The illustrious Society of Blithedale, though it toiled in downright
earnest for the good of mankind, yet not unfrequently illuminated its
laborious life with an afternoon or evening of pastime.  Picnics under
the trees were considerably in vogue; and, within doors, fragmentary
bits of theatrical performance, such as single acts of tragedy or
comedy, or dramatic proverbs and charades.  Zenobia, besides, was fond
of giving us readings from Shakespeare, and often with a depth of
tragic power, or breadth of comic effect, that made one feel it an
intolerable wrong to the world that she did not at once go upon the
stage.  Tableaux vivants were another of our occasional modes of
amusement, in which scarlet shawls, old silken robes, ruffs, velvets,
furs, and all kinds of miscellaneous trumpery converted our familiar
companions into the people of a pictorial world.  We had been thus
engaged on the evening after the incident narrated in the last chapter.
Several splendid works of art--either arranged after engravings from
the old masters, or original illustrations of scenes in history or
romance--had been presented, and we were earnestly entreating Zenobia
for more.

She stood with a meditative air, holding a large piece of gauze, or
some such ethereal stuff, as if considering what picture should next
occupy the frame; while at her feet lay a heap of many-colored
garments, which her quick fancy and magic skill could so easily convert
into gorgeous draperies for heroes and princesses.

"I am getting weary of this," said she, after a moment's thought. "Our
own features, and our own figures and airs, show a little too
intrusively through all the characters we assume.  We have so much
familiarity with one another's realities, that we cannot remove
ourselves, at pleasure, into an imaginary sphere.  Let us have no more
pictures to-night; but, to make you what poor amends I can, how would
you like to have me trump up a wild, spectral legend, on the spur of
the moment?"

Zenobia had the gift of telling a fanciful little story, off-hand, in a
way that made it greatly more effective than it was usually found to be
when she afterwards elaborated the same production with her pen. Her
proposal, therefore, was greeted with acclamation.

"Oh, a story, a story, by all means!" cried the young girls.  "No
matter how marvellous; we will believe it, every word.  And let it be a
ghost story, if you please."

"No, not exactly a ghost story," answered Zenobia; "but something so
nearly like it that you shall hardly tell the difference.  And,
Priscilla, stand you before me, where I may look at you, and get my
inspiration out of your eyes.  They are very deep and dreamy to-night."

I know not whether the following version of her story will retain any
portion of its pristine character; but, as Zenobia told it wildly and
rapidly, hesitating at no extravagance, and dashing at absurdities
which I am too timorous to repeat,--giving it the varied emphasis of
her inimitable voice, and the pictorial illustration of her mobile
face, while through it all we caught the freshest aroma of the
thoughts, as they came bubbling out of her mind,--thus narrated, and
thus heard, the legend seemed quite a remarkable affair.  I scarcely
knew, at the time, whether she intended us to laugh or be more
seriously impressed.  From beginning to end, it was undeniable
nonsense, but not necessarily the worse for that.

THE SILVERY VEIL

You have heard, my dear friends, of the Veiled Lady, who grew suddenly
so very famous, a few months ago.  And have you never thought how
remarkable it was that this marvellous creature should vanish, all at
once, while her renown was on the increase, before the public had grown
weary of her, and when the enigma of her character, instead of being
solved, presented itself more mystically at every exhibition?  Her last
appearance, as you know, was before a crowded audience.  The next
evening,--although the bills had announced her, at the corner of every
street, in red letters of a gigantic size,--there was no Veiled Lady to
be seen!  Now, listen to my simple little tale, and you shall hear the
very latest incident in the known life--(if life it may be called,
which seemed to have no more reality than the candle-light image of
one's self which peeps at us outside of a dark windowpane)--the life of
this shadowy phenomenon.

A party of young gentlemen, you are to understand, were enjoying
themselves, one afternoon,--as young gentlemen are sometimes fond of
doing,--over a bottle or two of champagne; and, among other ladies less
mysterious, the subject of the Veiled Lady, as was very natural,
happened to come up before them for discussion.  She rose, as it were,
with the sparkling effervescence of their wine, and appeared in a more
airy and fantastic light on account of the medium through which they
saw her.  They repeated to one another, between jest and earnest, all
the wild stories that were in vogue; nor, I presume, did they hesitate
to add any small circumstance that the inventive whim of the moment
might suggest, to heighten the marvellousness of their theme.

"But what an audacious report was that," observed one, "which pretended
to assert the identity of this strange creature with a young
lady,"--and here he mentioned her name,--"the daughter of one of our
most distinguished families!"

"Ah, there is more in that story than can well be accounted for,"
remarked another.  "I have it on good authority, that the young lady in
question is invariably out of sight, and not to be traced, even by her
own family, at the hours when the Veiled Lady is before the public; nor
can any satisfactory explanation be given of her disappearance.  And
just look at the thing: Her brother is a young fellow of spirit.  He
cannot but be aware of these rumors in reference to his sister.  Why,
then, does he not come forward to defend her character, unless he is
conscious that an investigation would only make the matter worse?"

It is essential to the purposes of my legend to distinguish one of
these young gentlemen from his companions; so, for the sake of a soft
and pretty name (such as we of the literary sisterhood invariably
bestow upon our heroes), I deem it fit to call him Theodore.

"Pshaw!" exclaimed Theodore; "her brother is no such fool!  Nobody,
unless his brain be as full of bubbles as this wine, can seriously
think of crediting that ridiculous rumor.  Why, if my senses did not
play me false (which never was the case yet), I affirm that I saw that
very lady, last evening, at the exhibition, while this veiled
phenomenon was playing off her juggling tricks!  What can you say to
that?"

"Oh, it was a spectral illusion that you saw!" replied his friends,
with a general laugh.  "The Veiled Lady is quite up to such a thing."

However, as the above-mentioned fable could not hold its ground against
Theodore's downright refutation, they went on to speak of other stories
which the wild babble of the town had set afloat.  Some upheld that the
veil covered the most beautiful countenance in the world; others,--and
certainly with more reason, considering the sex of the Veiled
Lady,--that the face was the most hideous and horrible, and that this
was her sole motive for hiding it.  It was the face of a corpse; it was
the head of a skeleton; it was a monstrous visage, with snaky locks,
like Medusa's, and one great red eye in the centre of the forehead.
Again, it was affirmed that there was no single and unchangeable set of
features beneath the veil; but that whosoever should be bold enough to
lift it would behold the features of that person, in all the world, who
was destined to be his fate; perhaps he would be greeted by the tender
smile of the woman whom he loved, or, quite as probably, the deadly
scowl of his bitterest enemy would throw a blight over his life.  They
quoted, moreover, this startling explanation of the whole affair: that
the magician who exhibited the Veiled Lady--and who, by the bye, was
the handsomest man in the whole world--had bartered his own soul for
seven years' possession of a familiar fiend, and that the last year of
the contract was wearing towards its close.

If it were worth our while, I could keep you till an hour beyond
midnight listening to a thousand such absurdities as these.  But
finally our friend Theodore, who prided himself upon his common-sense,
found the matter getting quite beyond his patience.

"I offer any wager you like," cried he, setting down his glass so
forcibly as to break the stem of it, "that this very evening I find out
the mystery of the Veiled Lady!"

Young men, I am told, boggle at nothing over their wine; so, after a
little more talk, a wager of considerable amount was actually laid, the
money staked, and Theodore left to choose his own method of settling
the dispute.

How he managed it I know not, nor is it of any great importance to this
veracious legend.  The most natural way, to be sure, was by bribing the
doorkeeper,--or possibly he preferred clambering in at the window.
But, at any rate, that very evening, while the exhibition was going
forward in the hall, Theodore contrived to gain admittance into the
private withdrawing-room whither the Veiled Lady was accustomed to
retire at the close of her performances.  There he waited, listening, I
suppose, to the stifled hum of the great audience; and no doubt he
could distinguish the deep tones of the magician, causing the wonders
that he wrought to appear more dark and intricate, by his mystic
pretence of an explanation.  Perhaps, too, in the intervals of the wild
breezy music which accompanied the exhibition, he might hear the low
voice of the Veiled Lady, conveying her sibylline responses.  Firm as
Theodore's nerves might be, and much as he prided himself on his sturdy
perception of realities, I should not be surprised if his heart
throbbed at a little more than its ordinary rate.

Theodore concealed himself behind a screen.  In due time the
performance was brought to a close, and whether the door was softly
opened, or whether her bodiless presence came through the wall, is more
than I can say, but, all at once, without the young man's knowing how
it happened, a veiled figure stood in the centre of the room.  It was
one thing to be in presence of this mystery in the hall of exhibition,
where the warm, dense life of hundreds of other mortals kept up the
beholder's courage, and distributed her influence among so many; it was
another thing to be quite alone with her, and that, too, with a
hostile, or, at least, an unauthorized and unjustifiable purpose.  I
further imagine that Theodore now began to be sensible of something
more serious in his enterprise than he had been quite aware of while he
sat with his boon-companions over their sparkling wine.

