmost scantiness of drapery,
so that the eye might chastely be gladdened with her material perfection
in its entireness.  I know not well how to express that the native glow
of coloring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms,
and what was visible of her full bust,--in a word, her womanliness
incarnated,--compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not
quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her.  Illness and exhaustion,
no doubt, had made me morbidly sensitive.

I noticed--and wondered how Zenobia contrived it--that she had always a
new flower in her hair.  And still it was a hot-house flower,--an
outlandish flower,--a flower of the tropics, such as appeared to have
sprung passionately out of a soil the very weeds of which would be fervid
and spicy.  Unlike as was the flower of each successive day to the
preceding one, it yet so assimilated its richness to the rich beauty of
the woman, that I thought it the only flower fit to be worn; so fit,
indeed, that Nature had evidently created this floral gem, in a happy
exuberance, for the one purpose of worthily adorning Zenobia's head.  It
might be that my feverish fantasies clustered themselves about this
peculiarity, and caused it to look more gorgeous and wonderful than if
beheld with temperate eyes.  In the height of my illness, as I well
recollect, I went so far as to pronounce it preternatural.

"Zenobia is an enchantress!"  whispered I once to Hollingsworth.  "She is
a sister of the Veiled Lady.  That flower in her hair is a talisman.  If
you were to snatch it away, she would vanish, or be transformed into
something else."  "What does he say?"  asked Zenobia.

"Nothing that has an atom of sense in it," answered Hollingsworth.  "He
is a little beside himself, I believe, and talks about your being a witch,
and of some magical property in the flower that you wear in your hair."

"It is an idea worthy of a feverish poet," said she, laughing rather
compassionately, and taking out the flower.  "I scorn to owe anything to
magic.  Here, Mr. Hollingsworth, you may keep the spell while it has any
virtue in it; but I cannot promise you not to appear with a new one
to-morrow.  It is the one relic of my more brilliant, my happier days!"

The most curious part of the matter was that, long after my slight
delirium had passed away,--as long, indeed, as t continued to know this
remarkable woman,--her daily flower affected my imagination, though more
slightly, yet in very much the same way.  The reason must have been that,
whether intentionally on her part or not, this favorite ornament was
actually a subtile expression of Zenobia's character.

One subject, about which--very impertinently, moreover--I perplexed
myself with a great many conjectures, was, whether Zenobia had ever been
married.  The idea, it must be understood, was unauthorized by any
circumstance or suggestion that had made its way to my ears.  So young as
I beheld her, and the freshest and rosiest woman of a thousand, there was
certainly no need of imputing to her a destiny already accomplished; the
probability was far greater that her coming years had all life's richest
gifts to bring.  If the great event of a woman's existence had been
consummated, the world knew nothing of it, although the world seemed to
know Zenobia well.  It was a ridiculous piece of romance, undoubtedly, to
imagine that this beautiful personage, wealthy as she was, and holding a
position that might fairly enough be called distinguished, could have
given herself away so privately, but that some whisper and suspicion, and
by degrees a full understanding of the fact, would eventually be blown
abroad.  But then, as I failed not to consider, her original home was at
a distance of many hundred miles.  Rumors might fill the social
atmosphere, or might once have filled it, there, which would travel but
slowly, against the wind, towards our Northeastern metropolis, and
perhaps melt into thin air before reaching it.

There was not--and I distinctly repeat it---the slightest foundation in
my knowledge for any surmise of the kind.  But there is a species of
intuition,--either a spiritual lie or the subtile recognition of a fact,
--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.  The soul
gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a vegetable
diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood.  Vapors then rise up
to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood, but sometimes
truth.  The spheres of our companions have, at such periods, a vastly
greater influence upon our own than when robust health gives us a
repellent and self-defensive energy.  Zenobia's sphere, I imagine,
impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed me, during this
period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical clairvoyant.

Then, also, as anybody could observe, the freedom of her deportment
(though, to some tastes, it might commend itself as the utmost perfection
of manner in a youthful widow or a blooming matron) was not exactly
maiden-like.  What girl had ever laughed as Zenobia did? What girl had
ever spoken in her mellow tones? Her unconstrained and inevitable
manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman to whom
wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery.  Yet sometimes I strove to
be ashamed of these conjectures.  I acknowledged it as a masculine
grossness--a sin of wicked interpretation, of which man is often guilty
towards the other sex--thus to mistake the sweet, liberal, but womanly
frankness of a noble and generous disposition.  Still, it was of no avail
to reason with myself nor to upbraid myself.  Pertinaciously the thought,
"Zenobia is a wife; Zenobia has lived and loved!  There is no folded
petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose!
"--irresistibly that thought drove out all other conclusions, as often as
my mind reverted to the subject.

Zenobia was conscious of my observation, though not, I presume, of the
point to which it led me.

"Mr. Coverdale," said she one day, as she saw me watching her, while she
arranged my gruel on the table, "I have been exposed to a great deal of
eye-shot in the few years of my mixing in the world, but never, I think,
to precisely such glances as you are in the habit of favoring me with.  I
seem to interest you very much; and yet--or else a woman's instinct is
for once deceived--I cannot reckon you as an admirer.  What are you
seeking to discover in me?"

"The mystery of your life," answered I, surprised into the truth by the
unexpectedness of her attack.  "And you will never tell me."

She bent her head towards me, and let me look into her eyes, as if
challenging me to drop a plummet-line down into the depths of her
consciousness.

"I see nothing now," said I, closing my own eyes, "unless it be the face
of a sprite laughing at me from the bottom of a deep well."

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that
any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.  Otherwise, the
matter could have been no concern of mine.  It was purely speculative,
for I should not, under any circumstances, have fallen in love with
Zenobia.  The riddle made me so nervous, however, in my sensitive
condition of mind and body, that I most ungratefully began to wish that
she would let me alone.  Then, too, her gruel was very wretched stuff,
with almost invariably the smell of pine smoke upon it, like the evil
taste that is said to mix itself up with a witch's best concocted
dainties.  Why could not she have allowed one of the other women to take
the gruel in charge?  Whatever else might be her gifts, Nature certainly
never intended Zenobia for a cook.  Or, if so, she should have meddled
only with the richest and spiciest dishes, and such as are to be tasted
at banquets, between draughts of intoxicating wine.



VII.  THE CONVALESCENT

As soon as my incommodities allowed me to think of past occurrences, I
failed not to inquire what had become of the odd little guest whom
Hollingsworth had been the medium of introducing among us.  It now
appeared that poor Priscilla had not so literally fallen out of the
clouds, as we were at first inclined to suppose.  A letter, which should
have introduced her, had since been received from one of the city
missionaries, containing a certificate of character and an allusion to
circumstances which, in the writer's judgment, made it especially
desirable that she should find shelter in our Community.  There was a
hint, not very intelligible, implying either that Priscilla had recently
escaped from some particular peril or irksomeness of position, or else
that she was still liable to this danger or difficulty, whatever it might
be.  We should ill have deserved the reputation of a benevolent
fraternity, had we hesitated to entertain a petitioner in such need, and
so strongly recommended to our kindness; not to mention, moreover, that
the strange maiden had set herself diligently to work, and was doing good
service with her needle.  But a slight mist of uncertainty still floated
about Priscilla, and kept her, as yet, from taking a very decided place
among creatures of flesh and blood.

The mysterious attraction, which, from her first entrance on our scene,
she evinced for Zenobia, had lost nothing of its force.  I often heard
her footsteps, soft and low, accompanying the light but decided tread of
the latter up the staircase, stealing along the passage-way by her new
friend's side, and pausing while Zenobia entered my chamber.
Occasionally Zenobia would be a little annoyed by Priscilla's too close
attendance.  In an authoritative and not very kindly tone, she would
advise her to breathe the pleasant air in a walk, or to go with her work
into the barn, holding out half a promise to come and sit on the hay with
her, when at leisure.  Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty requital for
her love.  Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with her.  For
several minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves retained the
susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low, pleasant murmur
ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained it to be
Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to Hollingsworth.  She
talked more largely and freely with him than with Zenobia, towards whom,
indeed, her feelings seemed not so much to be confidence as involuntary
affection.  I should have thought all the better of my own qualities had
Priscilla marked me out for the third place in her regards.  But, though
she appeared to like me tolerably well, I could never flatter myself with
being distinguished by her as Hollingsworth and Zenobia were.

