It remains only to say a few words about myself. Not improbably, the
reader might be willing to spare me the trouble; for I have made but a
poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate
interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other
lives. But one still retains some little consideration for one's self;
so I keep these last two or three pages for my individual and sole
behoof.
But what, after all, have I to tell? Nothing, nothing, nothing! I
left Blithedale within the week after Zenobia's death, and went back
thither no more. The whole soil of our farm, for a long time
afterwards, seemed but the sodded earth over her grave. I could not
toil there, nor live upon its products. Often, however, in these years
that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a
noble and unselfish life; and how fair, in that first summer, appeared
the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as
the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world! Were my
former associates now there,--were there only three or four of those
true-hearted men still laboring in the sun.
I sometimes fancy that I
should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to
receive me, for old friendship's sake. More and more I feel that we
had struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up, and
profit by it. The experiment, so far as its original projectors were
concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism,
and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher
spirit. Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town
paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield.
Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of
generous effort!
My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at all
events, tolerably enough. I am now at middle age, well, well, a step
or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows it!--a
bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise. I have
been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather agreeably at each
visit. Being well to do in the world, and having nobody but myself to
care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare sumptuously every day.
As for poetry, I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr.
Griswold--as the reader, of course, knows--has placed me at a fair
elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty
little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in
spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences),
let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose. If I could
earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort.