.. I am bent upon coming to see
you, this summer. Do not you remember how we used to go a-fishing
together in Raymond? Your mention of wild flowers and pickerel has given
me a longing for the woods and waters again."
Then, in August,
"C---- A----," writes his sister Louisa, "told me the other day that he
heard you were to do the travelling in Europe for the community."
This design, if it existed, might well have found a place in the
Dialogues of the Unborn which Hawthorne once meant to write; for this
was his only summer at Brook Farm. "A summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and
there became a rich experience," he writes, in "Blithedale." "I found
myself looking forward to years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on
the same system." This was, in fact, his attitude; for, after passing
the winter at the farm as a boarder, and then absenting himself a little
while, he returned in the spring to look over the ground and perhaps
select a house-site, just before his marriage, but came to an adverse
decision. This no doubt accorded with perceptions which he was not
called upon to make public; but because he was a writer of fiction there
seems to have arisen a tacit agreement, in some quarters, to call him
insincere in his connection with this socialistic enterprise. He had not
much to gain by leaving the community; for he had put into its treasury
a thousand dollars, about the whole of his savings from the custom-house
stipend, and had next to nothing to establish a home with elsewhere,
while a niche in the temple of the reformers would have cost him nothing
but labor.
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