Our Sundays at Blithedale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid
observance as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims,
whose high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered ourselves, we had
taken up, and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they
never dreamed of attaining.
On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our labors. Our oxen,
relieved from their week-day yoke, roamed at large through the pasture;
each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate, and
continuing to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish
sympathy, the union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard
ends. As for us human yoke-fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose
hoes had clinked together throughout the week, we wandered off, in
various directions, to enjoy our interval of repose. Some, I believe,
went devoutly to the village church. Others, it may be, ascended a
city or a country pulpit, wearing the clerical robe with so much
dignity that you would scarcely have suspected the yeoman's frock to
have been flung off only since milking-time. Others took long rambles
among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to look at black old
farmhouses, with their sloping roofs; and at the modern cottage, so
like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow could have no
scope within; and at the more pretending villa, with its range of
wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great portico.
Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay there for
hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the shadows
strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to make it
cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a
cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they darted to and
fro among the golden rules of sunshine. And others went a little way
into the woods, and threw themselves on mother earth, pillowing their
heads on a heap of moss, the green decay of an old log; and, dropping
asleep, the bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears,
causing the slumberers to twitch and start, without awaking.
With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a
custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock. It was known
to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the
venerable Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to
an Indian auditory. The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's
voice was wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the
soil, being of the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never
been brought under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch,
had succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a
tract of woodland as the great-great-great-great grandson of one of
Eliot's Indians (had any such posterity been in existence) could have
desired for the site and shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths,
indeed, lose the stately solemnity of the original forest. If left in
due neglect, however, they run into an entanglement of softer wildness,
among the rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as
it never could among the dark-browed pines.