Local tradition declares that, to prevent intrusion into this den, Hawthorne habitually sat upon a trap-door in the floor, which was the only entrance. Without this precaution he found in this eyrie the seclusion he coveted, and here, among the birds and the tree-tops, remote from the tumult of life and above ordinary distracting influences, he could linger undisturbed in thatborder-land between shadow and substance which was his delight, could evoke and fix upon his pages the weird creatures of his fancy. Several hours of each day he passed here alone in musing or composition, and here, besides some papers for the "Atlantic," he wrote "Our Old Home," "Grimshaw's Secret," "Septimius Felton," and the "Dolliver Romance" fragment. Years before, Thoreau told him, the Wayside had once been inhabited by a man who believed he would never die. The thus suggested idea, of a deathless man associated with this house, seems to have clung to Hawthorne in his last years, and was embodied in both his later works,—the scene of "Septimius Felton" being laid here at the Wayside. No one knew aught of its composition, and the author, rereading the tale in the solitude of this study and finding it in some way lacking the perfection of his ideal, laid it away in his closet, and, in weariness and failing health, commenced and vainly tried to finish the "Dolliver Romance" from the same materials.
The house is separated from the highway by a narrow strip of sward, out of which grow elms planted by Bronson Alcott and clustering evergreens rooted by Hawthorne himself. The greater part of his domain lies along the dark slope and the wooded summit of the ridge whichrises close behind the house. At the extremity of the grounds nearest the Orchard House, a depression in the turf marks the site of the little house where dwelt the Rose Garfield of "Septimius." Hawthorne planted sunflowers in this hollow, and Julian, his son, remembers seeing the novelist stand here and contemplate their wide disks above the old cellar.
On the steep hill-side remain the rough terraces Alcott fashioned when he occupied the place, and many of the flowering locusts and fruit-trees he and Thoreau planted. Here, too, are the sombre spruces and firs which Hawthorne sent from "Our Old Home" or planted after his return, and all are grown until they overshadow the whole place and fairly embower the house with their branches. Along the hill-side are the famous "Acacia path" of Mrs. Hawthorne and other walks planned by the novelist, some of them having been opened by him in the last summer of his life. By one path, once familiar to his feet, we find our way up the steep ascent among the locusts to the "Mount of Vision,"—as Mrs. Hawthorne named the ridge to which the novelist daily resorted for study and meditation.
The hill-top is clothed with a tangled growth of trees which hides it from the lower worldand renders it a fitting trysting-place for the wizard romancer and the mystic figures which abound in his tales. Along the brow we trace, among the ferns, vestiges of the pathway worn by his feet. In the safe seclusion of this spot he spent delectable hours, lying under the trees "with a book in his hands and an unwritten book in his thoughts," while the pines murmured to him of the mystery and shadow he loved. More often he sat on a rustic seat between yonder pair of giant trees, or paced his foot-path hour after hour, as he pondered his plots and worked out the mystic details of many romances, some of them never to be written. Walking here with Fields he unfolded his design of the "Dolliver" tale, which he left half told. Here he composed the weird story of "Septimius Felton," while trudging on the very path he describes as having been worn by his hero,—Hawthorne himself habitually walking, with hands clasped behind him and with eyes bent on the ground, in the very attitude he ascribes to "Septimius" as Rose saw him "treading, treading, treading, many a year," on this foot-path by the grave of the officer he had slain. In this refuge Hawthorne remained a whole day alone with his grief, when tidings came to him of the loss of his sister in the burning of the "Henry Clay."Here he sat with Howells one memorable afternoon. In the last years his wife was often with him here, sometimes walking, but more frequently sitting, with him,—as did Rose with "Septimius,"—and looking out, through an opening in the foliage near the western end of his path, upon the restful landscape, not less charming to-day than when his eyes lovingly lingered upon it. We see the same broad, sun-kissed meadows awave with lush grass and flecked with fleeting cloud-shadows, and beyond, the dark forests of Thoreau's Walden and the gentle outlines of low-lying hills which shut in the valley like a human life.
For some months after the election to the Presidency of his friend Franklin Pierce, the Wayside was frequented by office-seekers; but ordinarily Hawthorne had few visitors besides his Concord friends. Fields, Holmes, Hilliard, Whipple, Longfellow, Howells, Horatio Bridge, the poet Stoddard, Henry Bright, came to him here. The visits of "Gail Hamilton" (Miss Abigail Dodge), mentioned by Hawthorne as "a sensible, healthy-minded woman," were especially enjoyed by him. His own visits were very infrequent; "Orphic" Alcott said that in the several years he lived next door Hawthorne came but twice into his house: the first time hequickly excused himself "because the stove was too hot," next time "because the clock ticked too loud."
The Wayside was the only home Hawthorne ever owned. To it he came soon after his removal from the "little red house" in Berkshire, and to it he returned from his sojourn abroad; here, with failing health and desponding spirits, he lived in the gloomy war-days,—writing in his study or, with steps more and more uncertain, pacing his hill-top; from here he set out with his life-long friend Pierce on the last sad journey which ended so quickly and quietly.