Very strange, it must be confessed, was the movement with which the
figure floated to and fro over the carpet, with the silvery veil
covering her from head to foot; so impalpable, so ethereal, so without
substance, as the texture seemed, yet hiding her every outline in an
impenetrability like that of midnight.  Surely, she did not walk!  She
floated, and flitted, and hovered about the room; no sound of a
footstep, no perceptible motion of a limb; it was as if a wandering
breeze wafted her before it, at its own wild and gentle pleasure.  But,
by and by, a purpose began to be discernible, throughout the seeming
vagueness of her unrest.  She was in quest of something.  Could it be
that a subtile presentiment had informed her of the young man's
presence?  And if so, did the Veiled Lady seek or did she shun him?
The doubt in Theodore's mind was speedily resolved; for, after a moment
or two of these erratic flutterings, she advanced more decidedly, and
stood motionless before the screen.

"Thou art here!" said a soft, low voice.  "Come forth, Theodore!" Thus
summoned by his name, Theodore, as a man of courage, had no choice.  He
emerged from his concealment, and presented himself before the Veiled
Lady, with the wine-flush, it may be, quite gone out of his cheeks.

"What wouldst thou with me?" she inquired, with the same gentle
composure that was in her former utterance.

"Mysterious creature," replied Theodore, "I would know who and what you
are!"

"My lips are forbidden to betray the secret," said the Veiled Lady.

"At whatever risk, I must discover it," rejoined Theodore.

"Then," said the Mystery, "there is no way save to lift my veil."

And Theodore, partly recovering his audacity, stept forward on the
instant, to do as the Veiled Lady had suggested.  But she floated
backward to the opposite side of the room, as if the young man's breath
had possessed power enough to waft her away.

"Pause, one little instant," said the soft, low voice, "and learn the
conditions of what thou art so bold to undertake.  Thou canst go hence,
and think of me no more; or, at thy option, thou canst lift this
mysterious veil, beneath which I am a sad and lonely prisoner, in a
bondage which is worse to me than death.  But, before raising it, I
entreat thee, in all maiden modesty, to bend forward and impress a kiss
where my breath stirs the veil; and my virgin lips shall come forward
to meet thy lips; and from that instant, Theodore, thou shalt be mine,
and I thine, with never more a veil between us.  And all the felicity
of earth and of the future world shall be thine and mine together.  So
much may a maiden say behind the veil.  If thou shrinkest from this,
there is yet another way."  "And what is that?" asked Theodore.  "Dost
thou hesitate," said the Veiled Lady, "to pledge thyself to me, by
meeting these lips of mine, while the veil yet hides my face?  Has not
thy heart recognized me?  Dost thou come hither, not in holy faith, nor
with a pure and generous purpose, but in scornful scepticism and idle
curiosity?  Still, thou mayest lift the veil!  But, from that instant,
Theodore, I am doomed to be thy evil fate; nor wilt thou ever taste
another breath of happiness!"

There was a shade of inexpressible sadness in the utterance of these
last words.  But Theodore, whose natural tendency was towards
scepticism, felt himself almost injured and insulted by the Veiled
Lady's proposal that he should pledge himself, for life and eternity,
to so questionable a creature as herself; or even that she should
suggest an inconsequential kiss, taking into view the probability that
her face was none of the most bewitching.  A delightful idea, truly,
that he should salute the lips of a dead girl, or the jaws of a
skeleton, or the grinning cavity of a monster's mouth!  Even should she
prove a comely maiden enough in other respects, the odds were ten to
one that her teeth were defective; a terrible drawback on the
delectableness of a kiss.

"Excuse me, fair lady," said Theodore, and I think he nearly burst into
a laugh, "if I prefer to lift the veil first; and for this affair of
the kiss, we may decide upon it afterwards."

"Thou hast made thy choice," said the sweet, sad voice behind the veil;
and there seemed a tender but unresentful sense of wrong done to
womanhood by the young man's contemptuous interpretation of her offer.
"I must not counsel thee to pause, although thy fate is still in thine
own hand!"

Grasping at the veil, he flung it upward, and caught a glimpse of a
pale, lovely face beneath; just one momentary glimpse, and then the
apparition vanished, and the silvery veil fluttered slowly down and lay
upon the floor.  Theodore was alone.  Our legend leaves him there. His
retribution was, to pine forever and ever for another sight of that
dim, mournful face,--which might have been his life-long household
fireside joy,--to desire, and waste life in a feverish quest, and never
meet it more.

But what, in good sooth, had become of the Veiled Lady?  Had all her
existence been comprehended within that mysterious veil, and was she
now annihilated?  Or was she a spirit, with a heavenly essence, but
which might have been tamed down to human bliss, had Theodore been
brave and true enough to claim her?  Hearken, my sweet friends,--and
hearken, dear Priscilla,--and you shall learn the little more that
Zenobia can tell you.

Just at the moment, so far as can be ascertained, when the Veiled Lady
vanished, a maiden, pale and shadowy, rose up amid a knot of visionary
people, who were seeking for the better life.  She was so gentle and so
sad,--a nameless melancholy gave her such hold upon their
sympathies,--that they never thought of questioning whence she came.
She might have heretofore existed, or her thin substance might have
been moulded out of air at the very instant when they first beheld her.
It was all one to them; they took her to their hearts. Among them was a
lady to whom, more than to all the rest, this pale, mysterious girl
attached herself.

But one morning the lady was wandering in the woods, and there met her
a figure in an Oriental robe, with a dark beard, and holding in his
hand a silvery veil.  He motioned her to stay.  Being a woman of some
nerve, she did not shriek, nor run away, nor faint, as many ladies
would have been apt to do, but stood quietly, and bade him speak.  The
truth was, she had seen his face before, but had never feared it,
although she knew him to be a terrible magician.

"Lady," said he, with a warning gesture, "you are in peril!"  "Peril!"
she exclaimed.  "And of what nature?"

"There is a certain maiden," replied the magician, "who has come out of
the realm of mystery, and made herself your most intimate companion.
Now, the fates have so ordained it, that, whether by her own will or
no, this stranger is your deadliest enemy.  In love, in worldly
fortune, in all your pursuit of happiness, she is doomed to fling a
blight over your prospects.  There is but one possibility of thwarting
her disastrous influence."

"Then tell me that one method," said the lady.

"Take this veil," he answered, holding forth the silvery texture. "It
is a spell; it is a powerful enchantment, which I wrought for her sake,
and beneath which she was once my prisoner.  Throw it, at unawares,
over the head of this secret foe, stamp your foot, and cry, 'Arise,
Magician!  Here is the Veiled Lady!' and immediately I will rise up
through the earth, and seize her; and from that moment you are safe!"

So the lady took the silvery veil, which was like woven air, or like
some substance airier than nothing, and that would float upward and be
lost among the clouds, were she once to let it go.  Returning homeward,
she found the shadowy girl amid the knot of visionary
transcendentalists, who were still seeking for the better life.  She
was joyous now, and had a rose-bloom in her cheeks, and was one of the
prettiest creatures, and seemed one of the happiest, that the world
could show.  But the lady stole noiselessly behind her and threw the
veil over her head.  As the slight, ethereal texture sank inevitably
down over her figure, the poor girl strove to raise it, and met her
dear friend's eyes with one glance of mortal terror, and deep, deep
reproach.  It could not change her purpose.

"Arise, Magician!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot upon the earth.
"Here is the Veiled Lady!"

At the word, up rose the bearded man in the Oriental robes,--the
beautiful, the dark magician, who had bartered away his soul!  He threw
his arms around the Veiled Lady, and she was his bond-slave for
evermore!

Zenobia, all this while, had been holding the piece of gauze, and so
managed it as greatly to increase the dramatic effect of the legend at
those points where the magic veil was to be described.  Arriving at the
catastrophe, and uttering the fatal words, she flung the gauze over
Priscilla's head; and for an instant her auditors held their breath,
half expecting, I verily believe, that the magician would start up
through the floor, and carry off our poor little friend before our eyes.

As for Priscilla, she stood droopingly in the midst of us, making no
attempt to remove the veil.

"How do you find yourself, my love?" said Zenobia, lifting a corner of
the gauze, and peeping beneath it with a mischievous smile.  "Ah, the
dear little soul!  Why, she is really going to faint!  Mr. Coverdale,
Mr. Coverdale, pray bring a glass of water!"

Her nerves being none of the strongest, Priscilla hardly recovered her
equanimity during the rest of the evening.  This, to be sure, was a
great pity; but, nevertheless, we thought it a very bright idea of
Zenobia's to bring her legend to so effective a conclusion.

Coverdale remarks that Blithedale also indulged in leisure activities, such as drama, reading poetry, and creating tableaux vivants. One evening Zenobia proclaims that she is weary of this, as their true selves show through too much. She decides to tell a story to the group, which Coverdale repeats in his narrative. Entitled "The Silvery Veil", it is about the Veiled Lady, who had attained much fame. A group of young men were talking about her, sharing stories and rumors and their ideas about what was under the veil. One young man named Theodore proclaimed he saw her, and the others shouted him down. A wager was set regarding Theodore solving the mystery of the Veiled Lady. That evening Theodore went to an exhibition of the Veiled Lady and hid behind the screen. He observed the strange, spectral figure floating and flitting about the room. Once they were alone, the Veiled Lady called him forth. Surprised, Theodore announced his intention to find out her truth. She softly told him what his options were: to leave and never think of her again; to not lift the veil but win her love and loyalty; or to lift the veil and have her be his evil fate. Theodore thought he would be trapped in an eternal relationship with an ugly woman, and chose to lift the veil. The Veiled Lady was sad at this, but consented to let him lift her veil. Theodore glimpsed the most beautiful, sweet face, but she vanished immediately. In another place, a young maiden appeared amongst a group of visionaries. She became close to another woman there. That lady met a man in an Oriental robe who warned her that the young maiden was her deadliest foe, and that she must take this veil, throw it over the young maiden, and cry out, "Arise, Magician, here is the Veiled Lady" and he would take her. The lady did this, and the Magician came and took the girl as his slave forever. When Zenobia concludes her story, she throws a bit of gauze on Priscilla for affect, surprising everyone and making Priscilla uncomfortable

Theater, masks, stories, and art pervade the text. Despite the Community's lofty purposes, and their stated goal to till the earth, they are mostly artists and intellectuals who derive more pleasure from their games and leisure activities. Zenobia's story and Coverdale's exit to the city mark a turning point in the novel, where the narrative becomes more dreamlike, fragmented, unreliable, and infused with the language of the spiritual and the dramatic. Eliot's Pulpit is a fascinating yet often overlooked component of the novel, one that is tied in with larger questions about the relationship between the past and the present. It is related to the Puritans, who were moral and convicted but at the same time hypocritical and deluded. Critic Byron Stay writes of Eliot's Pulpit, explaining that the author "uses the wilderness setting...to represent Puritan strength in order to contrast the Blithedalers with their seventeenth-century counterparts." The Pulpit "mirrors and distorts the self-perceptions of the characters" and shows how they have very flimsy identities. It is a "neutral territory" where the characters inability to embody early ideals becomes plain. First, Stay explains who Eliot was: a Puritan apostle to the Indians and a writer, whom Hawthorne admired as a man with true character and a representative of "the survival of Puritan integrity in a world dominated by Puritan brutality." The Blithedalers may think that they are like him, but Hawthorne makes it clear that they are not. They think they are beyond "Puritan frigidity" but they truly aren't. Hollingsworth's philanthropy is false, and overall the Blithedalers have much more in common with the nonsectarian founders of Massachusetts Bay than they do with the Pilgrims of Plymouth. Their vision is much more self-interested than spiritual. Stay writes that the characteristics of the rock itself are telling; "The jaggedness of the rock suggests the Puritan-like callousness which undergirds the Blithedale experiment and foreshadows its impending disintegration. It also points to the psychological fissures which threaten each character from within." Since Coverdale only notices its softness, it is clear he cannot see the real truth behind appearances. If there is a focus on softness in the beginning, the shift to hardness later reveals the breakdowns each character is experiencing. The return to Eliot's Pulpit at the end of the novel, in which Zenobia holds sway, alludes to the witch trials of Salem and failures of Puritanism. Stay concludes, "Against the backdrop of Eliot's Pulpit, the utopians repeat Puritan history, but because they lack the Puritans' sense of moral direction, they are ultimately reduced to playing out a parody of Puritan barbarism." The characters' disintegration is the "decline that Hawthorne saw in the character of the mid-century American." Leo B. Levy also looks at the novel in its historical context, noting how "the extinction of predominantly rural America at the moment of its proposed revival at Blithedale threatens all traditional ties and institutions." Coverdale is between the old and the new, judging his friends according to traditional standards but aware of the changes imposing themselves on him as well. Both Coverdale and Hollingsworth embody "the sternness of the Puritan age", while Coverdale is indicative of the ultimate failure of uniting urban culture with the country -he is "a new kind of individual" and "the displaced person". Hawthorne is making his views  clear through Coverdale; the author "saw the value of an internal narrator whose integrity could be doubted precisely because he was so damaged by the conditions he describes as any of the other characters." Coverdale displays his voyeuristic tendencies to full effect here, obsessing over his friends across the way. His position at the window mirrors that of the hermitage. The vortex, the voyage into chaos that is Coverdale's obsession, manifests strongly here. Zenobia's story of the Veiled Lady is important, as it foreshadows the revelation of Priscilla later in the novel, and is also a part of the general theme of veiling and masks in the novel. The Blithedalers love to dress up, play roles and act, and, less in a spirit of fun, mask their true intentions and identities. Everyone has a secret, and ambiguity reigns.


Our Sundays at Blithedale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid
observance as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims,
whose high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered ourselves, we had
taken up, and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they
never dreamed of attaining.

On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our labors.  Our oxen,
relieved from their week-day yoke, roamed at large through the pasture;
each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate, and
continuing to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish
sympathy, the union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard
ends.  As for us human yoke-fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose
hoes had clinked together throughout the week, we wandered off, in
various directions, to enjoy our interval of repose.  Some, I believe,
went devoutly to the village church.  Others, it may be, ascended a
city or a country pulpit, wearing the clerical robe with so much
dignity that you would scarcely have suspected the yeoman's frock to
have been flung off only since milking-time.  Others took long rambles
among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to look at black old
farmhouses, with their sloping roofs; and at the modern cottage, so
like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow could have no
scope within; and at the more pretending villa, with its range of
wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great portico.
Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay there for
hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the shadows
strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to make it
cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a
cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they darted to and
fro among the golden rules of sunshine.  And others went a little way
into the woods, and threw themselves on mother earth, pillowing their
heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an old log; and, dropping
asleep, the bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears,
causing the slumberers to twitch and start, without awaking.

With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a
custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock.  It was known
to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the
venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to
an Indian auditory.  The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's
voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the
soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never
been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch,
had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a
tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of
Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in existence) could have
desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths,
indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original forest.  If left in
due neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness,
among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as
it never could among the dark-browed pines.

The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite
bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many
fissures, out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the
scanty soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any
other earth.  At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders inclined
towards each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our
little party had sometimes found protection from a summer shower.  On
the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft of pale columbines, in
their season, and violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla
was when we first knew her; children of the sun, who had never seen
their father, but dwelt among damp mosses, though not akin to them.  At
the summit, the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree,
which served as a sounding-board for the pulpit.  Beneath this shade
(with my eyes of sense half shut and those of the imagination widely
opened) I used to see the holy Apostle of the Indians, with the
sunlight flickering down upon him through the leaves, and glorifying
his figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.

I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath
solitude, because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended
Eliot's pulpit, and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few
disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's
breath among the leaves of the birch-tree.  No other speech of man has
ever moved me like some of those discourses.  It seemed most pitiful--a
positive calamity to the world--that a treasury of golden thoughts
should thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down among us three,
when a thousand hearers might have been the richer for them; and
Hollingsworth the richer, likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes.
After speaking much or little, as might happen, he would descend from
his gray pulpit, and generally fling himself at full length on the
ground, face downward.  Meanwhile, we talked around him on such topics
as were suggested by the discourse.

Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities
of temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear.  On the
first Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered down
from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion,
nothing short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women,
and equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and honor, and
with the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public.

"It shall not always be so!" cried she.  "If I live another year, I
will lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"

She perhaps saw me smile.

"What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?"
exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes.  "That smile,
permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and
shallow thought.  It is my belief--yes, and my prophecy, should I die
before it happens--that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there
will be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man.  Thus
far, no woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and
her whole mind.  The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of
society throttles us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats!  We
mumble a few weak words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You
let us write a little, it is true, on a limited range of subjects. But
the pen is not for woman.  Her power is too natural and immediate.  It
is with the living voice alone that she can compel the world to
recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart!"

Now,--though I could not well say so to Zenobia,--I had not smiled from
any unworthy estimate of woman, or in denial of the claims which she is
beginning to put forth.  What amused and puzzled me was the fact, that
women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves
about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual
affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are
not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional
misfortune.  I could measure Zenobia's inward trouble by the animosity
with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man.

"I will give you leave, Zenobia," replied I, "to fling your utmost
scorn upon me, if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the
widest liberty which woman has yet dreamed of.  I would give her all
she asks, and add a great deal more, which she will not be the party to
demand, but which men, if they were generous and wise, would grant of
their own free motion.  For instance, I should love dearly--for the
next thousand years, at least--to have all government devolve into the
hands of women.  I hate to be ruled by my own sex; it excites my
jealousy, and wounds my pride.  It is the iron sway of bodily force
which abases us, in our compelled submission.  But how sweet the free,
generous courtesy with which I would kneel before a woman-ruler!"

