The Blithedale Romance quotes

Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to affirm⁠—nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England⁠—had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the tropic.

Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve’s bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Eskimo. But we made a summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.

The better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so now; it is enough if it looked so then.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one’s daydream to its natural consummation, although, if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.

“Which man among you,” quoth he, “is the best judge of swine? Some of us must go to the next Brighton fair, and buy half a dozen pigs.”

Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from among the swinish multitude for this?

And again, in reference to some discussion about raising early vegetables for the market:—

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!”

… 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!

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.

“

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.”

“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.

And his consummated Paradise, as he pictures it, would be worthy of the agency which he counts upon for establishing it.

The nauseous villain!

”

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.

pantaloons of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the wearer before his ladylove—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;

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.

“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.

Her simple, careless, childish flow of spirits often made me sad. She seemed to me like a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of sunshine, and mistaking it for a broad and eternal summer.

We sometimes hold mirth to a stricter accountability than sorrow; it must show good cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily.

Priscilla’s gayety, moreover, was of a nature that showed me how delicate an instrument she was, and what fragile harp-strings were her nerves. As they made sweet music at the airiest touch, it would require but a stronger one to burst them all asunder.

Nothing used to please me more than to see one of these lay enthusiasts snatch up a hoe, as they were very prone to do, and set to work with a vigor that perhaps carried him through about a dozen ill-directed strokes.

Men are wonderfully soon satisfied, in this day of shameful bodily enervation, when, from one end of life to the other, such multitudes never taste the sweet weariness that follows accustomed toil.

I seldom saw the new enthusiasm that did not grow as flimsy and flaccid as the proselyte’s moistened shirt-collar, with a quarter of an hour’s active labor under a July sun.

Externally they bear a close resemblance to other men, and have perhaps all save the finest grace; but when a woman wrecks herself on such a being, she ultimately finds that the real womanhood within her has no corresponding part in him.

Her deepest voice lacks a response; the deeper her cry, the more dead his silence.

The fault may be none of his; he cannot give her what never lived within his soul.

“I think it is,” replied I.

Hollingsworth frowned; not in passion, but, like fate, inexorably.

“I will not argue the point,” said he. “What I desire to know of you is—and you can tell me in one word—whether I am to look for your cooperation in this great scheme of good? Take it up with me!

This species of nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough, sentimentally considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of love among us) was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical operation, mortal tempers being so infirm and variable as they are.

If one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt on the same side of everybody’s head.

Thus, even on the supposition that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.

“Yes,” said Zenobia, “you would be only too wise, too honest.

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person’s expense!

”

No, no, Mr. Coverdale; if I choose a counsellor, in the present aspect of my affairs, it must be either an angel or a madman; and I rather apprehend that the latter would be likeliest of the two to speak the fitting word.

It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through chaos!

The anchor is up—farewell!”

“No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike,” said I, with a degree of Orphic wisdom that astonished myself. “

Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.

Goodbye, Priscilla!”

I gave her hand a pressure, which, I think, she neither resisted nor returned.

Priscilla’s heart was deep, but of small compass; it had room but for a very few dearest ones, among whom she never reckoned me.

On the doorstep I met Hollingsworth. I had a momentary impulse to hold out my hand, or at least to give a parting nod, but resisted both.

The latter is always artificial; it is meant for the world’s eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment.

Realities keep in the rear, and put forward an advance guard of show and humbug.

The posterior aspect of any old farmhouse, behind which a railroad has unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life and individuality in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots …

… in existence, since they all had the same glimpse of the sky, all looked into the same area, all received just their equal share of sunshine through the front windows, and all listened to precisely the same noises of the street on which they boarded.

Men are so much alike in their nature, that they grow intolerable unless varied by their circumstances.

Just about this time a waiter entered my room. The truth was, I had rung the bell and ordered a sherry-cobbler.

Westervelt approached the window, and leaned his forehead against a pane of glass, displaying the sort of smile on his handsome features which, when I before met him, had let me into the secret of his gold-bordered teeth.

Every human being, when given over to the Devil, is sure to have the wizard mark upon him, in one form or another.

I fancied that this smile, with its peculiar revelation, was the Devil’s signet on the Professor.

And there was born to him a child, a beautiful daughter, whom he took from the beneficent hand of God with no just sense of her immortal value, but as a man already rich in gems would receive another jewel.

If he loved her, it was because she shone.

After Fauntleroy had thus spent a few empty years, coruscating continually an unnatural light, the source of it—which was merely his gold—began to grow more shallow, and finally became exhausted. He saw himself in imminent peril of losing all that had heretofore distinguished him;

Seldom, indeed, was it recalled, even by his closest former intimates. Nor could it have been otherwise. The man had laid no real touch on any mortal’s heart.

Being a mere image, an optical delusion, created by the sunshine of prosperity, it was his law to vanish into the shadow of the first intervening cloud.

He seemed to leave no vacancy; a phenomenon which, like many others that attended his brief career, went far to prove the illusiveness of his existence.

But, in my mind, the one and the other were alike impalpable.

In truth, it was Fauntleroy’s fatality to behold whatever he touched dissolve.

After a few years, his second wife (dim shadow that she had always been) faded finally out of the world, and left Fauntleroy to deal as he might with their pale and nervous child.

I spent painful hours in recalling these trifles, and rendering them more misty and unsubstantial than at first by the quantity of speculative musing thus kneaded in with them.

Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! These three had absorbed my life into themselves.

Together with an inexpressible longing to know their fortunes, there was likewise a morbid resentment of my own pain, and a stubborn reluctance to come again within their sphere.

It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that have grown irksome.

The bands that were silken once are apt to become iron fetters when we desire to shake them off.

Our souls, after all, are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate;

It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that have grown irksome. The bands that were silken once are apt to become iron fetters when we desire to shake them off.

Our souls, after all, are not our own.

We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate; but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves.

“Oh, a very old one will serve the purpose,” she replied. “

There are no new truths, much as we have prided ourselves on finding some.

A moral? Why, this:

“True—what is it?” exclaimed Zenobia. “After all, I hardly know. On better consideration, I have no message. Tell him—tell him something pretty and pathetic, that will come nicely and sweetly into your ballad—anything you please, so it be tender and submissive enough.

Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I’ll haunt him!

”—she spoke these words with the wildest energy.—“And give him—no, give Priscilla—this!”