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 Griswold117 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,118 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. Farther 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 moustache, 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!
THE END.
NOTES
1 (p. I) Brook Farm, located about nine miles from Boston, along the Charles River in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was in existence from 1841 to 1847 and represented an attempt to put into daily practice an ideal of society based on cooperation rather than competition. Hawthorne resided there from April to November 184I, having purchased two shares at $500 apiece —one for himself and one for his fiancée, Sophia Peabody.
2 (p. 2) In Greek and Roman mythology, Sibyls are women gifted with prophecy.
3 (p. 3) George Ripley (1802-80), a former Unitarian minister, founded and directed Brook Farm. Charles Anderson Dana (1819-97), a newspaper editor, lived there from 1841 to 1846; John Sullivan Dwight (1813-93), a music critic, from 1841 to 1847; Warren Burton (1800-66), a Unitarian minister and teacher, from 1841 to 1844. William Henry Channing (1810-84), a Unitarian minister and social reformer, was a frequent visitor but never a resident. Theodore Parker (1810-60), another frequent visitor, was the Unitarian minister whose West Roxbury parish attracted many Brook Farmers on Sundays. None of these ever wrote a history of Brook Farm, although Ripley died while writing a short account for Justin Winsor’s The Memorial History of Boston (1881).
4 (p. 3) “Nile Notes of a Howadji” (1851) and “Howadji in Syria” (1852) were the travel writings of George William Curtis (1824-92), formerly a student at the Brook Farm school from 1842 to 1843. “Howadji” meant traveler.
5 (p. 5) The historical Myles Coverdale (1488-1569) completed the first English translation of the Bible with Apocrypha in 1535.
6 (p. 5) Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) introduced into medicine his theory of an invisible universal fluid permeating and surrounding all bodies; later generations extended the physical properties of Mesmer’s fluid to mean the interpenetration of the physical realm by the spiritual. By Hawthorne’s day, “mesmerism” was no longer simply medical theory but a catchall term that embraced various forms of communication with spirits, including hypnotism, seances, and the display of mediums in public entertainments.
7 (p. 7) The character’s name may have been suggested by Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809), the self-educated English writer and actor who supported the French Revolution and then joined the Society for Constitutional Reform, agitating for radical social change in England. Indicted for high treason and imprisoned in 1794, he was released two months later. In 1816, William Hazlitt edited Holcroft’s Memoirs, Written by Himself and Continued Down to the Time of His Death, From His Diary, Notes and Other Papers, which revealed gentleness and humor behind the sometimes strident exterior of the committed political activist.
8 (p. 8) Praised for her beauty and intelligence, the historical Zenobia was probably responsible for the murder of her husband and his son by a former marriage; she then ruled Palmyra in the name of her infant son. Under her rule, Palmyran armies conquered Egypt in A.D. 269 and the next year overran Asia Minor. Her armies were finally defeated and the queen and her sons captured by Aurelian, who granted the queen a pension and a villa at Tibur.
9 (p. 8) A slang contraction of “candle-coal,” so named because it burns brightly.
10 (p. 10) A large whiskey bottle encased in wickerwork. The entire phrase, “and somewhat of proof in the concavity of a big demijohn,” was deleted in the original manuscript, probably in deference to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s objections to alcohol. The editors of the Centenary Edition restored it, along with two other passages noted below.
11 (p. 12) Nitre is a white, gray, or colorless mineral of potassium or sodium nitrate, the former used in making gun-powder; an atmosphere metaphorically charged with nitre is meant to indicate bracing weather.
12 (p. 17) Again, probably due to Sophia Hawthorne’s prudishness, this sentence was deleted from the original manuscript.
13 (p. 18) A cut of tobacco for chewing.
14 (p. 19) Muscles.
15 (p. 19) In Charles Fourier’s utopian vision, a phalanstery was a huge building subdivided into living quarters, dining areas, activity and work rooms, and housing the 1,620 members of a phalanx, his basic social unit. See also note 26 below.
16 (p. 21) For Classical and Renaissance poets, Arcadia (originally a mountainous district in the Peloponnese, mainly inhabited by shepherds) came to symbolize rural serenity and pastoral simplicity.
