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.
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