Where once
we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town paupers, aged,
nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what
faith is requisite to bear up against such results of generous effort!
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 Dr. Griswold--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.
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