The Masqueraders

And I still see the little rivulets, chill, clear, and bright,
that murmured beneath the road, through subterranean rocks, and
deepened into mossy pools, where tiny fish were darting to and fro, and
within which lurked the hermit frog. But no,--I never can account for
it, that, with a yearning interest to learn the upshot of all my story,
and returning to Blithedale for that sole purpose, I should examine
these things so like a peaceful-bosomed naturalist. Nor why, amid all
my sympathies and fears, there shot, at times, a wild exhilaration
through my frame.

Thus I pursued my way along the line of the ancient stone wall that
Paul Dudley built, and through white villages, and past orchards of
ruddy apples, and fields of ripening maize, and patches of woodland,
and all such sweet rural scenery as looks the fairest, a little beyond
the suburbs of a town. Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla! They glided
mistily before me, as I walked. Sometimes, in my solitude, I laughed
with the bitterness of self-scorn, remembering how unreservedly I had
given up my heart and soul to interests that were not mine. What had I
ever had to do with them? And why, being now free, should I take this
thraldom on me once again? It was both sad and dangerous, I whispered
to myself, to be in too close affinity with the passions, the errors,
and the misfortunes of individuals who stood within a circle of their
own, into which, if I stept at all, it must be as an intruder, and at a
peril that I could not estimate.