Part 11

Let us peep through the windows of the parlor at the end of the dark avenue and indulge in another flight of fancy. It is an unusual day at the Manse, for two visitors have called to greet the new occupant. The elder of the two, a man in his fortieth year, is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lives in the other end of the town in a large, comfortable, and cheery house, which we expect to see a little later. He knows the Old Manse well. His grandfather built it shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution and witnessed the battle of Concord from a window in the second story. This good man, who was the Revolutionary parson of the village, died in 1776 at the early age of thirty-three, and a few years later his widow married the Reverend Ezra Ripley, who maintained, for more than sixty years, the reputation of the Manse as a producer of sermons, being succeeded by his son, Samuel, also a minister. In October, 1834, Emerson came there with his mother and remained a year, during which he wrote his first, and one of his greatest essays, "Nature."

The other visitor is Henry D. Thoreau, a young man of twenty-five, then living with the Emersons. The two guests and their host are sitting bolt upright in stiff-backed chairs. The host speaks scarcely a word except to ask, for the sake of politeness, a few formal questions, which Thoreau answers with equal brevity. Emerson alone talks freely, but his words, however much weighted with wisdom, are those of a monologuist and do not beget conversation. Yet there is something in the manner of all three that seems to betray the unspoken thought. Hawthorne's observing eyes seem to be saying, "So this is Emerson, the man who, they say, is drawing all kinds of queer and oddly dressed people to this quiet little village,--visionaries, theorists, men and women who think they have discovered a new thought, and come to him to see if it is genuine. Perhaps he might help solve some of my problems. What a pure, intellectual gleam seems to be diffused about him! With what full and sweet tones he speaks and how persuasively! How serene and tranquil he seems! How reposeful, as though he had adjusted himself, with all reverence, to the supreme requirements of life! Yet I am not sure I can trust his philosophy. Let me admire him as a poet and a true man, but I shall ask him no questions."

Then while Thoreau is talking, Emerson gazes at Hawthorne and reflects: "This man's face haunts me. His manner fascinates me. I talk to him and his eyes alone answer me; and yet this seems sufficient. He does not echo my thoughts. He has a mind all his own. He says so little that I fear I talk too much. Yet he is a greater man than his words betray. I have never found pleasure in his writings, yet I cannot help admiring the man. Some day I hope to know him better. I have much to learn from him."

Meanwhile Hawthorne's gaze has turned upon the younger visitor. "What a wild creature he seems! How original! How unsophisticated! How ugly he is, with his long nose and queer mouth. Yet his manners are courteous and even his ugliness seems honest and agreeable. I understand he drifts about like an Indian, has no fixed method of gaining a livelihood, knows every path in the woods and will sit motionless beside a brook until the fishes, and the birds, and even the snakes will cease to fear his presence and come back to investigate him. He is a poet, too, as well as a scientist, and I am sure has the gift of seeing Nature as no other man has ever done. Some day I must walk with him in the woods."

Every man in the room loves freedom, and hates conventionalities. The ordinary formalities of polite society are unendurable. Therefore the four walls seem oppressive and the straight-back chairs produce an agonizing tension of the nerves. They are all glad when the call is over.

Now let the scene change. It is winter and the river behind the house is frozen. In the glory of the setting sun, its surface seems a smooth sea of transparent gold. The edges of the stream are bordered with fantastic draperies, hanging from the overarching trees in strange festoons of purest white. Once more our three friends appear, but the four walls are gone and the wintry breeze has blown away all constraint. All three lovers of the open air are now on skates. Thoreau circles about skillfully in a bewildering series of graceful curves, for he is an expert at this form of sport and thinks nothing of skating up the river for miles in pursuit of a fox or other wild creature. Emerson finds it harder; he leans forward until his straight back seems to parallel the ice and frequently returns to the shore to rest. Hawthorne, if we may recall the words of his admiring wife, moves "like a self-impelled Greek statue, stately and grave," as though acting a part in some classic drama, yet fond of the sport and apparently indefatigable in its pursuit.

Once more let the scene change. Summer has come again. The icy decorations have given place to green boughs and rushes and meadow-grass which seem to be trying to crowd the river into narrower quarters. A small boat is approaching the shore in the rear of the old house. In the stern stands a young man who guides the craft as though by instinct. With scarcely perceptible motions of the single paddle, he makes it go in whatsoever direction he wills, as though paddling were only an act of the mind. The boat is called the Musketaquid, after the Indian name of the river. Its pilot, who is also its builder, quickly reaches the shore, and we recognize the man of Nature, Thoreau. Hawthorne, who has been admiring both the boat and steersman, now steps aboard and the two friends are soon moving slowly among the lily-pads that line the margin of the river. Hawthorne is rowing. He handles the oars with no great skill, and as for paddling, it would be impossible for him to make the boat answer _his_ will. Thoreau plucks from the water a white pond-lily, and remarks that "this delicious flower opens its virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being through the magic of that genial kiss." He says he has "beheld beds of them unfolding in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower to flower"; and this leads Hawthorne to reflect that such a sight is "not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to a proper focus with the outward organ." We fancy that under these conditions their talk "gushed like the babble of a fountain," as Hawthorne said it did when he went fishing with Ellery Channing.

