Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/220

208 but restricting his benevolence exclusively to one channel, and having nothing to spare for other great manifestations of love to man, nor scarcely for the nutriment of individual attachments, unless they minister, in some way, to the terrible egotism which he mistakes for an angel of God:—with something of the woman moulded into his great stalwart frame, and a spirit of prayer abiding and working in his heart;—but himself grown to be the vond-slave of his philanthropic theory, which has become to him in effect a cold spectral monster of his own conjuring; persuading himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside his private conscience; embodying himself in a project, which the disenchanted Zenobia reprobates with hissing defiance as "self, self, self!" Priscilla, again: a weakly bud that blossoms into health and hope under the fostering dime of Blithedale, where she seems a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of sunshine, and mistaking it for a broad and eternal summer—though her gaiety reveals at times how delicate an instrument she is, and what fragile harp-strings are her nerves—a being of slender and shadowy grace, whose mysterious qualities make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light. Silas Foster, too: "lank, stalwart, uncouth, and grisly-bearded;" the prose element, and very dense prose, too, in the poetry of the Communists; with his palm of sole-leather and his joints of rusty iron, and his brain (as Zenobia pronounces it) of Savoy cabbage. And old Moodie, or Fauntleroy—that finished picture of a skulking outcast—shy and serpentine—with a queer appearance of hiding himself behind the patch on his left eye—a deplorable grey shadow—mysterious, but not mad; his mind only needing to be screwed up, like an instrument long out of tune, the strings of which have ceased to vibrate smartly and sharply—"a subdued, undemonstrative old man, who would doubtless drink a glass of liquor, now and then, and probably more than was good for him; not, however, with a purpose of undue exhilaration, but in the hope of bringing his spirits up to the ordinary level of the world's cheerfulness." Miles Coverdale himself is no lay figure in