One forenoon, during my convalescence, there came a gentle tap at my
chamber door.  I immediately said, "Come in, Priscilla!"  with an acute
sense of the applicant's identity.  Nor was I deceived.  It was really
Priscilla,--a pale, large-eyed little woman (for she had gone far enough
into her teens to be, at least, on the outer limit of girlhood), but much
less wan than at my previous view of her, and far better conditioned both
as to health and spirits.  As I first saw her, she had reminded me of
plants that one sometimes observes doing their best to vegetate among the
bricks of an enclosed court, where there is scanty soil and never any
sunshine.  At present, though with no approach to bloom, there were
indications that the girl had human blood in her veins.

Priscilla came softly to my bedside, and held out an article of
snow-white linen, very carefully and smoothly ironed.  She did not seem
bashful, nor anywise embarrassed.  My weakly condition, I suppose,
supplied a medium in which she could approach me.

"Do not you need this?"  asked she.  "I have made it for you."  It was a
nightcap!

"My dear Priscilla," said I, smiling, "I never had on a nightcap in my
life!  But perhaps it will be better for me to wear one, now that I am a
miserable invalid.  How admirably you have done it!  No, no; I never can
think of wearing such an exquisitely wrought nightcap as this, unless it
be in the daytime, when I sit up to receive company."

"It is for use, not beauty," answered Priscilla.  "I could have
embroidered it and made it much prettier, if I pleased."

While holding up the nightcap and admiring the fine needlework, I
perceived that Priscilla had a sealed letter which she was waiting for me
to take.  It had arrived from the village post-office that morning.  As I
did not immediately offer to receive the letter, she drew it back, and
held it against her bosom, with both hands clasped over it, in a way that
had probably grown habitual to her.  Now, on turning my eyes from the
nightcap to Priscilla, it forcibly struck me that her air, though not her
figure, and the expression of her face, but not its features, had a
resemblance to what I had often seen in a friend of mine, one of the most
gifted women of the age.  I cannot describe it.  The points easiest to
convey to the reader were a certain curve of the shoulders and a partial
closing of the eyes, which seemed to look more penetratingly into my own
eyes, through the narrowed apertures, than if they had been open at full
width.  It was a singular anomaly of likeness coexisting with perfect
dissimilitude.

"Will you give me the letter, Priscilla?" said I.

She started, put the letter into my hand, and quite lost the look that
had drawn my notice.

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"  "No,"
she answered.

"Because," said I, "you reminded me of her just now,--and it happens,
strangely enough, that this very letter is from her."

Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.

"I wish people would not fancy such odd things in me!"  she said rather
petulantly.  "How could I possibly make myself resemble this lady merely
by holding her letter in my hand?"

"Certainly, Priscilla, it would puzzle me to explain it," I replied; "nor
do I suppose that the letter had anything to do with it.  It was just a
coincidence, nothing more."

She hastened out of the room, and this was the last that I saw of
Priscilla until I ceased to be an invalid.

Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr. Emerson's
Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances (lent me by
Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the brethren or
sisterhood had brought with them.  Agreeing in little else, most of these
utterances were like the cry of some solitary sentinel, whose station was
on the outposts of the advance guard of human progression; or sometimes
the voice came sadly from among the shattered ruins of the past, but yet
had a hopeful echo in the future.  They were well adapted (better, at
least, than any other intellectual products, the volatile essence of
which had heretofore tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like ourselves,
whose present bivouac was considerably further into the waste of chaos
than any mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before.  Fourier's
works, also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a good
deal of my attention, from the analogy which I could not but recognize
between his system and our own.  There was far less resemblance, it is
true, than the world chose to imagine, inasmuch as the two theories
differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their main
principles.

I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his benefit,
some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.

"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe shall
arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into a
particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable at Paris in
Fourier's time.  He calls it limonade a cedre.  It is positively a fact!
Just imagine the city docks filled, every day, with a flood tide of this
delectable beverage!"

"Why did not the Frenchman make punch of it at once?"  asked
Hollingsworth.  "The jack-tars would be delighted to go down in ships and
do business in such an element."

I further proceeded to explain, as well as I modestly could, several
points of Fourier's system, illustrating them with here and there a page
or two, and asking Hollingsworth's opinion as to the expediency of
introducing these beautiful peculiarities into our own practice.