"Yes, if she were young and beautiful," said Zenobia, laughing.  "But
how if she were sixty, and a fright?"

"Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low," said I. "But let me go on. I
have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my
heart and conscience as to do me any spiritual good.  I blush at the
very thought!  Oh, in the better order of things, Heaven grant that the
ministry of souls may be left in charge of women!  The gates of the
Blessed City will be thronged with the multitude that enter in, when
that day comes!  The task belongs to woman.  God meant it for her.  He
has endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost depth and
purity, refined from that gross, intellectual alloy with which every
masculine theologist--save only One, who merely veiled himself in
mortal and masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine--has been prone
to mingle it.  I have always envied the Catholics their faith in that
sweet, sacred Virgin Mother, who stands between them and the Deity,
intercepting somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting his love to
stream upon the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension
through the medium of a woman's tenderness. Have I not said enough,
Zenobia?"

"I cannot think that this is true," observed Priscilla, who had been
gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes.  "And I am sure I do not
wish it to be true!"

"Poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously.  "She is the
type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it.  He is
never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he
loves.  In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his
own interests than profligate disregard of ours!"

"Is this true?" asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to
Hollingsworth.  "Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have
been saying?"

"No, Priscilla!" answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.
"They have neither of them spoken one true word yet."

"Do you despise woman?" said Zenobia.

"Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"

"Despise her?  No!" cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy head
and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely. "She is
the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character.
Her place is at man's side.  Her office, that of the sympathizer; the
unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition, withheld in every
other manner, but given, in pity, through woman's heart, lest man
should utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of God's own voice,
pronouncing, 'It is well done!' All the separate action of woman is,
and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain,
destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good
effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch
without woman; but woman is a monster--and, thank Heaven, an almost
impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without man as her
acknowledged principal!  As true as I had once a mother whom I loved,
were there any possible prospect of woman's taking the social stand
which some of them,--poor, miserable, abortive creatures, who only
dream of such things because they have missed woman's peculiar
happiness, or because nature made them really neither man nor
woman!--if there were a chance of their attaining the end which these
petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my own sex to
use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty, to
scourge them back within their proper bounds!  But it will not be
needful.  The heart of time womanhood knows where its own sphere is,
and never seeks to stray beyond it!"

Never was mortal blessed--if blessing it were--with a glance of such
entire acquiescence and unquestioning faith, happy in its completeness,
as our little Priscilla unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth.  She
seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into her heart, and brood
over it in perfect content.  The very woman whom he pictured--the
gentle parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful existence--sat
there at his feet.

I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent--as I felt,
by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought this
outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine
egotism.  It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her
very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere
incident in the great sum of man.  Hollingsworth had boldly uttered
what he, and millions of despots like him, really felt. Without
intending it, he had disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled
waters.  Now, if ever, it surely behooved Zenobia to be the champion of
her sex.

But, to my surprise, and indignation too, she only looked humbled. Some
tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not anger.

"Well, be it so," was all she said.  "I, at least, have deep cause to
think you right.  Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only
too ready to become to him what you say!"

I smiled--somewhat bitterly, it is true--in contemplation of my own
ill-luck.  How little did these two women care for me, who had freely
conceded all their claims, and a great deal more, out of the fulness of
my heart; while Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his horrible
injustice, seemed to have brought them both to his feet!

"Women almost invariably behave thus," thought I. "What does the fact
mean?  Is it their nature?  Or is it, at last, the result of ages of
compelled degradation?  And, in either case, will it be possible ever
to redeem them?"

An intuition now appeared to possess all the party, that, for this
time, at least, there was no more to be said.  With one accord, we
arose from the ground, and made our way through the tangled undergrowth
towards one of those pleasant wood-paths that wound among the
overarching trees.  Some of the branches hung so low as partly to
conceal the figures that went before from those who followed. Priscilla
had leaped up more lightly than the rest of us, and ran along in
advance, with as much airy activity of spirit as was typified in the
motion of a bird, which chanced to be flitting from tree to tree, in
the same direction as herself.  Never did she seem so happy as that
afternoon.  She skipt, and could not help it, from very playfulness of
heart.

Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next, in close contiguity, but not with
arm in arm.  Now, just when they had passed the impending bough of a
birch-tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth in
both her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall again!

The gesture was sudden, and full of passion; the impulse had evidently
taken her by surprise; it expressed all!  Had Zenobia knelt before him,
or flung herself upon his breast, and gasped out, "I love you,
Hollingsworth!"  I could not have been more certain of what it meant.
They then walked onward, as before.  But, methought, as the declining
sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I beheld it
tremulous; and the delicate stem of the flower which she wore in her
hair was likewise responsive to her agitation.

Priscilla--through the medium of her eyes, at least could not possibly
have been aware of the gesture above described.  Yet, at that instant,
I saw her droop.  The buoyancy, which just before had been so
bird-like, was utterly departed; the life seemed to pass out of her,
and even the substance of her figure to grow thin and gray. I almost
imagined her a shadow, tiding gradually into the dimness of the wood.
Her pace became so slow that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by, and
I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook her.

"Come, Priscilla," said I, looking her intently in the face, which was
very pale and sorrowful, "we must make haste after our friends. Do you
feel suddenly ill?  A moment ago, you flitted along so lightly that I
was comparing you to a bird.  Now, on the contrary, it is as if you had
a heavy heart, and a very little strength to bear it with. Pray take my
arm!"

"No," said Priscilla, "I do not think it would help me.  It is my
heart, as you say, that makes me heavy; and I know not why.  Just now,
I felt very happy."

No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt to come within her
maidenly mystery; but, as she appeared to be tossed aside by her other
friends, or carelessly let fall, like a flower which they had done
with, I could not resist the impulse to take just one peep beneath her
folded petals.

"Zenobia and yourself are dear friends of late," I remarked.  "At
first,--that first evening when you came to us,--she did not receive
you quite so warmly as might have been wished."

"I remember it," said Priscilla.  "No wonder she hesitated to love me,
who was then a stranger to her, and a girl of no grace or beauty,--she
being herself so beautiful!"

"But she loves you now, of course?" suggested I. "And at this very
instant you feel her to be your dearest friend?"

"Why do you ask me that question?" exclaimed Priscilla, as if
frightened at the scrutiny into her feelings which I compelled her to
make.  "It somehow puts strange thoughts into my mind.  But I do love
Zenobia dearly!  If she only loves me half as well, I shall be happy!"

"How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?"  I rejoined.  "But
observe how pleasantly and happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are
walking together.  I call it a delightful spectacle.  It truly rejoices
me that Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a friend!  So
many people in the world mistrust him,--so many disbelieve and
ridicule, while hardly any do him justice, or acknowledge him for the
wonderful man he is,--that it is really a blessed thing for him to have
won the sympathy of such a woman as Zenobia.  Any man might be proud of
that.  Any man, even if he be as great as Hollingsworth, might love so
magnificent a woman.  How very beautiful Zenobia is!  And Hollingsworth
knows it, too."

There may have been some petty malice in what I said.  Generosity is a
very fine thing, at a proper time and within due limits.  But it is an
insufferable bore to see one man engrossing every thought of all the
women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without
even the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate
individual has rejected.  Yes, it was out of a foolish bitterness of
heart that I had spoken.

"Go on before," said Priscilla abruptly, and with true feminine
imperiousness, which heretofore I had never seen her exercise.  "It
pleases me best to loiter along by myself.  I do not walk so fast as
you."

With her hand she made a little gesture of dismissal.  It provoked me;
yet, on the whole, was the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had
ever done.  I obeyed her, and strolled moodily homeward, wondering--as
I had wondered a thousand times already--how Hollingsworth meant to
dispose of these two hearts, which (plainly to my perception, and, as I
could not but now suppose, to his) he had engrossed into his own huge
egotism.

There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful of speculation.
In what attitude did Zenobia present herself to Hollingsworth?  Was it
in that of a free woman, with no mortgage on her affections nor
claimant to her hand, but fully at liberty to surrender both, in
exchange for the heart and hand which she apparently expected to
receive?  But was it a vision that I had witnessed in the wood?  Was
Westervelt a goblin?  Were those words of passion and agony, which
Zenobia had uttered in my hearing, a mere stage declamation?  Were they
formed of a material lighter than common air?  Or, supposing them to
bear sterling weight, was it a perilous and dreadful wrong which she
was meditating towards herself and Hollingsworth?

Arriving nearly at the farmhouse, I looked back over the long slope of
pasture land, and beheld them standing together, in the light of
sunset, just on the spot where, according to the gossip of the
Community, they meant to build their cottage.  Priscilla, alone and
forgotten, was lingering in the shadow of the wood.

