The Blithedale Romance

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Hawthorne Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance

I. OLD MOODIE

II. BLITHEDALE

III. A KNOT OF DREAMERS

IV. THE SUPPER-TABLE

V. UNTIL BEDTIME

VI. COVERDALE'S SICK-CHAMBER

VII. THE CONVALESCENT

VIII. A MODERN ARCADIA

IX. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA

X. A VISITOR FROM TOWN

XI. THE WOOD-PATH

XII. COVERDALE'S HERMITAGE

XIII. ZENOBIA'S LEGEND

XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT

XV. A CRISIS

XVI. LEAVE-TAKINGS

XVII. THE HOTEL

XVIII. THE BOARDING-HOUSE

XIX. ZENOBIA'S DRAWING-ROOM

XX. THEY VANISH

XXI. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

XXII. FAUNTLEROY

XXIII. A VILLAGE HALL

XXIV. THE MASQUERADERS

XXV. THE THREE TOGETHER

XXVI. ZENOBIA AND COVERDALE

XXVII. MIDNIGHT

XXVIII. BLITHEDALE PASTURE

XXIX. MILES COVERDALE'S CONFESSION

Отрывок из книги

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache), there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney. Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack of more inspiring breath. Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for my finger-ends! The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out. Their genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from damp fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer through a forest. 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 Esquimaux. But we made a summer of it, in spite of the wild drifts.

.....

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: – "We shall never make any hand at market gardening," said Silas Foster, "unless the women folks will undertake to do all the weeding. We haven't team enough for that and the regular farm-work, reckoning three of your city folks as worth one common field-hand. No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a little too early in the morning, to compete with the market gardeners round Boston."

It struck me as rather odd, that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood. Nor could this fail to be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and better half of society should range itself on our side. Constituting so pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual bond among ourselves.

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