"Let me hear no more of it!"  cried he, in utter disgust.  "I never will
forgive this fellow!  He has committed the unpardonable sin; for what
more monstrous iniquity could the Devil himself contrive than to choose
the selfish principle,--the principle of all human wrong, the very
blackness of man's heart, the portion of ourselves which we shudder at,
and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,--to
choose it as the master workman of his system?  To seize upon and foster
whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial, and abominable corruptions
have cankered into our nature, to be the efficient instruments of his
infernal regeneration!  And his consummated Paradise, as he pictures it,
would be worthy of the agency which he counts upon for establishing it.
The nauseous villain!"

"Nevertheless," remarked I, "in consideration of the promised delights of
his system,---so very proper, as they certainly are, to be appreciated by
Fourier's countrymen,--I cannot but wonder that universal France did not
adopt his theory at a moment's warning.  But is there not something very
characteristic of his nation in Fourier's manner of putting forth his
views?  He makes no claim to inspiration.  He has not persuaded
himself--as Swedenborg did, and as any other than a Frenchman would, with
a mission of like importance to communicate--that he speaks with
authority from above.  He promulgates his system, so far as I can
perceive, entirely on his own responsibility.  He has searched out and
discovered the whole counsel of the Almighty in respect to mankind, past,
present, and for exactly seventy thousand years to come, by the mere
force and cunning of his individual intellect!"

"Take the book out of my sight," said Hollingsworth with great virulence
of expression, "or, I tell you fairly, I shall fling it in the fire!  And
as for Fourier, let him make a Paradise, if he can, of Gehenna, where, as
I conscientiously believe, he is floundering at this moment!"

"And bellowing, I suppose," said I,--not that I felt any ill-will towards
Fourier, but merely wanted to give the finishing touch to Hollingsworth's
image, "bellowing for the least drop of his beloved limonade a cedre!"

There is but little profit to be expected in attempting to argue with a
man who allows himself to declaim in this manner; so I dropt the subject,
and never took it up again.

But had the system at which he was so enraged combined almost any amount
of human wisdom, spiritual insight, and imaginative beauty, I question
whether Hollingsworth's mind was in a fit condition to receive it.  I
began to discern that he had come among us actuated by no real sympathy
with our feelings and our hopes, but chiefly because we were estranging
ourselves from the world, with which his lonely and exclusive object in
life had already put him at odds.  Hollingsworth must have been
originally endowed with a great spirit of benevolence, deep enough and
warm enough to be the source of as much disinterested good as Providence
often allows a human being the privilege of conferring upon his fellows.
This native instinct yet lived within him.  I myself had profited by it,
in my necessity.  It was seen, too, in his treatment of Priscilla.  Such
casual circumstances as were here involved would quicken his divine power
of sympathy, and make him seem, while their influence lasted, the
tenderest man and the truest friend on earth.  But by and by you missed
the tenderness of yesterday, and grew drearily conscious that
Hollingsworth had a closer friend than ever you could be; and this friend
was the cold, spectral monster which he had himself conjured up, and on
which he was wasting all the warmth of his heart, and of which, at last,
--as these men of a mighty purpose so invariably do,--he had grown to be
the bond-slave.  It was his philanthropic theory.

This was a result exceedingly sad to contemplate, considering that it had
been mainly brought about by the very ardor and exuberance of his
philanthropy.  Sad, indeed, but by no means unusual: he had taught his
benevolence to pour its warm tide exclusively through one channel; so
that there was nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love to
man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments, unless
they could minister in some way to the terrible egotism which he mistook
for an angel of God.  Had Hollingsworth's education been more enlarged,
he might not so inevitably have stumbled into this pitfall.  But this
identical pursuit had educated him.  He knew absolutely nothing, except
in a single direction, where he had thought so energetically, and felt to
such a depth, that no doubt the entire reason and justice of the universe
appeared to be concentrated thitherward.

