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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here Hollingsworth stepped forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coverdale continues to wax poetic about the fire. It makes the men look hale and hearty and the women beautiful. All sit and look at each awkwardly in their first attempt at enacting brotherhood and sisterhood. Coverdale wonders if they would really enjoy each other if they had not chosen to be here, and how when he was "secretly putting weight on some imaginary social advantage, it must have been while I was striving to prove myself ostentatiously his equal, and no more". A knock sounds on the door and no one moves. It comes again and Hollingsworth enters. He brings with him a slight young woman, saying he does not know who she is but assumes she was expected. The girl is sickly and wan, depressed and sad in appearance. She fixes her eyes on Zenobia, though, and brightens immensely. Coverdale finds this one of the strangest looks he has ever seen. He does not know why Zenobia is hostile towards her in return. Hollingsworth, for his part, is large, dark, with an abundant beard and a muscular frame. He is a blacksmith by trade, but is tender and kind and appealing to men and women. To Coverdale's surprise, when Hollingsworth chides Zenobia, she quails under his words and gaze. The girl, named Priscilla, declares she must always be near Zenobia. Zenobia laughs and says she is fine with that. Hollingsworth says not to pry into her secrets, just to make her one of them. Silas is eating all the while, and although coarse, sensibly says to give her tea and let her eat with them


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Look at her now!" whispered I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How cold an Arcadia was this!

Silas does a bit of shoemaking while the rest of the party sits in the parlor. Mrs. Foster knits and then falls asleep. Priscilla sits by Zenobia, delighting in her new friend's pulchritude and grace. Coverdale is bemused, wondering if she came here to be the woman's slave. Zenobia teases him that he ought to turn her story into a ballad. She then tells him she suspects Priscilla is a seamstress because of the marks on her fingers, and that she lives a dark and dismal life in the city. Priscilla hears her and tears up. Zenobia scoffs and claims she is not ill natured, and will be kind to the girl from now on. She caresses Priscilla's hair, which has an immediate positive effect. Priscilla calms down and begins to knit, but the storm makes her uncomfortable. The night is mostly quiet and everyone is uncommunicative. Coverdale believes that Hollingsworth was never interested in their "socialist scheme" but only his impractical plan to reform criminals. A committee forms to find a new name, but they eventually decide to keep "Blithedale. The first evening comes to a close. Coverdale goes to bed but struggles with feverish dreams. In retrospect, he feels that if he had recorded those dreams, he would have been able to see the incidents of this narrative and the culminating catastrophe

Hawthorne's third novel is rich, complex, and layered; it has dozens of symbols, metaphors, and philosophical, historical, religious, literary, and psychosexual references. Thus, it is rife with topics for discussion, but can often be difficult in terms of narrowing down areas of focus. Each chapter is utterly jam-packed with things to discuss, so, in terms of a disclaimer, this study guide cannot possibly address every facet of Hawthorne's fascinating and at times inscrutable book. With that in mind, the first six chapters bring us a myriad of mysteries, examples of foreshadowing, and symbols. First of all, Hawthorne sets his story in the spring -it is a cold, blustery April when Coverdale sets out for Blithedale -and ends it in the Fall, when the leaves, Blithedale's founding spirit, and one of its own are dying. He also is keen to begin his exploration of the contrasts between city and countryside. Coverdale speaks of how fresh and revivifying the air is, contrasting it with the stifling air of the city; the invented biography for Priscilla also places the city in a negative light. The countryside is supposed to be an idyllic place where the human spirit can be renewed. It is the perfect place for this experiment of Blithedale to take place, as it is free from the constraints, hierarchies, and engrained norms of the city. Despite the sense of exuberance that pervades Coverdale's narrative for a couple chapters, there is already quite a bit of foreshadowing that things will not turn out well. Coverdale acknowledges that the world outside is hostile to them. He says that the group decides to ignore the land's Indian name, and thus its history, in favor of the anodyne "Blithedale." Silas Foster speaks of the practicalities of working on a farm, destroying some of the illusions of their great purpose, while everyone knows right away that Hollingsworth is barely committed. There are tensions regarding gender roles and duties. Coverdale also catches cold and has feverish dreams that allude to some future doom. Finally, Coverdale begins to exhibit the tendency that makes him a fascinating and complicated narrator: he is obsessively interested in those around him, watching, wondering, and judging. The thing that Coverdale is overwhelmingly concerned with in these early chapters is Zenobia's past. He wonders if she was married, and then wonders if she is not a virgin: "the freedom of her deportment...was not exactly maidenlike...Her constrained and inevitable manifestation, I said often to myself, was that of a woman to whom wedlock had thrown wide the gates of mystery" . Zenobia notices his interest in her, speculating that "I cannot reckon you as an admirer" . Sex is an important underlying tension throughout the novel, with Coverdale often inadvertently revealing his own fixations as well as giving us clues to those of other characters. Related to this is Zenobia's flower, one of the most potent symbols in the text. It is absolutely identified with her sexuality, and the language Coverdale uses to describe it is rife with eroticism: "It was an exotic, of rare beauty, and as fresh as if the hot-house gardener had just clipped it...I can see and smell it, at this moment" .


