, first lapsing
into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own
higher spirit. Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the
town-paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly a-field. 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 Doctor 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.
If Kossuth, 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,