It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life, Hollingsworth
was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people (among whom I include
humorists of every degree), it required all the constancy of friendship
to restrain his associates from pronouncing him an intolerable bore.
Such prolonged fiddling upon one string--such multiform presentation of
one idea!  His specific object (of which he made the public more than
sufficiently aware, through the medium of lectures and pamphlets) was to
obtain funds for the construction of an edifice, with a sort of
collegiate endowment.  On this foundation he purposed to devote himself
and a few disciples to the reform and mental culture of our criminal
brethren.  His visionary edifice was Hollingsworth's one castle in the
air; it was the material type in which his philanthropic dream strove to
embody itself; and he made the scheme more definite, and caught hold of
it the more strongly, and kept his clutch the more pertinaciously, by
rendering it visible to the bodily eye.  I have seen him, a hundred times,
with a pencil and sheet of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view,
or the rear of the structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as
lovingly as another man might plan those of the projected home where he
meant to be happy with his wife and children.  I have known him to begin
a model of the building with little stones, gathered at the brookside,
whither we had gone to cool ourselves in the sultry noon of hayingtime.
Unlike all other ghosts, his spirit haunted an edifice, which, instead of
being time-worn, and full of storied love, and joy, and sorrow, had never
yet come into existence.

"Dear friend," said I once to Hollingsworth, before leaving my
sick-chamber," I heartily wish that I could make your schemes my schemes,
because it would be so great a happiness to find myself treading the same
path with you.  But I am afraid there is not stuff in me stern enough for
a philanthropist,--or not in this peculiar direction,--or, at all events,
not solely in this.  Can you bear with me, if such should prove to be the
case?"

"I will at least wait awhile," answered Hollingsworth, gazing at me
sternly and gloomily.  "But how can you be my life-long friend, except you
strive with me towards the great object of my life?"

Heaven forgive me!  A horrible suspicion crept into my heart, and stung
the very core of it as with the fangs of an adder.  I wondered whether it
were possible that Hollingsworth could have watched by my bedside, with
all that devoted care, only for the ulterior purpose of making me a
proselyte to his views!



VIII.  A MODERN ARCADIA

May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia s sole decree, or by the unanimous
vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival.  It was
deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to clear away
the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring out a few of
the readiest wild flowers.  On the forenoon of the substituted day, after
admitting some of the balmy air into my chamber, I decided that it was
nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself a prisoner any longer.  So I
descended to the sitting-room, and finding nobody there, proceeded to the
barn, whence I had already heard Zenobia's voice, and along with it a
girlish laugh which was not so certainly recognizable.  Arriving at the
spot, it a little surprised me to discover that these merry outbreaks
came from Priscilla.

The two had been a-maying together.  They had found anemones in abundance,
houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few longstalked violets,
and a quantity of white everlasting flowers, and had filled up their
basket with the delicate spray of shrubs and trees.  None were prettier
than the maple twigs, the leaf of which looks like a scarlet bud in May,
and like a plate of vegetable gold in October.  Zenobia, who showed no
conscience in such matters, had also rifled a cherry-tree of one of its
blossomed boughs, and, with all this variety of sylvan ornament, had been
decking out Priscilla.  Being done with a good deal of taste, it made her
look more charming than I should have thought possible, with my
recollection of the wan, frostnipt girl, as heretofore described.
Nevertheless, among those fragrant blossoms, and conspicuously, too, had
been stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect, which, as soon as I
detected it, destroyed the effect of all the rest.  There was a gleam of
latent mischief--not to call it deviltry--in Zenobia's eye, which seemed
to indicate a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement.

As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore nothing
but her invariable flower of the tropics.

"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?"  asked she,
surveying her as a child does its doll.  "Is not she worth a verse or
two?"

"There is only one thing amiss," answered I.  Zenobia laughed, and flung
the malignant weed away.

"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet than
myself.  She is the very picture of the New England spring; subdued in
tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and bringing us a
few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer, though hardly more
beautiful, hereafter.  The best type of her is one of those anemones."

"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"
observed Zenobia, "is her wildness.  Such a quiet little body as she
seemed, one would not have expected that.  Why, as we strolled the woods
together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees, like a
squirrel.  She has never before known what it is to live in the free air,
and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine.  And she thinks it
such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly Mr. Hollingsworth and
myself, such angels!  It is quite ridiculous, and provokes one's malice
almost, to see a creature so happy, especially a feminine creature."

"They are always happier than male creatures," said I.

"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia
contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight.  Did you
ever see a happy woman in your life?  Of course, I do not mean a girl,
like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike, while on
the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman.  How can she be happy,
after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single event, which
she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?  A man has his
choice of innumerable events."

"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one
event, may compensate for the lack of variety."   "Indeed!"  said Zenobia.

While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a
distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder, returning
from the field.  She immediately set out to meet him, running and
skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May morning, but
with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive; she clapped her
hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young
girls when their electricity overcharges them.  But, all at once, midway
to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round about her, towards the river,
the road, the woods, and back towards us, appearing to listen, as if she
heard some one calling her name, and knew not precisely in what direction.

"Have you bewitched her?"  I exclaimed.

"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl do
that identical thing once or twice before.  Can you imagine what is the
matter with her?"

"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy tongues
that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."

From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have
deserted her.  She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until
Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to us,
she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless
Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago.  These sudden
transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme nervous
susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl, though with
diminished frequency as her health progressively grew more robust.

I was now on my legs again.  My fit of illness had been an avenue between
two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through which I
crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and knees, as it
were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond.  In
this respect, it was like death.  And, as with death, too, it was good to
have gone through it.  No otherwise could I have rid myself of a thousand
follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other such worldly dust as
inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad highway, giving them
all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however freshly they may have
begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning.  The very substance upon my
bones had not been fit to live with in any better, truer, or more
energetic mode than that to which I was accustomed.  So it was taken off
me and flung aside, like any other worn-out or unseasonable garment; and,
after shivering a little while in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew,
and much more satisfactorily than in my previous suit.  In literal and
physical truth, I was quite another man.  I had a lively sense of the
exultation with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its
eternal progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an
early grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as now
affected me for the flesh which I had lost.

Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of the
brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions.  Their
enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they
sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material
world and its climate.  In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and
stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,
blossoming with many-colored delights.  Thus Nature, whose laws I had
broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a
strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his
naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty
playthings to console the urchin for her severity.

In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to
our little army of saints and martyrs.  They were mostly individuals who
had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary
pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to
lose their faith in the better time to come.  On comparing their minds
one with another they often discovered that this idea of a Community had
been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for years.  Thoughtful,
strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows, but eyes that did not
require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by the student's lamplight,
and hair that seldom showed a thread of silver.  Age, wedded to the past,
incrusted over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid
in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an
enterprise like this.  Youth, too, in its early dawn, was hardly more
adapted to our purpose; for it would behold the morning radiance of its
own spirit beaming over the very same spots of withered grass and barren
sand whence most of us had seen it vanish.  We had very young people with
us, it is true,--downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and
children of all heights above one's knee; but these had chiefly been sent
hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our
institution to supply.  Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere,
who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized more or less in our
theories, and sometimes shared in our labors.

On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,
perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long.  Persons
of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might be
called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot.  But, so
long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a
free nature in him, might have sought far and near without finding so
many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward.  We were of all
creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable
subject.  Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative.
We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with in our
past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of
lumbering along with the old system any further.  As to what should be
substituted, there was much less unanimity.  We did not greatly care--at
least, I never did--for the written constitution under which our
millennium had commenced.  My hope was, that, between theory and practice,
a true and available mode of life might be struck out; and that, even
should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in the trial would
not have been wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the
experience which makes men wise.

Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened
with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people of poetry and
the stage.  In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked rather like a
gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of honest
laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers.  Whatever might be our
points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to Blithedale with
the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes.  Such
garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield!  Coats with high
collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with
the waist at every point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons of a
dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the
humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a
living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment of
men who had seen better days.  It was gentility in tatters.  Often
retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the
denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by
agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their cabbage
garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most
clumsily patched in the rear.  We might have been sworn comrades to
Falstaff's ragged regiment.  Little skill as we boasted in other points
of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to
stick up for a scarecrow.  And the worst of the matter was, that the
first energetic movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor
was sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments.  So we gradually
flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as
preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,--
"Ara nudus; sere nudus,"--which as Silas Foster remarked, when I
translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish the women-folks.

After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us.  Our
faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our
shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if
they had never been capable of kid gloves.  The plough, the hoe, the
scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp.  The oxen responded
to our voices.  We could do almost as fair a day's work as Silas Foster
himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak with only a
little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite gone by
breakfast-time.