But we must not linger at the gate of the Old Manse indulging these dreams, for we have other pleasures in store. A hundred yards beyond, we turn into the bit of road, at right angles with the highway, now preserved because it was the scene of the famous Concord fight. A beautiful vista is made by the overarching of trees that have grown up since the battle, and in the distance we see the Monument, the Bridge, and the "Minute Man." The Monument marks the spot where the British soldiers stood and opened fire on the 19th of April, 1775, while the "Minute Man" stands at the place where the Americans received their order to return the fire. The Monument was dedicated on the sixty-first anniversary of the battle, Emerson offering his famous "Concord Hymn," the opening stanza of which, thirty-nine years later, was carved on the pedestal of the Minute Man, erected in commemoration of the centennial of the event:--

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world."

The bridge is of no significance. It is a recent structure of cement, the wooden bridge over which the Minute Men charged having disappeared more than a century ago.

Hawthorne took little interest in the battlefield, though he did express a desire to open the graves of the two nameless British soldiers, who lie buried by the roadside, because of a tale that one of them had been killed by a boy with an axe--a fiendish yarn which we may be glad is not authenticated. The great romancer confessed that the field between the battlefield and his house interested him far more because of the Indian arrow-heads and other relics he could pick up there--a trick he had learned from Thoreau.

On our way back to the village we made a turn to the left, for a visit to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Never was such a place more appropriately named. An elliptical bowl, bordered by grassy knolls, with flowering shrubs and green groves, forms a perfect cradle among the hills in which sleep generation after generation of the inhabitants of old Concord. On the opposite side of the hollow, well up the slope of the hill and shaded by many trees, we came to the graves of the Emersons, the Thoreaus, and the Hawthornes, in neighborly proximity. The Emerson grave seemed eminently satisfactory. A rough-hewn boulder at the foot of a tall pine marks the resting-place of a strong, sincere, and unpretentious character, who lived close to Nature. By his side lies Lidian, his wife, with an inscription on her tombstone, which few, perchance, stop to read, but which ought to be read by all who can appreciate this rare tribute to a woman's worth:--

In her youth an unusual sense of the Divine Presence was granted her and she retained through life the impress of that high Communion. To her children she seemed in her native ascendancy and unquestioning courage, a Queen, a Flower in elegance and delicacy. The love and care for her husband and children was her first earthly interest but with overflowing compassion her heart went out to the slave, the sick and the dumb creation. She remembered them that were in bonds as bound with them.

Thoreau's grave is not quite so satisfactory. It creates the impression that the poet and naturalist who brought fame to his family was only one of a considerable number of children and died in infancy with all the rest. It is marked with a small headstone and the single name, Henry. In the center of the lot a larger stone records the names of all the members of the family who lie buried there.

The Hawthorne grave is wholly unsatisfactory. It is not easily found by a stranger, even after careful directions. The small lot is inclosed by an ugly fence, only partially concealed by a poorly kept hedge. By making an effort one can peep through and see a simple headstone with the name Hawthorne. The most conspicuous object in the inclosure is a big sign warning the public not to pluck the leaves, etc., and ending with the curt injunction, "Have respect for the living if not for the dead." The unsightly fence and the rudeness of the sign clang discordantly upon the sensibilities of those who have been taught to admire the gracious hospitality and courteous disposition of the man. We came to gaze reverently upon the grave of a man whom we had seemed to know for many years as a personal friend, but found ourselves treated with contempt as if we were merely vulgar seekers for useless souvenirs! Let us get back to the village and see the things of life.

Next to the Old Manse, the most interesting house in Concord is Emerson's. It is southeast of the public square, at the point where the Cambridge Turnpike joins the Lexington Road. When Emerson bought it in 1835, it was on the outskirts of the village and not prepossessing. He said, himself, "It is in a mean place, and cannot be fine until trees and flowers give it a character of its own. But we shall crowd so many books and papers, and, if possible, wise friends into it, that it shall have as much wit as it can carry." In September of that year, Emerson went to Plymouth and was married to Miss Lydia Jackson, in a colonial mansion belonging to the bride, who suggested that they remain there. But Concord had charms which the poet could not sacrifice, so the couple established themselves in the big house at the southern edge of the village, where, ere long, the philosopher was dividing time between his study and the vegetable-garden, while Lidian, as her husband preferred to call her, set out her favorite flowers transplanted from the garden at Plymouth.

