The Blithedale Romance - Page 34/170

"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!"