Being much alone during my recovery, I read interminably in Mr.
Emerson's Essays, "The Dial," Carlyle's works, George Sand's romances
(lent me by Zenobia), and other books which one or another of the
brethren or sisterhood had brought with them. Agreeing in little
else, most of these utterances were like the cry of some solitary
sentinel, whose station was on the outposts of the advance guard of
human progression; or sometimes the voice came sadly from among the
shattered ruins of the past, but yet had a hopeful echo in the future.
They were well adapted (better, at least, than any other
intellectual products, the volatile essence of which had heretofore
tinctured a printed page) to pilgrims like ourselves, whose present
bivouac was considerably further into the waste of chaos than any
mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before. Fourier's works,
also, in a series of horribly tedious volumes, attracted a good deal
of my attention, from the analogy which I could not but recognize
between his system and our own. There was far less resemblance, it
is true, than the world chose to imagine, inasmuch as the two
theories differed, as widely as the zenith from the nadir, in their
main principles.

I talked about Fourier to Hollingsworth, and translated, for his
benefit, some of the passages that chiefly impressed me.

"When, as a consequence of human improvement," said I, "the globe
shall arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be
converted into a particular kind of lemonade, such as was fashionable
at Paris in Fourier's time. He calls it limonade a cedre. It is
positively a fact! Just imagine the city docks filled, every day,
with a flood tide of this delectable beverage!"