Page:Americans (1922).djvu/150

 occasionally at the havoc it makes with his wits and at the waste of blessed hours; yet he thanks it for teaching him to "know a politician," and to acquit himself like a man in a world of men. Then this strange coal-gauger walks home under the cloud-rack of a scattered storm—"so glorious indeed, and so lovely, that I had a fantasy of heaven's being broken into fleecy fragments and dispersed through space, with its blest inhabitants dwelling blissfully upon those scattered islands." He enters his room and lies down to read his Spenser, or records in his journal some such half-mystical experience as this: "Besides the bleak, unkindly air, I have been plagued by two sets of coal-shovellers at the same time, and have been obliged to keep two separate tallies simultaneously. But I was conscious this was merely a vision and a fantasy, and that, in reality, I was not half frozen by the bitter blast, nor tormented by those grimy coal-heavers, but that I was basking quietly in the sunshine of eternity. . . . Any sort of bodily and earthly torment may serve to make us sensible that we have a soul that is not within the jurisdiction of such shadowy demons,—it separates the immortal within us from the mortal."

It was doubtless in the hope of bringing the inner and the outer worlds into harmony that Hawthorne in the spring of 1841 joined the socialistic commu-