was all that she had hitherto known of
nature; so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its limitless
extent. Once, while the blast was bellowing, she caught hold of Zenobia's robe,
with precisely the air of one who hears her own name spoken, at a distance, but
is unutterably reluctant to obey the call.
    We spent rather an incommunicative evening. Hollingsworth hardly said a
word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then, indeed, he
would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, like a tiger
out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and betake himself back into
the solitude of his heart and mind. The poor fellow had contracted this
ungracious habit from the intensity with which he contemplated his own ideas,
and the infrequent sympathy which they met with from his auditors; a
circumstance that seemed only to strengthen the implicit confidence that he
awarded to them. His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our
socialist scheme, but was forever busy with his strange, and, as most people
thought it, impracticable plan for the reformation of criminals, through an
appeal to their higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many
a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have commenced his
investigation of the subject by perpetrating some huge sin, in his proper
person, and examining the condition of his higher instincts, afterwards.
    The rest of us formed ourselves into a committee for providing our infant
Community with an appropriate name; a matter of greatly more difficulty than the
uninitiated reader would suppose. Blithedale was neither good nor bad. We should
have resumed the old Indian name of the premises, had it possessed the
oil-and-honey flow which the aborigines were so often happy in communicating to
their local appellations; but it chanced to be a harsh, ill-connected, and
interminable word, which seemed to fill the mouth with a mixture of very stiff
clay and very crumbly pebbles. Zenobia suggested Sunny Glimpse, as expressive of
a vista into a better system of society. This we turned over and over, for
awhile, acknowledging its prettiness, but concluded it to be rather too fine and
sentimental a name (a fault inevitable by literary ladies, in such attempts) for
sun-burnt men to work under. I ventured to whisper Utopia, which, however, was
unanimously scouted down, and the proposer very harshly maltreated, as if he had
intended a latent satire. Some were for calling our institution The Oasis, in
view of its being the one green spot in the