It made me acutely sensible how strange a piece of
mosaic-work had lately been wrought into my life. True, if you look
at it in one way, it had been only a summer in the country. But,
considered in a profounder relation, it was part of another age, a
different state of society, a segment of an existence peculiar in its
aims and methods, a leaf of some mysterious volume interpolated into
the current history which time was writing off. At one moment, the
very circumstances now surrounding me--my coal fire and the dingy
room in the bustling hotel--appeared far off and intangible; the next
instant Blithedale looked vague, as if it were at a distance both in
time and space, and so shadowy that a question might be raised
whether the whole affair had been anything more than the thoughts of
a speculative man. I had never before experienced a mood that so
robbed the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a
charm, on which--a devoted epicure of my own emotions--I resolved to
pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.
Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the
thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many
men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took
quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could
never be enough of it. Each characteristic sound was too suggestive
to be passed over unnoticed. Beneath and around me, I heard the stir
of the hotel; the loud voices of guests, landlord, or bar-keeper;
steps echoing on the staircase; the ringing of a bell, announcing
arrivals or departures; the porter lumbering past my door with
baggage, which he thumped down upon the floors of neighboring
chambers; the lighter feet of chambermaids scudding along the
passages;--it is ridiculous to think what an interest they had for me!
From the street came the tumult of the pavements, pervading the
whole house with a continual uproar, so broad and deep that only an
unaccustomed ear would dwell upon it.
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