The first thing that strikes your eye, as you pass the Emerson house, is the row of great horse-chestnuts shading its front. Mr. Coolidge, of Boston, who built the house in 1828, remembered the lofty chestnuts of his boyhood home in Bowdoin Square and promptly set to work to duplicate them when he completed his new country house. Emerson added to his original two acres until he had nine, and planted an orchard of apple trees and pear trees, on which Thoreau did the grafting. "When I bought my farm," said Emerson, "I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks, and thrushes, which were not charged in the bill. As little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying, what reaches of landscape, and what fields and lanes for a tramp." To appreciate the full extent, therefore, of Emerson's domain, we must next visit the favorite objective of his Sunday walks, Walden Pond, only a mile or two away.

Walden Pond is a pretty sheet of water, about half a mile long, completely inclosed by trees, which grow very near to the water's edge. I fancy the visitors who go there may be divided into two classes: first, those who go for a swim in the cool, deep waters, as Hawthorne liked to do; and second, those who go to lay a stone upon the cairn that marks the site of Thoreau's hut. It is well worth a pilgrimage, in these days, to see the place where a man actually built a dwelling-house at a cost of $28.121/2 and lived in it two years at an estimated expense of $1.09 a month. One of his extravagances was a watermelon, costing two cents, and this was classified in his summary among the "Experiments which failed!" The site of the hut was admirably chosen. It overlooks a little cove or bay, and the still surface of the pond, glimpses of which could be seen through the trees, reflecting the blue sky overhead, made a beautiful picture.

We must now return to the village, for there are two more houses to be seen, both on the Lexington Road. The first is the Alcott house, now restored to something like its original condition and preserved as a memorial to the author of "Little Women." A. Bronson Alcott came to live in Concord in 1840, having visited there for the first time five years earlier. Emerson at once hailed him as "the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of his time." He marveled at the "steadiness of his vision" before which "we little men creep about ashamed." The "Sage of Concord" was too modest and time failed to justify his enthusiasm for the new neighbor. He came to admit that Alcott, though a man of lofty spirit, could not be trusted as to matters of fact; that he did not have the power to write or otherwise communicate his thoughts; and that he was like a gold-ore, sometimes found in California, "in which the gold is in combination with such other elements that no chemistry is able to separate it without great loss."

Alcott was a "handy man" with tools, could construct fanciful summer-houses or transform a melodeon into a bookcase, as a piece of his handiwork in the "restored" house will testify. But in intellectual matters he fired his bullets of wisdom so far over the heads of his fellow men that they never came down, and therefore penetrated nobody's brain.

This lack of practical wisdom came near bringing disaster to the family. But his daughter came to the rescue with "Little Women," a book that has had an astonishing success from the first. Originally published in 1868, it has had a circulation estimated at one million copies and is still in demand.

In the winter of 1862-63, Louisa M. Alcott marched off to war, carrying several volumes of Dickens along with her lint and bandages, determined that she would not only bind up the soldiers' wounds, but also relieve the tedium of their hospital life during the long days of convalescence. When she was ready to start, Alcott said he was sending "his only son." Girl visitors to the old "Orchard house" take great delight in the haunts of Meg, Amy, Beth, and Joe, and particularly in Amy's bedroom, where the young artist's drawings on the doors and window-frames are still preserved.

Just beyond the Alcott house is a pine grove on the side of a hill and then the "Wayside," Hawthorne's home for the last twelve years of his life. When Hawthorne left the Old Manse, he went to Salem, then to Lenox, and for a short time to West Newton. In the summer of 1852, he returned to Concord, having purchased the "Wayside" from Alcott.

While living in Lenox he had written "The Wonder-Book," which so fascinated the children, including their elders as well, that his first task upon settling in the new home was to prepare, in response to many urgent demands, a second series of the same kind to be known as "The Tanglewood Tales."

