"Well, folks," remarked Silas, "you'll be wishing yourselves back to
town again, if this weather holds."
And, true enough, there was a look of gloom, as the twilight fell
silently and sadly out of the sky, its gray or sable flakes
intermingling themselves with the fast-descending snow. The storm, in
its evening aspect, was decidedly dreary. It seemed to have arisen for
our especial behoof,--a symbol of the cold, desolate, distrustful
phantoms that invariably haunt the mind, on the eve of adventurous
enterprises, to warn us back within the boundaries of ordinary life.
But our courage did not quail. We would not allow ourselves to be
depressed by the snowdrift trailing past the window, any more than if
it had been the sigh of a summer wind among rustling boughs. There
have been few brighter seasons for us than that. If ever men might
lawfully dream awake, and give utterance to their wildest visions
without dread of laughter or scorn on the part of the audience,--yes,
and speak of earthly happiness, for themselves and mankind, as an
object to be hopefully striven for, and probably attained, we who made
that little semicircle round the blazing fire were those very men.
We had left the rusty iron framework of society behind us; we had broken
through many hindrances that are powerful enough to keep most people on
the weary treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its
irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stepped down from
the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we
had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is
better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It
was our purpose--a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in
full proportion with its generosity--to give up whatever we had
heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind the example of a
life governed by other than the false and cruel principles on which
human society has all along been based.
And, first of all, we had divorced ourselves from pride, and were
striving to supply its place with 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 it or no. And, as the basis of our institution, we
purposed to offer up the earnest toil of our bodies, as a prayer no
less than an effort for the advancement of our race.