The Blithedale Romance - Page 97/170

In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as was

going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of

Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that were

wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm, and pure,

and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a noble and

happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and, having a

decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel it) getting

quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing state of the

world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind of a world it

was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or ought to be. It was

impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything

in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the

crust of the earth in many places was broken, and its whole surface

portentously upheaving; that it was a day of crisis, and that we

ourselves were in the critical vortex. Our great globe floated in the

atmosphere of infinite space like an unsubstantial bubble. No

sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively

among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning

into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new

observation from that old standpoint.

It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with

the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the

merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those

respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and

mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had

not come into vogue since yesterday morning.

The brethren took leave of me with cordial kindness; and as for the

sisterhood, I had serious thoughts of kissing them all round, but

forbore to do so, because, in all such general salutations, the penance

is fully equal to the pleasure. So I kissed none of them; and nobody,

to say the truth, seemed to expect it.

"Do you wish me," I said to Zenobia, "to announce in town, and at the

watering-places, your purpose to deliver a course of lectures on the

rights of women?"

"Women possess no rights," said Zenobia, with a half-melancholy smile;

"or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the

force to exercise them."

She gave me her hand freely and kindly, and looked at me, I thought,

with a pitying expression in her eyes; nor was there any settled light

of joy in them on her own behalf, but a troubled and passionate flame,

flickering and fitful.

"I regret, on the whole, that you are leaving us," she said; "and all

the more, since I feel that this phase of our life is finished, and can

never be lived over again. Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, that I have

been several times on the point of making you my confidant, for lack of

a better and wiser one? But you are too young to be my father

confessor; and you would not thank me for treating you like one of

those good little handmaidens who share the bosom secrets of a

tragedy-queen."