17 (p. 24) Pandora, the “Eve” figure of Greek mythology, was the first mortal female. She was made with clay and fired by Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods, at the request of Zeus. Zeus intended to give her to Prometheus as a wife in punishment for Prometheus’ having stolen fire from the gods for mankind. Prometheus declined Zeus’ gift, but his brother, Epimetheus, married Pandora. Endowed with all manner of gifts and graces from the gods, Pandora’s curiosity led her to open the beautiful box given her at her bridal by Zeus. From the box there issued forth the plagues and troubles that have ever after tormented humankind.
&n
bsp; 18 (p. 25) Beetles.
19 (p. 34) A portable stove used to heat or dry buildings under construction.
20 (p. 37) Scoffed at.
21 (p. 38) In Judges 4:21, Jael drives a tent nail into the head of the sleeping Sisera, commander of the Canaanite armies which had previously taken the Israelites captive; after defeat by the Israelites, Sisera had sought shelter in her tent.
22 (p. 40) Michael Scot (c. 1175-1235), scholar, alchemist, and reputed magician, was said to have entertained his guests with delicacies from the kitchens of European royalty, brought to his table by devils and spirits.
23 (p. 41) Homeopathic medicine prescribes natural curatives that are like or related to the illness being treated; homeopathic practitioners do not advocate large or intrusive doses of any medicine.
24 (p. 46) In Hawthorne’s day, a meatless diet was believed to generate the same “ether” in the body as the all-pervading, massless ether then postulated as the medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. The human being thus became less carnal and more sensitive to spiritual or intuitive stimuli.
25 (p. 52) Margaret Fuller (1810—50), poet, editor, translator, literary critic, and author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), was a frequent visitor at Brook Farm. She was active in intellectual circles in and around Boston and an acquaintance (and sometime neighbor) of the Hawthomes in Concord, Massachusetts. The physical features attributed here to Priscilla are those of Fuller, who habitually squinted (from nearsightedness) and seemed to hunch her shoulders (from a back complaint). Readers, however, have preferred to see Fuller’s influence in the character of Zenobia, rather than Priscilla.
26 (p. 52) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841, 1844) articulate a liberal faith in the essential unity of the human and the natural with Spirit (or “the Oversoul,” as he termed it). The Dial (1840-44), the short-lived journal of the New England Transcendentalists, was edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Emerson; its essays and literary contributions were liberal in their politics and philosophy, questioning doctrinaire positions in art, philosophy, and religion. The essays of the Scottish historian and literary critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) decried the evils of industrial society and advocated work, duty, and spiritual idealism (in lieu of more established religious forms). George Sand (1803-76) was the pen name of Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin Dudevant, the French novelist who broke with convention in her private life, publicly championed women’s rights, and produced works that were decidedly socialist in their implications. It is appropriate that the Blithedale communitarians would have given these to Coverdale, as they represented the variety of progressive and liberal thought at that period.
27 (p- 53) The French social theorist Charles Fourier (1772- 1837) published six volumes criticizing existing social organizations and meticulously laying out an alternative based on independent cooperative units. Each unit, consisting of 1,620 persons, would provide for the material as well as the social (and sexual) needs of its members. The “analogy” which Coverdale adduces here between Blithedale and Fourier’s designs probably reflected the popular public impression that Brook Farm had always been organized on Fourier’s principles; in fact, while Hawthorne was in residence there, Brook Farm was a simple cooperative joint stock venture attempting a kind of agrarian socialism.
28 (p. 53) Coverdale does not translate Fourier’s Frencl accurately here. In his Théorie des Quatre Mouvements et des Destinees Générales, Fourier spoke of a borealic citric acid (“un acide citrique boréal”) which, when combined with salt, would give seawater the taste of a kind of tart lemonade then known to the French as aigre de cèdre.
29 (p. 53) Sailors.
30 (p. 54) Hollingsworth’s anger here seems directed at the fact that Fourier proposed satisfying, rather than repressing, individuals’ instinctive and selfish needs, including the sexual. Only when gratified, Fourier argued, would self-interest and instinctual desires cease to disrupt and distort human relations; a nonrepressive society, in his view, fostered harmony and cooperation.
31 (p. 54) Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a Swedish theologian, derived from his several experiences of divine revelation and theory that every natural object is permeated by a spiritual cause; his ideas influenced Emerson and American Transcendentalism.
