Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that
Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of
ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,
and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little
beyond the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla!
They glided mistily before me, as I walked. Sometimes, in my
solitude, I laughed with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering
how unreservedly I had given up my heart and soul to interests that
were not mine. What had I ever had to do with them? And why, being
now free, should I take this thraldom on me once again? It was both
sad and dangerous, I whispered to myself, to be in too close affinity
with the passions, the errors, and the misfortunes of individuals who
stood within a circle of their own, into which, if I stept at all, it
must be as an intruder, and at a peril that I could not estimate.
Drawing nearer to Blithedale, a sickness of the spirits kept
alternating with my flights of causeless buoyancy. I indulged in a
hundred odd and extravagant conjectures. Either there was no such
place as Blithedale, nor ever had been, nor any brotherhood of
thoughtful laborers, like what I seemed to recollect there, or else
it was all changed during my absence. It had been nothing but dream
work and enchantment. I should seek in vain for the old farmhouse,
and for the greensward, the potato-fields, the root-crops, and acres
of Indian corn, and for all that configuration of the land which I
had imagined.
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