pride, and were striving to supply its place by familiar love. We meant to lessen the laboring man's great burden of toil, by performing our due share of it at the cost of our own thews and sinews. We sought our profit by mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy, or filching it craftily from those less shrewd than ourselves (if indeed, there were any such in New England), or winning it by selfish competition with a neighbor; in one or another of which fashions every son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil, whether he chooses or no. And, as the basis of our institution, we proposed to offer up the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no less than an effort for the advancement of our race. Therefore if we built splendid castles (phalansteries perhaps they might be more fitly called), and pictured beautiful scenes among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to wrack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I rejoice that I once could think better of the world's improbability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error.

Stout Silas Foster mingled little in our conversation ; but when he did speak, it was very much to some practical purpose. For instance :

"Which man among you," quoth he, "is the best judge of swine? Some of us must go to the next Brighton Fair, and buy half-a-dozen pigs."

Pigs! Good heavens! had we come out from the swinish multitude for this? And again, in eference to some discussion about raising early vegetables for the market :

"We shall never make any hand at market-garden. ing," said Silas Foster, "unless the women-folks will undertake to do all the weeding. We haven't team enough for that and the regular farm-work, reckoning three of you city-folks as worth one common field-hand. No, no; I tell you, we should have to get up a little too early in the morning to compete with the marketgardeners round Boston."

It struck me as rather odd that one of the first questions raised, after our separation from the greedy, struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of labor. But, to own the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility, rather than new brotherhood. Nor could this fail to

be the case, in some degree, until the bigger and better half of society should range itself on our side. Constituting so pitiful a minority as now, we were inevitably estranged from the rest of mankind in pretty fair proportion with the strictness of our mutual bond among ourselves.

This dawning idea, however, was driven back into my inner consciousness by the entrance of Zenobia. She came with the welcome intelligence that supper was on the table. Looking at herself in the glass, and perceiving that her one magnificent flower had grown rather languid (probably by being exposed to the fervency of the kitchen fire), she flung it on the floor as unconcernedly as a village girl would throw away a faded violet. The action seemed proper to her character, although, methought, it would still more have benefitted the bounteous nature of this beautiful woman to scatter fresh flowers from her hand, and to revive faded one's by her touch. Nevertheless, it was a singular, but irresistible effect: the presence of Zenobia caused our heroic enterprise to show like an illusion, a masquerade, a pastoral, a counterfeit Arcadia, in which we grown-up men and women were making a play-day of the years that were given us to live in. I tried to analyze this impression, but not with much

success.

The evening wore on, and the outer solitude looked in upon us through the windows, gloomy, wild, and vague, like another stage of existence close beside the little sphere of warmth and light in which we were the prattlers and bustlers of a moment. By-and-by the door was opened by Silas Foster, with a cotton handkerchief about his head, and a tallow candle in his hand.

"Take my advice, brother farmers," said he, with a great bottomless yawn, "and get to bed as soon as you

can. I shall sound the horn at daybreak; and we've got to get the cattle to fodder, and nine cows to milk, and a dozen other things to do before breakfast."

Thus ended the first evening at Blithedale. I went shivering to my fireless chamber, with the miserable consciousness (which had been growing upon me for several hours past) that I had caught a tremendous cold, and should probably awaken, at the blast of the horn, a fit subject for a hospital. How cold an Arcadia was this.-The Blithedale Romance.

THE REVEREND ARTHUR DIMMESDALE.

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale recalled and more and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester Prynne and himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England, or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam or the few settlements of Europeans, scattered thinly along the seaboard. Hester could take it upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child, with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would be on the fourth day from the present. "That is most fortunate," he had said to himself. The reason why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate was because on the third day from the present he was to preach the Election Sermon; and as such an occasion formed an honorable epoch in the life of a New England clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more suitable mode and time of terminating his official career. "At least, they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, "that I leave no public duty unperformed nor ill performed!" Sad indeed that introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and still may have worse things to tell of him;

but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence at once so slight and irrefragible of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings, as he returned from his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. As he drew near the town he took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects. that presented themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There was indeed each former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of gables, peaks, and a weathercock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not the less, however, came this importunately recurring sense of change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known shapes of human life about the little town. They looked neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day. It was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very strange and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had operated upon his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will, and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore; but the same VOL. XIII.-2

minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to the friends who greeted him, "I am not the man for whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree-trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him, "Thou art thyself the man!"— but the error would have been their own, not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was impelled to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.

For instance: He met one of his own deacons. The good old man addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the Church, entitled him to use; and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect which the minister's professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank and inferior order of endowment, toward a higher. Now during a conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary-headed deacon, it was only by the most careful self-control that the former could refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind respecting the communion-supper. He absolutely trembled, and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in utterances of those horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it. And even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing to imagine how