University of Virginia Library

29. XXIX.
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 a-field.
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 Doctor 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
battle-field 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 loth 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 in 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!