To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our real
proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand.  They told
slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive
them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their conjugal
bond at nightfall.  They had the face to say, too, that the cows laughed
at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked over the pails;
partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the wrong side, and
partly because, taking offence at the whisking of their tails, we were in
the habit of holding these natural fly-flappers with one hand and milking
with the other.  They further averred that we hoed up whole acres of
Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth carefully about the weeds;
and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for
cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful planting few of our seeds ever
came up at all, or, if they did come up, it was stern-foremost; and that
we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a field of
beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way.
They quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or
other of us to crop off two or three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy
use of the hay-cutter.  Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these
mendacious rogues circulated a report that we communitarians were
exterminated, to the last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the
sweep of our own scythes!  and that the world had lost nothing by this
little accident.

But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring farmers.
The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming
practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be
anything else.  While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased
ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.  It
was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.  Each stroke of
the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden
from the sun.  Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture
from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the
far-off soul of truth.  In this point of view, matters did not turn out
quite so well as we anticipated.  It is very true that, sometimes, gazing
casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a
richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky.  There was,
at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as
if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no
opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she
mysteriously hides herself from mortals.  But this was all.  The clods of
earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were
never etherealized into thought.  Our thoughts, on the contrary, were
fast becoming cloddish.  Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us
mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening.  Intellectual activity is
incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.  The yeoman and
the scholar--the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not
the man of sturdiest sense and integrity--are two distinct individuals,
and can never be melted or welded into one substance.

Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as
Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.

"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the hay-cart,"
said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."

"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.
"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."

"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?"  asked
Zenobia.  "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better than
Burns did.  Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an individual you
are to be, two or three years hence.  Grim Silas Foster is your prototype,
with his palm of soleleather, and his joints of rusty iron (which all
through summer keep the stiffness of what he calls his winter's
rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't know what his brain is made of,
unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but yours may be cauliflower, as a rather
more delicate variety.  Your physical man will be transmuted into salt
beef and fried pork, at the rate, I should imagine, of a pound and a half
a day; that being about the average which we find necessary in the
kitchen.  You will make your toilet for the day (still like this
delightful Silas Foster) by rinsing your fingers and the front part of
your face in a little tin pan of water at the doorstep, and teasing your
hair with a wooden pocketcomb before a seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass.
Your only pastime will be to smoke some very vile tobacco in the black
stump of a pipe."

"Pray, spare me!"  cried I.  "But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of
solacing himself with the weed."

"Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her
description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our friend
Foster never gets so far as the newspaper.  When you happen to sit down,
at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal proclamation of the
fact, as he does; and invariably you must be jogged out of a nap, after
supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and persuaded to go regularly to
bed.  And on Sundays, when you put on a blue coat with brass buttons, you
will think of nothing else to do but to go and lounge over the stone
walls and rail fences, and stare at the corn growing.  And you will look
with a knowing eye at oxen, and will have a tendency to clamber over into
pigsties, and feel of the hogs, and give a guess how much they will weigh
after you shall have stuck and dressed them.  Already I have noticed you
begin to speak through your nose, and with a drawl.  Pray, if you really
did make any poetry to-day, let us hear it in that kind of utterance!"

"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who never
had the slightest appreciation of my poetry.  "Just think of him penning
a sonnet with a fist like that!  There is at least this good in a life of
toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves
nothing but what truly belongs to him.  If a farmer can make poetry at
the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it; and if that
be the case, let him make it, in Heaven's name!"

"And how is it with you?"  asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she
never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me.  "You, I think,
cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."

"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth.  "I have
hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart!  It
matters little what my outward toil may be.  Were I a slave, at the bottom
of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its ultimate
accomplishment, that I do now.  Miles Coverdale is not in earnest, either
as a poet or a laborer."

"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt.  "I
have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had been
in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"

"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no doubt,
she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--" I cannot conceive of
being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the sphere of a strong
and noble nature, without being strengthened and ennobled by its
influence!"

This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had
already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other illustrious
prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to make at least two
proselytes among the women to one among the men.  Zenobia and Priscilla!
These, I believe (unless my unworthy self might be reckoned for a third),
were the only disciples of his mission; and I spent a great deal of time,
uselessly, in trying to conjecture what Hollingsworth meant to do with
them--and they with him!



