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Updated: May 4, 2025
It was nothing short of midnight when I went to bed, after drinking a glass of particularly fine sherry on which I used to pride myself in those days. It was the very last bottle; and I finished it, with a friend, the next forenoon, before setting out for Blithedale.
One day, when Una and I went to shop in Douglas, we saw in the market square a second-hand bookstall. I had been trying in vain to get "Peveril of the Peak" at the library and bookstores, and hoped this sales-counter might have it. So I looked over the books, and what do you think I saw? A well-read and soiled copy of the handsome edition of Mr. Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance"! Yes, even in Mona.
The reader may possibly find in it the original of the thrilling conclusion of the Blithedale Romance, and learn anew that dark as is the thread with which Hawthorne weaves his spells, it is no darker than those with which tragedies are spun, even in regions apparently so torpid as Concord.
He has included in it a number of descriptive passages taken from his Brook Farm diary; most notably the account of that sylvan masquerade, in which Coverdale finds his former associates engaged on his return to Blithedale in the autumn. Perhaps this is the reason why the book has so pleasant a flavor a mellow after-thought of old associations.
As to whether it is worth while to seek to know something of New England in order to extract a more intimate quality from The House of Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, I need not pronounce; but it is certain that a considerable observation of the society to which these productions were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for enjoying them.
To him only who can tenderly sympathize must be given the highest and profoundest insight. In "Blithedale" I think one feels this tender humanity. It will come out more and more. Shall I tell you where I am? I am sitting in our acacia grove, on the hill, with a few pines near enough for me to hear their oceanic murmur.
His denouements are overwhelming in grip and scenic value: the stage effect of the scaffold scene in "The Scarlet Letter," the murder scene in the "Marble Faun," the tragic close of Zenobia's career in "The Blithedale Romance," such scenes are never arbitrary and detached; they are tonal, led up to by all that goes before.
It is difficult to see, indeed, how the generation of which Hawthorne has given us, in Blithedale, a few portraits, should not at this time of day be spoken of very tenderly and sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the lightest and gentlest.
In society, indeed, a genuine American never dreams of stepping across the inappreciable air-line which separates one class from another. But what was rank to the colonists of Blithedale?" "There were other reasons," I replied, "why I should have demonstrated myself an ass, had I fallen in love with Priscilla. By the bye, has Hollingsworth ever seen her in this dress?"
"But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I have done with it; and Blithedale must find another woman to superintend the laundry, and you, Mr. Coverdale, another nurse to make your gruel, the next time you fall ill.
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