The Blithedale Romance - Page 141/170

Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that

Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of

ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,

and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond

the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! They glided

mistily before me, as I walked. Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed

with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had

given up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine. What had I

ever had to do with them? And why, being now free, should I take this

thraldom on me once again? It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered

to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors,

and the misfortunes of individuals who stood within a circle of their

own, into which, if I stept at all, it must be as an intruder, and at a

peril that I could not estimate.

Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept

alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy. I indulged in a

hundred odd and extravagant conjectures. Either there was no such

place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of

thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else it

was all changed during my absence. It had been nothing but dream work

and enchantment. I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse, and for

the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres of Indian

corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I had imagined.

It would be another spot, and an utter strangeness.

These vagaries were of the spectral throng so apt to steal out of an

unquiet heart. They partly ceased to haunt me, on my arriving at a

point whence, through the trees, I began to catch glimpses of the

Blithedale farm. That surely was something real. There was hardly a

square foot of all those acres on which I had not trodden heavily, in

one or another kind of toil. The curse of Adam's posterity--and, curse

or blessing be it, it gives substance to the life around us--had first

come upon me there. In the sweat of my brow I had there earned bread

and eaten it, and so established my claim to be on earth, and my

fellowship with all the sons of labor. I could have knelt down, and

have laid my breast against that soil. The red clay of which my frame

was moulded seemed nearer akin to those crumbling furrows than to any

other portion of the world's dust. There was my home, and there might

be my grave.