Miles Coverdale's Confession

My subsequent life has passed,--I was going to say happily, but, at all
events, tolerably enough. I am now at middle age, well, well, a step
or two beyond the midmost point, and I care not a fig who knows it!--a
bachelor, with no very decided purpose of ever being otherwise. I have
been twice to Europe, and spent a year or two rather agreeably at each
visit. Being well to do in the world, and having nobody but myself to
care for, I live very much at my ease, and fare sumptuously every day.
As for poetry, I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr.
Griswold--as the reader, of course, knows--has placed me at a fair
elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty
little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in
spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences),
let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose. If I could
earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort.

As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange! He was
ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want
of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an
emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet, were there any cause, in
this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying for, and
which my death would benefit, then--provided, however, the effort did
not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble--methinks I might be bold
to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the
battlefield of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and
choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles
Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled
bayonets. Further than that, I should be loath to pledge myself.