XV. A CRISIS

Thus the summer was passing away,--a summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and
there became a rich experience.  I found myself looking forward to
years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system.  The
Community were now beginning to form their permanent plans.  One of our
purposes was to erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it, after
Fourier; but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my
remembrance), where the great and general family should have its
abiding-place.  Individual members, too, who made it a point of
religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were selecting
sites for their cottages, by the wood-side, or on the breezy swells, or
in the sheltered nook of some little valley, according as their taste
might lean towards snugness or the picturesque.  Altogether, by
projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a show of novelty to
existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil beneath our
feet had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on
every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a
hitherto unwedded bride.

Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects.  It was
easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervor, but
either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or, at any
rate, with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of
his.  Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he and I were
repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying forward
into the future time.

"When we come to be old men," I said, "they will call us uncles, or
fathers,--Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale,--and we will look
back cheerfully to these early days, and make a romantic story for the
young People (and if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it
will be no harm) out of our severe trials and hardships. In a century
or two, we shall, every one of us, be mythical personages, or
exceedingly picturesque and poetical ones, at all events.  They will
have a great public hall, in which your portrait, and mine, and twenty
other faces that are living now, shall be hung up; and as for me, I
will be painted in my shirtsleeves, and with the sleeves rolled up, to
show my muscular development.  What stories will be rife among them
about our mighty strength!" continued I, lifting a big stone and
putting it into its place, "though our posterity will really be far
stronger than ourselves, after several generations of a simple,
natural, and active life.  What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and
Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities
which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light!  In due course of
ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will
ourselves--at least, I will--bend unseen over the future poet, and lend
him inspiration while he writes it."

"You seem," said Hollingsworth, "to be trying how much nonsense you can
pour out in a breath."

"I wish you would see fit to comprehend," retorted I, "that the
profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine tenths of nonsense, else
it is not worth the breath that utters it.  But I do long for the
cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over
them, and the moss to gather on the walls, and the trees--which we will
set out--to cover them with a breadth of shadow.  This spick-and-span
novelty does not quite suit my taste.  It is time, too, for children to
be born among us.  The first-born child is still to come.  And I shall
never feel as if this were a real, practical, as well as poetical
system of human life, until somebody has sanctified it by death."

"A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!" said Hollingsworth.

"As good as any other," I replied.  "I wonder, Hollingsworth, who, of
all these strong men, and fair women and maidens, is doomed the first
to die.  Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of it,
to fix upon a spot for a cemetery?  Let us choose the rudest, roughest,
most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and Death shall
teach us to beautify it, grave by grave.  By our sweet, calm way of
dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral
rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones,
the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that hereafter it may be
happiness to live, and bliss to die.  None of us must die young.  Yet,
should Providence ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful, but
affect us with a tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost
smiling pathos!"

"That is to say," muttered Hollingsworth, "you will die like a heathen,
as you certainly live like one.  But, listen to me, Coverdale.  Your
fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a
wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a
precious summer of our lives.  Do you seriously imagine that any such
realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be
brought to pass?"

"Certainly I do," said I. "Of course, when the reality comes, it will
wear the every-day, commonplace, dusty, and rather homely garb that
reality always does put on.  But, setting aside the ideal charm, I hold
that our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common sense."

"You only half believe what you say," rejoined Hollingsworth; "and as
for me, I neither have faith in your dream, nor would care the value of
this pebble for its realization, were that possible.  And what more do
you want of it?  It has given you a theme for poetry.  Let that content
you.  But now I ask you to be, at last, a man of sobriety and
earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise which is worth all our
strength, and the strength of a thousand mightier than we."

There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation that ensued.
It is enough to say that Hollingsworth once more brought forward his
rigid and unconquerable idea,--a scheme for the reformation of the
wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the sympathy
of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to his pupils
the possibility of a worthier life than that which had become their
fate.  It appeared, unless he overestimated his own means, that
Hollingsworth held it at his choice (and he did so choose) to obtain
possession of the very ground on which we had planted our Community,
and which had not yet been made irrevocably ours, by purchase.  It was
just the foundation that he desired.  Our beginnings might readily be
adapted to his great end.  The arrangements already completed would
work quietly into his system. So plausible looked his theory, and, more
than that, so practical,--such an air of reasonableness had he, by
patient thought, thrown over it,--each segment of it was contrived to
dovetail into all the rest with such a complicated applicability, and
so ready was he with a response for every objection, that, really, so
far as logic and argument went, he had the matter all his own way.

"But," said I, "whence can you, having no means of your own, derive the
enormous capital which is essential to this experiment?  State Street,
I imagine, would not draw its purser strings very liberally in aid of
such a speculation."

"I have the funds--as much, at least, as is needed for a
commencement--at command," he answered.  "They can be produced within a
month, if necessary."

My thoughts reverted to Zenobia.  It could only be her wealth which
Hollingsworth was appropriating so lavishly.  And on what conditions
was it to be had?  Did she fling it into the scheme with the
uncalculating generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her
impulse to be generous at all?  And did she fling herself along with
it?  But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an explanation.

"And have you no regrets," I inquired, "in overthrowing this fair
system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now
beginning to flourish so hopefully around us?  How beautiful it is,
and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable!  The ages have waited
for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on
our mortal existence in love and mutual help!  Hollingsworth, I would
be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience."

"Then let it rest wholly upon mine!" he answered, knitting his black
brows.  "I see through the system.  It is full of
defects,--irremediable and damning ones!--from first to last, there is
nothing else!  I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever.
There is not human nature in it."

"Why are you so secret in your operations?"  I asked.  "God forbid that
I should accuse you of intentional wrong; but the besetting sin of a
philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His
sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some
point of his course--I know not exactly when or where--he is tempted to
palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that
the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside
his private conscience.  Oh, my dear friend, beware this error!  If you
meditate the overthrow of this establishment, call together our
companions, state your design, support it with all your eloquence, but
allow them an opportunity of defending themselves."

"It does not suit me," said Hollingsworth.  "Nor is it my duty to do
so."

"I think it is," replied I.

Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate, inexorably.

"I will not argue the point," said he.  "What I desire to know of you
is,--and you can tell me in one word,--whether I am to look for your
cooperation in this great scheme of good?  Take it up with me!  Be my
brother in it!  It offers you (what you have told me, over and over
again, that you most need) a purpose in life, worthy of the extremest
self-devotion,--worthy of martyrdom, should God so order it!  In this
view, I present it to you.  You can greatly benefit mankind.  Your
peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable of being so
wrought into this enterprise that not one of them need lie idle. Strike
hands with me, and from this moment you shall never again feel the
languor and vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied man.
There may be no more aimless beauty in your life; but, in its stead,
there shall be strength, courage, immitigable will,--everything that a
manly and generous nature should desire!  We shall succeed!  We shall
have done our best for this miserable world; and happiness (which never
comes but incidentally) will come to us unawares."

It seemed his intention to say no more.  But, after he had quite broken
off, his deep eyes filled with tears, and he held out both his hands to
me.

"Coverdale," he murmured, "there is not the man in this wide world whom
I can love as I could you.  Do not forsake me!"

As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness and dimness of so
many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had caught
hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost
irresistible force.  It is a mystery to me how I withstood it. But, in
truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what was odious.
A loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work! A great black
ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a thousand human
hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of
transmuting it into virtue!  Had I but touched his extended hand,
Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his own
conception of all these matters.  But I stood aloof.  I fortified
myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too
gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on considerations
that should have been paramount to every other.

"Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise?"  I asked.

"She is," said Hollingsworth.

"She!--the beautiful!--the gorgeous!"  I exclaimed.  "And how have you
prevailed with such a woman to work in this squalid element?"

"Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect," he answered; "but by
addressing whatever is best and noblest in her."

Hollingsworth was looking on the ground.  But, as he often did
so,--generally, indeed, in his habitual moods of thought,--I could not
judge whether it was from any special unwillingness now to meet my
eyes.  What it was that dictated my next question, I cannot precisely
say.  Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into my mouth, and, as it
were, asked itself so involuntarily, that there must needs have been an
aptness in it.

"What is to become of Priscilla?"

Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely, and with glowing eyes.  He could
not have shown any other kind of expression than that, had he meant to
strike me with a sword.

"Why do you bring in the names of these women?" said he, after a moment
of pregnant silence.  "What have they to do with the proposal which I
make you?  I must have your answer!  Will you devote yourself, and
sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of friends forever?"

"In Heaven's name, Hollingsworth," cried I, getting angry, and glad to
be angry, because so only was it possible to oppose his tremendous
concentrativeness and indomitable will, "cannot you conceive that a man
may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some other
plan than precisely that which you have laid down?  And will you cast
off a friend for no unworthiness, but merely because he stands upon his
right as an individual being, and looks at matters through his own
optics, instead of yours?"