32 (p. 54) A place of tormented souls (Hell).
33 (p. 58) The first of May has traditionally been celebrated as the beginning of spring, with the crowning of a May queen, the gathering of woodland wild flowers, and a decorated may-pole around which the celebrants dance. It originated as a pagan festival for Maia, the oldest of the Pleiades and the mother of Mercury.
34 (p. 60) A workman’s rough-woven outer shirt.
35 (p. 60) Quoted from John Milton’s Comus: A Masque (1634), in which the “virtuous mind” of the chaste young woman who speaks these words keeps her safe from evil enchantment.
36 (p. 63) A bundle of twigs or sticks.
37 (p. 64) The London street famous for housing hack writers.
38 (p. 64) A democratic utopian society based on “all-equal rule.” Its projectors, the English Romantic poets and essayists Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, once hoped to establish such a community in Pennsylvania.
39 (p. 64) See Candide (1759) by the French writer and philosopher Voltaire, in which the characters explore a chaotic and dangerous world, only to return happily to their own isolated little garden kingdom.
40 (p. 64) See the “tattered” soldiers whom Falstaff takes into battle in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, act IV, scene 2.
41 (p. 64) A rough-woven fabric mixing linen and wool.
42 (p. 64) “Strip to plow, strip to sow,” from Virgil’s Georgics, I, 299.
43 (p. 65) A coarse, weedy plant with bristly purplish flowers.
44 (p. 66) In his dialect poems, the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96) often presented himself as a happy farmer.
45 (p. 67) A variety of common cabbage grown for winter use.
46 (p. 72) In Greek and Roman mythology, the first age of mankind (before the advent of women), when happiness and truth prevailed in an atmosphere of perpetual spring.
47 (p. 73) In Greek mythology, the beautiful Arcadian princess who bested all her suitors in a series of footraces.
48 (p. 75) A reference to lines 13-24 of “The Deserted Village” (1770), a popular work by the English writer Oliver Goldsmith; “thorn-tree” is another name for the “hawthorn bush” mentioned by Goldsmith in line 13.
49 (p. 77) An older woman (usually a relative) who chaperones girls of marriageable age.
50 (p. 78) A small pointed instrument for making holes in fabric or leather.
51 (p. 78) Rat poison (usually arsenic).
52 (p. 90) A brimmed hat woven of thin strips of woody fiber.
53 (p. 91) See Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy, As You Like It, in which a banished duke, his nobles, and the melancholy courtier Jacques experience a changed existence in the forest of Arden.
54 (p. 91) The savage or “wild man” of medieval legend and Elizabethan pageantry was pictured as hairy and clothed only in leafy vines.
55 (p. 94) Know.
56 (p. 95) Loud laughter.
57 (p. 98) In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) the title character, marooned on a desert island, looks for ships from a platform in a tree; after his armies lost the battle of Worcester (September 3, 1651), England’s Charles II hid from Cromwell’s advancing troops in an oak tree.
58 (p. 99) See the allegorical figure of October, rich with Autumn’s abundance, in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), VII, vii, 39.
59 (p. 102) This refers to the folk myth that salamanders are so cold-blooded as to live unharmed amid fire.
60 (p. 103) At the beginning of the Inferno section of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (c. 1307-21), Dante pictures himself wandering in a dark wood.
61 (p. 106) Literally, “a living picture,” in which the participants don costumes and group themselves into
the poses of a particular scene (from art, literature, or history), all the while remaining stationary and silent.
62 (p. 106) Refers to influential European artists who lived before the eighteenth century.
63 (p. 110) Medusa was one of the three Gorgons of Greek mythology, a female monster with serpents for hair, brazen claws, and staring eyes whose glance turned men into stone.
64 (p. 115) Transcendentalism was a New England movement that flourished from about 1835 to 1860; its advocates included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and most of those involved with Brook Farm, including the community’s founder, George Ripley. Basically an out growth of current social, religious, and intellectual ferment, Transcendentalism held that the divine is everywhere and that the recognition of this truth could prove the basis for human—and hence, social—perfectibility. Transcendentalists were generally liberal in their politics and active in various social reform movements, as well as in literature and the arts.