Chapter Chapter 28 · MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION

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. As

Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange! He was

ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want

of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an

emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet, were there any cause, in

this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and

which my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did

not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold

to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the

battlefield of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and

choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles

Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled

bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.

I exaggerate my own defects. The reader must not take my own word for

it, nor believe me altogether changed from the young man who once hoped

strenuously, and struggled not so much amiss. Frostier heads than mine

have gained honor in the world; frostier hearts have imbibed new

warmth, and been newly happy. Life, however, it must be owned, has

come to rather an idle pass with me. Would my friends like to know

what brought it thither? There is one secret,--I have concealed it all

along, and never meant to let the least whisper of it escape,--one

foolish little secret, which possibly may have had something to do with

these inactive years of meridian manhood, with my bachelorship, with

the unsatisfied retrospect that I fling back on life, and my listless

glance towards the future. Shall I reveal it? It is an absurd thing

for a man in his afternoon,--a man of the world, moreover, with these

three white hairs in his brown mustache and that deepening track of a

crow's-foot on each temple,--an absurd thing ever to have happened, and

quite the absurdest for an old bachelor, like me, to talk about. But

it rises to my throat; so let it come.

I perceive, moreover, that the confession, brief as it shall be, will

throw a gleam of light over my behavior throughout the foregoing

incidents, and is, indeed, essential to the full understanding of my

story. The reader, therefore, since I have disclosed so much, is

entitled to this one word more. As I write it, he will charitably

suppose me to blush, and turn away my face:

I--I myself--was in love--with--Priscilla!

End of Project Gutenberg's The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne