II. BLITHEDALE

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty
bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache),
there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth,
as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood
fire, in the parlor of an old farmhouse, on an April afternoon, but
with the fitful gusts of a wintry snowstorm roaring in the chimney.
Vividly does that fireside re-create itself, as I rake away the ashes
from the embers in my memory, and blow them up with a sigh, for lack
of more inspiring breath. Vividly for an instant, but anon, with the
dimmest gleam, and with just as little fervency for my heart as for
my finger-ends! The staunch oaken logs were long ago burnt out.
Their genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest
phosphoric glimmer, like that which exudes, rather than shines, from
damp fragments of decayed trees, deluding the benighted wanderer
through a forest. Around such chill mockery of a fire some few of us
might sit on the withered leaves, spreading out each a palm towards
the imaginary warmth, and talk over our exploded scheme for beginning
the life of Paradise anew.

Paradise, indeed! Nobody else in the world, I am bold to
affirm--nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England,--
had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the
tropic. Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most
skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's
bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. But we