"Be with me," said Hollingsworth, "or be against me!  There is no third
choice for you."

"Take this, then, as my decision," I answered.  "I doubt the wisdom of
your scheme.  Furthermore, I greatly fear that the methods by which you
allow yourself to pursue it are such as cannot stand the scrutiny of an
unbiassed conscience."

"And you will not join me?"

"No!"

I never said the word--and certainly can never have it to say
hereafter--that cost me a thousandth part so hard an effort as did that
one syllable.  The heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an
absolute torture of the breast.  I was gazing steadfastly at
Hollingsworth.  It seemed to me that it struck him, too, like a bullet.
A ghastly paleness--always so terrific on a swarthy face--overspread
his features.  There was a convulsive movement of his throat, as if he
were forcing down some words that struggled and fought for utterance.
Whether words of anger, or words of grief, I cannot tell; although many
and many a time I have vainly tormented myself with conjecturing which
of the two they were.  One other appeal to my friendship,--such as
once, already, Hollingsworth had made,--taking me in the revulsion that
followed a strenuous exercise of opposing will, would completely have
subdued me.  But he left the matter there.  "Well!" said he.

And that was all!  I should have been thankful for one word more, even
had it shot me through the heart, as mine did him.  But he did not
speak it; and, after a few moments, with one accord, we set to work
again, repairing the stone fence.  Hollingsworth, I observed, wrought
like a Titan; and, for my own part, I lifted stones which at this
day--or, in a calmer mood, at that one--I should no more have thought
it possible to stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back.

On Sundays those of Blithedale take their rest and do what they wish. Hollingsworth, Priscilla, Zenobia, and Coverdale frequent a place they call Eliot's Pulpit - a rock outcrop with a shallow cave and a tree canopy, with a built-in pulpit that Hollingsworth occasionally discourses from. Since she met with Westervelt, Zenobia's mood varies wildly. One evening at Eliot's Pulpit she lashes out at Coverdale about women. She proclaims that society throttles them and limits them. Coverdale thinks to himself that women might be superior intellectually but don't often rise up because they are not natural reformers. Aloud, he tells her that he would rather be ruled by women than men, because other men excite his jealousy and hurt his pride. Zenobia scoffs that he would not want to be ruled by an unsightly sixty-year old. Coverdale tries to appease her by saying he wishes women were religious leaders. Priscilla says she does not agree with this, and Zenobia cries out that she is the type of woman that man has spent centuries making. Hollingsworth tells Priscilla both are wrong, and Zenobia becomes angry and asks if he despises women. He replies that he does not, but that man "is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster -and, thank Heaven, an almost impossible hitherto imagined monster -without man, as her acknowledged principal. he adds that the heart of true womanhood knows its place. Coverdale is surprised to see Zenobia humbled and tearful. He also comes to see that these two women are in the palm of Hollingsworth's hand, but care nothing for him. As they leave, Priscilla seems incredibly happy. Zenobia and Hollingsworth walk away, and Coverdale espies her take his hand and press it to her chest in a passion. Even though Priscilla does not see this, her spirits droop, and Coverdale asks if she is okay. He then presses more, asking if she really thinks Zenobia is her friend and saying how interesting it is that the other two found each other. Imperiously, Priscilla orders him away and says she wants to be alone. Coverdale finds this attractive. He wonders how Zenobia presents herself to Hollingsworth -unattached and unfettered


Thus the summer was passing away,--a summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and
there became a rich experience.  I found myself looking forward to
years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system.  The
Community were now beginning to form their permanent plans.  One of our
purposes was to erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it, after
        Fourier; but the phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my
        remembrance), where the great and general family should have its
abiding-place.  Individual members, too, who made it a point of
religion to preserve the sanctity of an exclusive home, were selecting
sites for their cottages, by the wood-side, or on the breezy swells, or
in the sheltered nook of some little valley, according as their taste
might lean towards snugness or the picturesque.  Altogether, by
projecting our minds outward, we had imparted a show of novelty to
existence, and contemplated it as hopefully as if the soil beneath our
feet had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded generations, on
every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a
hitherto unwedded bride.

Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects.  It was
easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervor, but
either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or, at any
rate, with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of
his.  Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he and I were
repairing an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying forward
into the future time.

"When we come to be old men," I said, "they will call us uncles, or
fathers,--Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale,--and we will look
back cheerfully to these early days, and make a romantic story for the
young People (and if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it
        will be no harm) out of our severe trials and hardships. In a century
or two, we shall, every one of us, be mythical personages, or
exceedingly picturesque and poetical ones, at all events.  They will
have a great public hall, in which your portrait, and mine, and twenty
other faces that are living now, shall be hung up; and as for me, I
will be painted in my shirtsleeves, and with the sleeves rolled up, to
show my muscular development.  What stories will be rife among them
about our mighty strength!" continued I, lifting a big stone and
putting it into its place, "though our posterity will really be far
stronger than ourselves, after several generations of a simple,
         natural, and active life.  What legends of Zenobia's beauty, and
         Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those mysterious qualities
         which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light!  In due course of
         ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem; and we will
         ourselves--at least, I will--bend unseen over the future poet, and lend
         him inspiration while he writes it."

         "You seem," said Hollingsworth, "to be trying how much nonsense you can
         pour out in a breath."

         "I wish you would see fit to comprehend," retorted I, "that the
         profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine tenths of nonsense, else
         it is not worth the breath that utters it.  But I do long for the
         cottages to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over
         them, and the moss to gather on the walls, and the trees--which we will
         set out--to cover them with a breadth of shadow.  This spick-and-span
         novelty does not quite suit my taste.  It is time, too, for children to
         be born among us.  The first-born child is still to come.  And I shall
         never feel as if this were a real, practical, as well as poetical
         system of human life, until somebody has sanctified it by death."

         "A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!" said Hollingsworth.

         "As good as any other," I replied.  "I wonder, Hollingsworth, who, of
         all these strong men, and fair women and maidens, is doomed the first
         to die.  Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of it,
         to fix upon a spot for a cemetery?  Let us choose the rudest, roughest,
         most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and Death shall
         teach us to beautify it, grave by grave.  By our sweet, calm way of
         dying, and the airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral
         rites, and the cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones,
         the final scene shall lose its terrors; so that hereafter it may be
         happiness to live, and bliss to die.  None of us must die young.  Yet,
         should Providence ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful, but
         affect us with a tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost
         smiling pathos!"

         "That is to say," muttered Hollingsworth, "you will die like a heathen,
         as you certainly live like one.  But, listen to me, Coverdale.  Your
         fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a
         wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a
         precious summer of our lives.  Do you seriously imagine that any such
         realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be
         brought to pass?"

         "Certainly I do," said I. "Of course, when the reality comes, it will
         wear the every-day, commonplace, dusty, and rather homely garb that
         reality always does put on.  But, setting aside the ideal charm, I hold
         that our highest anticipations have a solid footing on common sense."

         "You only half believe what you say," rejoined Hollingsworth; "and as
         for me, I neither have faith in your dream, nor would care the value of
         this pebble for its realization, were that possible.  And what more do
         you want of it?  It has given you a theme for poetry.  Let that content
         you.  But now I ask you to be, at last, a man of sobriety and
         earnestness, and aid me in an enterprise which is worth all our
         strength, and the strength of a thousand mightier than we."

         There can be no need of giving in detail the conversation that ensued.
         It is enough to say that Hollingsworth once more brought forward his
         rigid and unconquerable idea,--a scheme for the reformation of the
         wicked by methods moral, intellectual, and industrial, by the sympathy
         of pure, humble, and yet exalted minds, and by opening to his pupils
         the possibility of a worthier life than that which had become their
         fate.  It appeared, unless he overestimated his own means, that
         Hollingsworth held it at his choice (and he did so choose) to obtain
         possession of the very ground on which we had planted our Community,
         and which had not yet been made irrevocably ours, by purchase.  It was
         just the foundation that he desired.  Our beginnings might readily be
         adapted to his great end.  The arrangements already completed would
         work quietly into his system. So plausible looked his theory, and, more
         than that, so practical,--such an air of reasonableness had he, by
         patient thought, thrown over it,--each segment of it was contrived to
         dovetail into all the rest with such a complicated applicability, and
         so ready was he with a response for every objection, that, really, so
         far as logic and argument went, he had the matter all his own way.

         "But," said I, "whence can you, having no means of your own, derive the
         enormous capital which is essential to this experiment?  State Street,
         I imagine, would not draw its purser strings very liberally in aid of
         such a speculation."

         "I have the funds--as much, at least, as is needed for a
         commencement--at command," he answered.  "They can be produced within a
         month, if necessary."

         My thoughts reverted to Zenobia.  It could only be her wealth which
         Hollingsworth was appropriating so lavishly.  And on what conditions
         was it to be had?  Did she fling it into the scheme with the
         uncalculating generosity that characterizes a woman when it is her
         impulse to be generous at all?  And did she fling herself along with
         it?  But Hollingsworth did not volunteer an explanation.