In the following spring the family sailed for Liverpool, where Hawthorne was to be the American Consul, and from this journey he did not return until 1860, seven years later. He was then at the height of his fame as the author of "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Marble Faun." As soon as his family was settled in the Wayside, he began extensive alterations, the most remarkable of which is the tower, which not only spoiled the architecture of the building, but failed, partially at least, to serve its primary purpose as a study. It was a room about twenty feet square, reached by a narrow stairway where the author could shut himself in against all intrusion. A small stove made the air stifling in winter, and the sun's rays upon the roof made it unbearable in summer. Nevertheless, Hawthorne managed to make some use of it and here he wrote "Our Old Home." I fancy he must have composed most of it while walking back and forth in the seclusion of the pine grove which he had purchased with the house. And here in this pleasant grove we must leave him for the present, while we go back to Boston and thence to Salem, to search out a few more old houses, which would fall into decay and finally disappear without notice, like hundreds of others of the same kind, but for the one simple fact that the touch of Hawthorne's presence, more than half a century ago, conferred upon these dingy old buildings a dignity and interest that draw to them annually a host of visitors from all parts of the United States.

II

SALEM

On arrival at Salem we inquired of a local druggist whether he could direct us to any of the Hawthorne landmarks. He promptly pleaded ignorance, but referred us to an old citizen who chanced to be in the store and who admitted that he knew all about the town, having been "born and raised" there. Did he know whether there was a real "House of Seven Gables"? Well, he had heard of such a place, but it was torn down long ago. Could he direct us to the Custom House? Oh, yes, right down the street: he would show us the way. Any houses where Hawthorne had lived? Well, no,--he hadn't "followed that much." Had any of his family ever seen Hawthorne, or spoken of him? Yes--but he didn't amount to much: kind of a lazy fellow. People here didn't set much store by him.

We were moving away, fearing that the old fellow would offer to accompany us and thereby spoil some of our anticipated enjoyment of the old houses, when he called after us--"Say, there's an old house right down this street that I've heard had something to do with Hawthorne. I don't know just what, but maybe the folks there can tell you. It's just this side of the graveyard." We thanked the old man, and following his directions, soon stood before an old three-story wooden house, with square front, big chimneys, and its upper windows considerably shorter than those below--a type common enough in Salem and other New England towns. It stood directly on the sidewalk and had a small, inclosed porch, with oval windows on each side, through which one could look up or down the street. In all these details it agreed exactly with Hawthorne's description of the house of Dr. Grimshawe. Adjoining it on the left was the very graveyard where Nat and little Elsie chased butterflies and played hide-and-seek among the quaint old tombstones, which had puffy little cherubs and doleful verses carved upon them. That corner room, no doubt, that overlooks the graveyard, was old Dr. Grim's study, so thickly festooned with cobwebs, where the grisly old monomaniac sat with his long clay pipe and bottle of brandy, with no better company than an enormous tropical spider, which hung directly above his head and seemed at times to be the incarnation of the Evil One himself.

How could Hawthorne, in his later years, conceive such horrible suggestions in connection with a house which must have been associated in his mind with the happiest memories of his life? For here lived the Peabody family, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody and his highly cultivated wife, their three sons, only one of whom lived to maturity, and their three remarkable daughters--Elizabeth Palmer, who achieved fame as one of the foremost kindergartners of America and died at a ripe old age; Mary, who became the wife of Horace Mann; and the gentle, scholarly, and high-minded Sophia, who refused to come down to see Hawthorne, on plea of illness, the first time he called at the house, but fell in love with him at a subsequent visit. The calls were frequent enough after that, and before the family left the old house to reside in Boston, the lovers were engaged to be married.

During the period of the courtship, Hawthorne lived with his mother and two sisters in a house on Herbert Street not far distant, and the two families came into close neighborly relations. Of course, we walked over to Herbert Street to find this house, but what remains of it has been remodeled into an ordinary tenement house and no longer resembles the house to which Sophia Peabody once sent a bouquet of tulips for Mr. Hawthorne, only to have it quietly appropriated by his sister Elizabeth, who thought her brother incapable of appreciating flowers, though she kindly permitted him to look at them! In the rear of this building, fronting on Union Street, is the plain, two-story-and-a-half house, with a gambrel roof, where Hawthorne was born.

When the Hawthornes returned to Salem, after their residence in the Old Manse, they occupied the Herbert Street house, with Madam Hawthorne and her two daughters, Elizabeth and Louisa. This proved inconvenient for so large a family and they moved into a three-story house on Chestnut Street, well shaded by some fine old elms. This was only a temporary arrangement, and soon afterward, the family took a large three-story house on Mall Street, where the mother and sisters occupied separate apartments. Hawthorne's study was on the third floor--near enough his own family for convenience, but sufficiently remote for quiet. It was to this house that he returned one day in dejected mood and announced that he had been removed from his position at the Custom House. "Oh! then, you can write your book!" was the unexpectedly joyous reply of his wife, who knew that he had a story weighing on his mind. And then she produced the savings which she had carefully hoarded to meet just such an emergency. "The Scarlet Letter" was begun on the same day.