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is the matter now?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do not believe it," I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What does he say?" asked Zenobia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The horn sounds at daybreak, and Coverdale hears people getting up. He also hears Hollingsworth praying, which affects him deeply. Coverdale also realizes he is ill, and almost wishes he could have put off his reforming of society. He begins to wonder why he left his comfortable apartment and his life full of books and people and dinners at the Albion. Hollingsworth comes in cheerfully, and offers to help take care of Coverdale while he is ill. This brings him a great deal of comfort. Coverdale muses on how men are not prone to tenderness, although sometimes Christianity and women can help them attain it. Hollingsworth has it, though, and is not ashamed. He is grateful to have him there, and would hope to have a friend like him at his death bed. When Coverdale moans of dying, Hollingsworth asks him if there is nothing left for him to fancy. Coverdale replies that he likes pretty verses like Zenobia's. At one point Coverdale calls him tender, and Hollingsworth wonders at that, saying he sees himself as inflexible and severe in purpose. Everyone comes to kindly visit Coverdale while he is sick. Zenobia brings him gruel, which he does not enjoy. He reflects on her mind, which he finds "full of weeds" though she has a strong intellect. He thinks she is made for the stage and being a stump-oratoress; he also calls her magnificent in her appearance. The new flower in her hair every day intrigues him. In his perturbation of mind he whispers to Hollingsworth that she is an enchantress and a relative of the Veiled Lady. There is another thing that vexes him -whether or not she has been married. He has no clear evidence, but there is something about her that makes it seem as if she is experienced in the ways of sex. He sees her as "not exactly maidenlike" , but tells himself not to assume that her openness of character means that. She sees his staring at her and says that her instinct says he is not an admirer. To this replies he wants to know the mystery of her life. She leans in close for him to look into her eyes and all he says he sees is a sprite. He says he would have never fallen in love with her, but this whole riddle of her life makes him nervous and uncomfortable while he is ill. He wishes she would not come to his room


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Priscilla," I inquired, "did you ever see Miss Margaret Fuller?"

"No," she answered.

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

Priscilla, for whatever reason, looked very much discomposed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A delayed letter comes regarding Priscilla, implying that she has recently escaped an onerous or perilous situation. There is still uncertainty about her, although she is welcome in the community. While Priscilla seems to love Zenobia, there is not much requital. She also cares for Hollingsworth a great deal and talks freely with him. Her wan complexion perks up, and her bloom is conspicuous. She brings the convalescing Coverdale a night-cap she knitted. While he looks at her he sees that she looks like someone he knows. As she hands him a letter, he tells her she looks like Margaret Fuller, and then is surprised to see that the letter is from that woman. This disturbs Priscilla. While recovering Coverdale reads a great deal, particular Fourier, whose theories on cooperatives he shares with Hollingsworth. That man is hostile to Fourier's ideas, claiming he has committed some sin. Coverdale wonders if his mind is not fit to receive such ideas, and realizes Hollingsworth never really cared for the community's purpose but merely liked its isolation and estrangement. His philanthropic endeavor put him in bondage, and he could not spare emotional attachment for anything or anyone else. He may even have been going mad, as he always talked about getting money to build an edifice with intent of reforming criminals. Coverdale laments that Hollingsworth's spirit haunts a yet-unbuilt edifice rather than one full of memories already. He starts to feel like the man only took care of him when he was sick to proselytize to him

In this next set of chapters, Hawthorne proffers more questions and a few answers. We find out that Priscilla is Moodie's daughter, but that is all; we do not know his relationship with Zenobia, or anything else about Priscilla's past. We find out Hollingsworth's true purpose in being at Blithedale. We meet Westervelt, a dapper but insidious and mysterious young man whom Coverdale assumes has an indiscreet relationship with Zenobia. And we are left wondering at the relationships springing up between Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla. While it is hinted that Zenobia and Hollingsworth are involved, Priscilla's role complicates it. In terms of Priscilla, she is a much more enigmatic character than commonly assumed. Critics tend to focus on Hawthorne's "dark ladies" - Hester, Zenobia - and their various mysteries, and pay less attention to the virginal young woman that also populate his pages. Priscilla is certainly described in ways that indicate purity, as in her paleness, quietness, and slight stature, but Hawthorne complicates this by associating her with wildness and by placing clues about her probably less-than-moral past. Coverdale continues to act the part of the voyeur. He has his "hermitage," a lofty hideout where he can sit alone and watch those perambulating below. Hawthorne always associates Coverdale with these sorts of spaces; later in the novel his room at the hotel is a perfect, 19th century version of Rear Window in which he can spy on those in the boardinghouse across the way. He also articulates his growing obsession, commenting that he knows it is perhaps better not to pry into people's characters too much, lest you find something you never should have seen, but that he could not help it. He is also apt to refer to his three friends as a problem he cannot solve, indicating just how concerned he is with them. It is probably during this time in the narrative that the three of them begin to be suspicious of Coverdale and his interest in them, although the actual break is never officially known. Some readers may wonder about Charles Fourier and his place within the novel. The French social theorist wrote of an alternative social organization based on independent cooperative units, with each unit containing 1620 individuals who took care of each others needs from the material to the social to the sexual. It was assumed that Brook Farm incorporated some of Fourier's principles, although it was not the case when Hawthorne participated. As Annette Kolodny writes in her annotations to the novel, Hollingsworth grows angry in his discussion about Fourier with Coverdale because the theorist "proposed satisfying, rather than repressing, individuals' instinctive and selfish needs, including the sexual. Only when gratified, Fourier argued, would self-interest and instinctual desires cease to disrupt and distort human relations; a unrepressed society, in his view, fostered harmony and cooperation." Most characters in Blithedale are nowhere near this progressive perspective; Zenobia is the only one who would espouse this degree of comfort with sexual freedom. Coverdale maintains the position of judge, while Hollingsworth's singular focus on his philanthropic endeavors precludes him from fully engaging with these sorts of complications. Another real-world personage to note briefly is Margaret Fuller, a contemporary of Hawthorne's. Fuller, a women's rights activist and writer, is usually associated with Zenobia, but Hawthorne playfully confuses his readers by suggesting Priscilla's resemblance to her.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    "Indeed!" said Zenobia.

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

    "Have you bewitched her?"  I exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On May Day, Priscilla and Zenobia frolic together. Coverdale notices Zenobia gave Priscilla a weed for her hair. Zenobia comes over to talk about Priscilla with Coverdale, mentioning that she finds the girl's wildness singular. When Coverdale says women are happier than men, she chides him, saying women only have one task assigned by fate and men have many. Priscilla sits before Hollingsworth, and he leads her back to them. Coverdale's health is improved, and he feels as if "I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond. In this respect, it was like death. He feels like another man, and in the sunshine thinks his compatriots have realized some of Fourier's ideals. There are new people in the community, some young, some old, and some boarders. It is a "society such as has seldom met together; nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. The bond seems negative, not positive, and they never follow their written constitution. In terms of clothing, they look rather like beggars, and have a clerical or scholarly air. They do well enough at the yeoman life, but their neighbors mock them and tell slanderous rumors. This, Coverdale assumes, is due to envy. He sees them as spiritualizing labor, but comes to believe that the yeoman and the scholar can never be one. Zenobia teases Coverdale about this, and says he is fated to be Silas Foster. Hollingsworth comments that he no longer makes verses either. Zenobia asks Hollingsworth about himself, but does not laugh, as she never does with him. Coverdale thinks that Hollingsworth is making disciples out of Priscilla and Zenobia