         "And have you no regrets," I inquired, "in overthrowing this fair
         system of our new life, which has been planned so deeply, and is now
         beginning to flourish so hopefully around us?  How beautiful it is,
         and, so far as we can yet see, how practicable!  The ages have waited
         for us, and here we are, the very first that have essayed to carry on
         our mortal existence in love and mutual help!  Hollingsworth, I would
         be loath to take the ruin of this enterprise upon my conscience."

         "Then let it rest wholly upon mine!" he answered, knitting his black
         brows.  "I see through the system.  It is full of
         defects,--irremediable and damning ones!--from first to last, there is
         nothing else!  I grasp it in my hand, and find no substance whatever.
         There is not human nature in it."

         "Why are you so secret in your operations?"  I asked.  "God forbid that
         I should accuse you of intentional wrong; but the besetting sin of a
         philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His
         sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some
         point of his course--I know not exactly when or where--he is tempted to
         palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that
         the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside
         his private conscience.  Oh, my dear friend, beware this error!  If you
         meditate the overthrow of this establishment, call together our
         companions, state your design, support it with all your eloquence, but
         allow them an opportunity of defending themselves."

         "It does not suit me," said Hollingsworth.  "Nor is it my duty to do
         so."

         "I think it is," replied I.

         Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate, inexorably.

         "I will not argue the point," said he.  "What I desire to know of you
         is,--and you can tell me in one word,--whether I am to look for your
         cooperation in this great scheme of good?  Take it up with me!  Be my
         brother in it!  It offers you (what you have told me, over and over
                 again, that you most need) a purpose in life, worthy of the extremest
         self-devotion,--worthy of martyrdom, should God so order it!  In this
         view, I present it to you.  You can greatly benefit mankind.  Your
         peculiar faculties, as I shall direct them, are capable of being so
         wrought into this enterprise that not one of them need lie idle. Strike
         hands with me, and from this moment you shall never again feel the
         languor and vague wretchedness of an indolent or half-occupied man.
         There may be no more aimless beauty in your life; but, in its stead,
         there shall be strength, courage, immitigable will,--everything that a
         manly and generous nature should desire!  We shall succeed!  We shall
         have done our best for this miserable world; and happiness (which never
                 comes but incidentally) will come to us unawares."

         It seemed his intention to say no more.  But, after he had quite broken
         off, his deep eyes filled with tears, and he held out both his hands to
         me.

         "Coverdale," he murmured, "there is not the man in this wide world whom
         I can love as I could you.  Do not forsake me!"

         As I look back upon this scene, through the coldness and dimness of so
         many years, there is still a sensation as if Hollingsworth had caught
         hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost
         irresistible force.  It is a mystery to me how I withstood it. But, in
         truth, I saw in his scheme of philanthropy nothing but what was odious.
         A loathsomeness that was to be forever in my daily work! A great black
         ugliness of sin, which he proposed to collect out of a thousand human
         hearts, and that we should spend our lives in an experiment of
         transmuting it into virtue!  Had I but touched his extended hand,
         Hollingsworth's magnetism would perhaps have penetrated me with his own
         conception of all these matters.  But I stood aloof.  I fortified
         myself with doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too
         gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on considerations
         that should have been paramount to every other.

         "Is Zenobia to take a part in your enterprise?"  I asked.

         "She is," said Hollingsworth.

         "She!--the beautiful!--the gorgeous!"  I exclaimed.  "And how have you
         prevailed with such a woman to work in this squalid element?"

         "Through no base methods, as you seem to suspect," he answered; "but by
         addressing whatever is best and noblest in her."

         Hollingsworth was looking on the ground.  But, as he often did
         so,--generally, indeed, in his habitual moods of thought,--I could not
         judge whether it was from any special unwillingness now to meet my
         eyes.  What it was that dictated my next question, I cannot precisely
         say.  Nevertheless, it rose so inevitably into my mouth, and, as it
         were, asked itself so involuntarily, that there must needs have been an
         aptness in it.

         "What is to become of Priscilla?"

         Hollingsworth looked at me fiercely, and with glowing eyes.  He could
         not have shown any other kind of expression than that, had he meant to
         strike me with a sword.

         "Why do you bring in the names of these women?" said he, after a moment
         of pregnant silence.  "What have they to do with the proposal which I
         make you?  I must have your answer!  Will you devote yourself, and
         sacrifice all to this great end, and be my friend of friends forever?"

         "In Heaven's name, Hollingsworth," cried I, getting angry, and glad to
         be angry, because so only was it possible to oppose his tremendous
         concentrativeness and indomitable will, "cannot you conceive that a man
         may wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some other
         plan than precisely that which you have laid down?  And will you cast
         off a friend for no unworthiness, but merely because he stands upon his
         right as an individual being, and looks at matters through his own
         optics, instead of yours?"

         "Be with me," said Hollingsworth, "or be against me!  There is no third
         choice for you."

         "Take this, then, as my decision," I answered.  "I doubt the wisdom of
         your scheme.  Furthermore, I greatly fear that the methods by which you
         allow yourself to pursue it are such as cannot stand the scrutiny of an
         unbiassed conscience."

         "And you will not join me?"

         "No!"

         I never said the word--and certainly can never have it to say
         hereafter--that cost me a thousandth part so hard an effort as did that
         one syllable.  The heart-pang was not merely figurative, but an
         absolute torture of the breast.  I was gazing steadfastly at
         Hollingsworth.  It seemed to me that it struck him, too, like a bullet.
         A ghastly paleness--always so terrific on a swarthy face--overspread
         his features.  There was a convulsive movement of his throat, as if he
         were forcing down some words that struggled and fought for utterance.
         Whether words of anger, or words of grief, I cannot tell; although many
         and many a time I have vainly tormented myself with conjecturing which
         of the two they were.  One other appeal to my friendship,--such as
         once, already, Hollingsworth had made,--taking me in the revulsion that
         followed a strenuous exercise of opposing will, would completely have
         subdued me.  But he left the matter there.  "Well!" said he.

         And that was all!  I should have been thankful for one word more, even
         had it shot me through the heart, as mine did him.  But he did not
         speak it; and, after a few moments, with one accord, we set to work
         again, repairing the stone fence.  Hollingsworth, I observed, wrought
         like a Titan; and, for my own part, I lifted stones which at this
         day--or, in a calmer mood, at that one--I should no more have thought
         it possible to stir than to carry off the gates of Gaza on my back.

The Community begins to form permanent plans, such as where they will live and build. Coverdale waxes poetic to Hollingsworth about future generations admiring them, but Hollingsworth will have none of it. When Coverdale wonders about the first births and deaths there, and proposes a cemetery, Hollingsworth becomes annoyed. Coverdale starts to realize how little Hollingsworth cares for the community and how his goal is to obtain the very land they are on for his own reform purposes. He wonders if the man is using Zenobia's money. He confronts him, and they argue. Hollingsworth claims he sees things as they are in terms of the defects. He then tries to recruit Coverdale, who assiduously resists. From this moment on, the two are estranged, their relationship now full of tension and grief


A few days after the tragic passage-at-arms between Hollingsworth and
me, I appeared at the dinner-table actually dressed in a coat, instead
of my customary blouse; with a satin cravat, too, a white vest, and
several other things that made me seem strange and outlandish to
myself.  As for my companions, this unwonted spectacle caused a great
stir upon the wooden benches that bordered either side of our homely
board.

"What's in the wind now, Miles?" asked one of them.  "Are you deserting
us?"

"Yes, for a week or two," said I. "It strikes me that my health demands
a little relaxation of labor, and a short visit to the seaside, during
the dog-days."

"You look like it!" grumbled Silas Foster, not greatly pleased with the
idea of losing an efficient laborer before the stress of the season was
well over.  "Now, here's a pretty fellow!  His shoulders have broadened
a matter of six inches since he came among us; he can do his day's
work, if he likes, with any man or ox on the farm; and yet he talks
about going to the seashore for his health!  Well, well, old woman,"
added he to his wife, "let me have a plateful of that pork and cabbage!
I begin to feel in a very weakly way.  When the others have had their
turn, you and I will take a jaunt to Newport or Saratoga!"

"Well, but, Mr. Foster," said I, "you must allow me to take a little
breath."

"Breath!" retorted the old yeoman.  "Your lungs have the play of a pair
of blacksmith's bellows already.  What on earth do you want more?  But
go along!  I understand the business.  We shall never see your face
here again.  Here ends the reformation of the world, so far as Miles
Coverdale has a hand in it!"

"By no means," I replied.  "I am resolute to die in the last ditch, for
the good of the cause."