IX.  HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA

It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote
ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women.  If
the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty certain
to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second
glance.  Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope,
we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his
peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him
very clumsily together again.  What wonder, then, should we be frightened
by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,--though we can point to
every feature of his deformity in the real personage,--may be said to
have been created mainly by ourselves.

Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a
great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as
great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which I
seemed to make.  But I could not help it.  Had I loved him less, I might
have used him better.  He and Zenobia and Priscilla--both for their own
sakes and as connected with him--were separated from the rest of the
Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of a problem
which it was my business to solve.  Other associates had a portion of my
time; other matters amused me; passing occurrences carried me along with
them, while they lasted.  But here was the vortex of my meditations,
around which they revolved, and whitherward they too continually tended.
In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a feeling of loneliness.
For it was impossible not to be sensible that, while these three
characters figured so largely on my private theatre, I--though probably
reckoned as a friend by all--was at best but a secondary or tertiary
personage with either of them.

I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed.  But it
impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful
peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than
pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too
intimate a connection with him.  He was not altogether human.  There was
something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and sympathies
and affections and celestial spirit.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an
overruling purpose.  It does not so much impel them from without, nor
even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all
that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save
that one principle.  When such begins to be the predicament, it is not
cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims.  They have no heart, no
sympathy, no reason, no conscience.  They will keep no friend, unless he
make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you,
and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you
take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third,
and every other step of their terribly strait path.  They have an idol to
which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to
offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to
suspect--so cunning has the Devil been with them--that this false deity,
in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see
only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself,
projected upon the surrounding darkness.  And the higher and purer the
original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the
slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process
by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.

Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated,
in the attempt to make it adequate.  Professed philanthropists have gone
far; but no originally good man, I presume, ever went quite so far as
this.  Let the reader abate whatever he deems fit.  The paragraph may
remain, however, both for its truth and its exaggeration, as strongly
expressive of the tendencies which were really operative in Hollingsworth,
and as exemplifying the kind of error into which my mode of observation
was calculated to lead me.  The issue was, that in solitude I often
shuddered at my friend.  In my recollection of his dark and impressive
countenance, the features grew more sternly prominent than the reality,
duskier in their depth and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the
frown, that had merely flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted
it with an adamantine wrinkle.  On meeting him again, I was often filled
with remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow
of a household fire that was burning in a cave.  "He is a man after all,"
thought I; "his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!---not that
steel engine of the Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!"  But in my
wood-walks, and in my silent chamber, the dark face frowned at me again.

When a young girl comes within the sphere of such a man, she is as
perilously situated as the maiden whom, in the old classical myths, the
people used to expose to a dragon.  If I had any duty whatever, in
reference to Hollingsworth, it was to endeavor to save Priscilla from
that kind of personal worship which her sex is generally prone to lavish
upon saints and heroes.  It often requires but one smile out of the
hero's eyes into the girl's or woman's heart, to transform this devotion,
from a sentiment of the highest approval and confidence, into passionate
love.  Now, Hollingsworth smiled much upon Priscilla,--more than upon any
other person.  If she thought him beautiful, it was no wonder.  I often
thought him so, with the expression of tender human care and gentlest
sympathy which she alone seemed to have power to call out upon his
features.  Zenobia, I suspect, would have given her eyes, bright as they
were, for such a look; it was the least that our poor Priscilla could do,
to give her heart for a great many of them.  There was the more danger of
this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all associated at Blithedale
was widely different from that of conventional society.  While inclining
us to the soft affections of the golden age, it seemed to authorize any
individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of
what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent.  Accordingly the
tender passion was very rife among us, in various degrees of mildness or
virulence, but mostly passing away with the state of things that had
given it origin.  This was all well enough; but, for a girl like
Priscilla and a woman like Zenobia to jostle one another in their love of
a man like Hollingsworth, was likely to be no child's play.

Had I been as cold-hearted as I sometimes thought myself, nothing would
have interested me more than to witness the play of passions that must
thus have been evolved.  But, in honest truth, I would really have gone
far to save Priscilla, at least, from the catastrop