_ It remains only to say a few words about myself. Not improbably, the
reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but
a poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate
interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other
lives. But one still retains some little consideration for one's
self; so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and
sole behoof.
But what, after all, have I to tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing! I
left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back
thither no more. The whole soil of our farm, for a long time
afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave. I could not
toil there, nor live upon its products. Often, however, in these
years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme
of a noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer,
appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be
perfected, as the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a
world! Were my former associates now there,--were there only three
or four of those true-hearted men still laboring in the sun,--I
sometimes fancy that I should direct my world-weary footsteps
thitherward, and entreat them to receive me, for old friendship's
sake. More and more I feel that we had struck upon what ought to be
a truth. Posterity may dig it up, and profit by it. The experiment,
so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a
failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well
deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where once
we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town paupers, aged,
nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what
faith is requisite to bear up against such results of generous effort!
My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at
all events, tolerably enough. I am now at middle age, well, well, a
step or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows
it!--a bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise.
I have been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather
agreeably at each visit. Being well to do in the world, and having
nobody but myself to care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare
sumptuously every day. As for poetry, I have given it up,
notwithstanding that Dr. Griswold--as the reader, of course,
knows--has placed me at a fair elevation among our minor minstrelsy,
on the strength of my pretty little volume, published ten years ago.
As regards human progress (in spite of my irrepressible yearnings
over the Blithedale reminiscences), let them believe in it who can,
and aid in it who choose. If I could earnestly do either, it might
be all the better for my comfort. As Hollingsworth once told me, I
lack a purpose. How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an overplus
of the very same ingredient, the want of which, I occasionally
suspect, has rendered my own life all an emptiness. I by no means
wish to die. Yet, were there any cause, in this whole chaos of human
struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and which my death would
benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did not involve an
unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold to offer up
my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battlefield of
Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild,
sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale
would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled
bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.
I exaggerate my own defects. The reader must not take my own word
for it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once
hoped strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss. Frostier heads
than mine have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have
imbibed new warmth, and been newly happy. Life, however, it must be
owned, has come to rather an idle pass with me. Would my friends
like to know what brought it thither? There is one secret,--I have
concealed it all along, and never meant to let the least whisper of
it escape,--one foolish little secret, which possibly may have had
something to do with these inactive years of meridian manhood, with
my bachelorship, with the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on
life, and my listless glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it?
It is an absurd thing for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world,
moreover, with these three white hairs in his brown mustache and
that deepening track of a crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd
thing ever to have happened, and quite the absurdest for an old
bachelor, like me, to talk about. But it rises to my throat; so let
it come.
I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will
throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing
incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my
story. The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is
entitled to this one word more. As I write it, he will charitably
suppose me to blush, and turn away my face:
I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!
THE END.
The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. _