"Die in a ditch!" muttered gruff Silas, with genuine Yankee intolerance
of any intermission of toil, except on Sunday, the Fourth of July, the
autumnal cattle-show, Thanksgiving, or the annual Fast,--"die in a
ditch!  I believe, in my conscience, you would, if there were no
steadier means than your own labor to keep you out of it!"

The truth was, that an intolerable discontent and irksomeness had come
over me.  Blithedale was no longer what it had been.  Everything was
suddenly faded.  The sunburnt and arid aspect of our woods and
pastures, beneath the August sky, did but imperfectly symbolize the
lack of dew and moisture, that, since yesterday, as it were, had
blighted my fields of thought, and penetrated to the innermost and
shadiest of my contemplative recesses.  The change will be recognized
by many, who, after a period of happiness, have endeavored to go on
with the same kind of life, in the same scene, in spite of the
alteration or withdrawal of some principal circumstance.  They discover
(what heretofore, perhaps, they had not known) that it was this which
gave the bright color and vivid reality to the whole affair.

I stood on other terms than before, not only with Hollingsworth, but
with Zenobia and Priscilla.  As regarded the two latter, it was that
dreamlike and miserable sort of change that denies you the privilege to
complain, because you can assert no positive injury, nor lay your
finger on anything tangible.  It is a matter which you do not see, but
feel, and which, when you try to analyze it, seems to lose its very
existence, and resolve itself into a sickly humor of your own. Your
understanding, possibly, may put faith in this denial.  But your heart
will not so easily rest satisfied.  It incessantly remonstrates,
though, most of the time, in a bass-note, which you do not separately
distinguish; but, now and then, with a sharp cry, importunate to be
heard, and resolute to claim belief.  "Things are not as they were!" it
keeps saying.  "You shall not impose on me!  I will never be quiet!  I
will throb painfully!  I will be heavy, and desolate, and shiver with
cold!  For I, your deep heart, know when to be miserable, as once I
knew when to be happy!  All is changed for us! You are beloved no
more!"  And were my life to be spent over again, I would invariably
lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths, however clamorous
the music and the merriment of a more superficial region.

My outbreak with Hollingsworth, though never definitely known to our
associates, had really an effect upon the moral atmosphere of the
Community.  It was incidental to the closeness of relationship into
which we had brought ourselves, that an unfriendly state of feeling
could not occur between any two members without the whole society being
more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby.  This species of
nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough, sentimentally
considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of love among us)
was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical operation, mortal
tempers being so infirm and variable as they are. If one of us happened
to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt
on the same side of everybody's head. Thus, even on the supposition
that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great
deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.

Musing on all these matters, I felt an inexpressible longing for at
least a temporary novelty.  I thought of going across the Rocky
Mountains, or to Europe, or up the Nile; of offering myself a volunteer
on the Exploring Expedition; of taking a ramble of years, no matter in
what direction, and coming back on the other side of the world.  Then,
should the colonists of Blithedale have established their enterprise on
a permanent basis, I might fling aside my pilgrim staff and dusty
shoon, and rest as peacefully here as elsewhere.  Or, in case
Hollingsworth should occupy the ground with his School of Reform, as he
now purposed, I might plead earthly guilt enough, by that time, to give
me what I was inclined to think the only trustworthy hold on his
affections.  Meanwhile, before deciding on any ultimate plan, I
determined to remove myself to a little distance, and take an exterior
view of what we had all been about.

In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was
going on in the general brain of the Community.  It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were
wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure,
and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and
happy life.  But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and, having a
decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting
quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the
world.  I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it
was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be.  It was
impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything
in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the
crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface
portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we
ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the
atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble.  No
sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively
among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning
into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new
observation from that old standpoint.

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with
the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the
merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had
not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the
sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but
forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the penance
is fully equal to the pleasure.  So I kissed none of them; and nobody,
to say the truth, seemed to expect it.

"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the
watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the
rights of women?"

"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;
"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the
force to exercise them."

She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,
with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light
of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame,
flickering and fitful.

"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all
the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and can
never be lived over again.  Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I have
been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for lack of
a better and wiser one?  But you are too young to be my father
confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like one of
those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a
tragedy-queen."

"I would, at least, be loyal and faithful," answered I; "and would
counsel you with an honest purpose, if not wisely."

"Yes," said Zenobia, "you would be only too wise, too honest. Honesty
and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!"

"Ah, Zenobia," I exclaimed, "if you would but let me speak!"

"By no means," she replied, "especially when you have just resumed the
whole series of social conventionalisms, together with that
strait-bodied coat.  I would as lief open my heart to a lawyer or a
clergyman!  No, no, Mr. Coverdale; if I choose a counsellor, in the
present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman;
and I rather apprehend that the latter would be likeliest of the two to
speak the fitting word.  It needs a wild steersman when we voyage
through chaos!  The anchor is up,--farewell!"

Priscilla, as soon as dinner was over, had betaken herself into a
corner, and set to work on a little purse.  As I approached her, she
let her eyes rest on me with a calm, serious look; for, with all her
delicacy of nerves, there was a singular self-possession in Priscilla,
and her sensibilities seemed to lie sheltered from ordinary commotion,
like the water in a deep well.

"Will you give me that purse, Priscilla," said I, "as a parting
keepsake?"

"Yes," she answered, "if you will wait till it is finished."

"I must not wait, even for that," I replied.  "Shall I find you here,
on my return?"

"I never wish to go away," said she.

"I have sometimes thought," observed I, smiling, "that you, Priscilla,
are a little prophetess, or, at least, that you have spiritual
intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people. If
that be the case, I should like to ask you what is about to happen; for
I am tormented with a strong foreboding that, were I to return even so
soon as to-morrow morning, I should find everything changed. Have you
any impressions of this nature?"

"Ah, no," said Priscilla, looking at me apprehensively.  "If any such
misfortune is coming, the shadow has not reached me yet.  Heaven
forbid!  I should be glad if there might never be any change, but one
summer follow another, and all just like this."

"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike," said I,
with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself.  "Times change,
and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much
the worse for us.  Good-by, Priscilla!"

I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor
returned.  Priscilla's heart was deep, but of small compass; it had
room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned me.

On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth.  I had a momentary impulse to hold
out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both.
When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to
mock the sacred past with any show of those commonplace civilities that
belong to ordinary intercourse.  Being dead henceforth to him, and he
to me, there could be no propriety in our chilling one another with the
touch of two corpse-like hands, or playing at looks of courtesy with
eyes that were impenetrable beneath the glaze and the film.  We passed,
therefore, as if mutually invisible.

I can nowise explain what sort of whim, prank, or perversity it was,
that, after all these leave-takings, induced me to go to the pigsty,
and take leave of the swine!  There they lay, buried as deeply among
the straw as they could burrow, four huge black grunters, the very
symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort.  They were asleep,
drawing short and heavy breaths, which heaved their big sides up and
down.  Unclosing their eyes, however, at my approach, they looked dimly
forth at the outer world, and simultaneously uttered a gentle grunt;
not putting themselves to the trouble of an additional breath for that
particular purpose, but grunting with their ordinary inhalation.  They
were involved, and almost stifled and buried alive, in their own
corporeal substance.  The very unreadiness and oppression wherewith
these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life-machinery
in sluggish movement appeared to make them only the more sensible of
the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their existence.  Peeping at me
an instant out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes, they dropt
asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was
still present to them, betwixt dream and reality.

"You must come back in season to eat part of a spare-rib," said Silas
Foster, giving my hand a mighty squeeze.  "I shall have these fat
fellows hanging up by the heels, heads downward, pretty soon, I tell
you!"

"O cruel Silas, what a horrible idea!" cried I. "All the rest of us,
men, women, and livestock, save only these four porkers, are bedevilled
with one grief or another; they alone are happy,--and you mean to cut
their throats and eat them!  It would be more for the general comfort
to let them eat us; and bitter and sour morsels we should be!"

Coverdale decides he will take leave of the Community for a few days. Silas Foster is gruffly irritated, wondering if he will return. Truthfully, Coverdale feels as if the luster of Blithedale has dimmed; he is not on good terms with his former friends, and the whole Community has felt the effect of his break with Hollingsworth. Coverdale thus wants to travel elsewhere and get away from the bedlam of the Community. He thinks he has lost touch with the actual world since they only discuss how the world ought to be. On his way out he asks Zenobia if he should promote any intention of hers to deliver a lecture on women's rights, to which she sadly says they have none. She looks at him and tells him she has a sense that a phase of their lives is finished. She once thought he could be a confidant but thought he was too young to be a Father Confessor and was not a girlish friend. Now, she says, if she had a confidant it would have to be an angel or a madman. He also bids farewell to Priscilla, whom he calls a little prophetess, and asks if she senses anything foreboding, or a major change. She does not. He passes mutely by Hollingsworth, but actually goes to say farewell to the pigs outside. He marvels at their comfortable indolence and their deep sleep amid their own weight. He is sad when Silas Foster comments that they will eat them soon