VII
THE WALDEN OF THOREAU
A Transcendental Font—Emerson's Garden—Thoreau's Cove—Cairn—Beanfield—Resort of Emerson—Hawthorne—Channing—Hosmer—Alcott, etc.
ONE long-to-be-remembered day we follow the shady foot-paths, once familiar to the sublimated Concord company, through their favorite forest retreats to "the blue-eyed Walden,"—sung by many a bard, beloved by transcendental saint and seer. After a delightful stroll of a mile or more, we emerge from the wood and see the lovely lakelet "smiling upon its neighbor pines." We find it a half-mile in diameter, with bold and picturesquely irregular margins indented with deep bays and mostly wooded to the pebbles at the water's edge. From this setting of emerald foliage it scintillates like a gem: its wavelets lave a narrow pebbly shore within which a bottom of pure white sand gleams upward through the most transparent water ever seen. At one point where the railway skirts the margin, the woods are disfigured with pavilions and tables for summer pleasure-seekers, and a farther wooded slope has recently been ravaged by fire; but most of the shore has escaped bothprofanation and devastation, so that the literary pilgrim will find the shrines he seeks little disturbed since the Concord luminaries here had their haunt.
From the summit of the forest ledge which rises from the southern shore, the lakelet seems a foliage-framed patch of the firmament. This rocky eminence affords a wide and enchanting prospect, and was the terminus and object of many excursions of Emerson and the other "Walden-Pond-Walkers," as the transcendentalists were styled by their more prosy and orthodox neighbors. It was upon this elevation in the midst of a portion of his estate which he celebrates in his poetry as "My Garden"—whose "banks slope down to the blue lake-edge"—that Emerson proposed to erect a lodge or retreat for retirement and thought. A mossy path, once trodden almost daily by the philosopher and his friends, brings us to the beautiful and secluded cove where Emerson and Thoreau kept a boat, and where the shining ones often came to bathe in this limpid water. Ablution here seems to have been a sort of transcendent baptism, and many a visitor, eminent in art, thought, or letters, has boasted that he walked and talked with Emerson in Walden woods and bathed with him in Walden water. In this romantic nook Thoreauspent much time during his hermitage, sitting in reverie on its banks or afloat on its glassy surface, fishing or playing his flute to the charmed perch. On the shore of this cove he procured the stones for the foundations and the sand for the plastering of his cabin. From the water's edge an obscure path, bordered by the wild flowers he loved, winds among the murmuring pines up to the site of Thoreau's retreat, on a gentle hill-side which falls away to the shore a few rods distant. A cairn of small stones, placed by reverent pilgrims, stands upon or near the spot where he erected his dwelling at an outlay of twenty-eight dollars and lived upon an income of one dollar per month.
The hermit would hardly know the place now; his young pines are grown into giants that allow but glimpses of the shimmering lake; even the "potato hole" he dug under his cabin, whence the squirrels chirped at him from beneath the floor as he sat to write, and where he kept his winter store,—the "beans with the weevil in them" and the "potatoes with every third one nibbled by chipmunks,"—is obliterated and overgrown with the glabrous sumach. His near-by field, where he learned to "know beans" and gathered relics of a previous and aboriginal race of bean-hoers, is covered by a growth of pinesand dwarf oaks, in places so dense as to be almost impassable.
Some one has said, "Thoreau experienced Nature as other men experience religion." Certainly the life at Walden, which he depicted in one of the most fascinating of books, was in all its details—whether he was ecstatically hoeing beans in his field or dreaming on his door-step, floating on the lake or rambling in forest and field—that of an ascetic and devout worshipper of Nature in all her moods. Thoreau "built himself in Walden woods a den" in 1845,—after his return from tutoring in the family of Emerson's brother at Staten Island; here he wrote most of "Walden" and the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and much more that has been posthumously published; from here he went to jail for refusing to pay a tax on his poll, from here he made the excursion described in "The Maine Woods."
He finally removed from Walden in the autumn of 1847, to reside in the house of Emerson during that sage's absence in Europe. An old neighbor of Thoreau's, who had often watched his "stumpy" figure as he hoed the beans, and had even once or twice assisted him in that celestial agriculture, tells us that Thoreau's hut was removed by a gardener to the middle of the bean-fieldand there occupied for some years. Later it was purchased by a farmer, who set it upon wheels and conveyed it to his farm some miles distant, where it has decayed and gone to pieces.
In Concord it is not difficult to identify the personages associated with Thoreau's life at Walden Pond and referred to in his book. The "landlord and waterlord" of the domain, on which Thoreau was "a squatter," was Waldo Emerson; the owner of the axe which the hermit borrowed to hew the frame of his hut was Bronson Alcott; the "honorable raisers" of the structure were Emerson, Curtis the Nile "Howadji," Alcott, Hosmer, and others; the lady who made the sketch of the hermitage which appears on the title-page of "Walden" was the author's sister Sophia. Of the hermit's visitors here, "the one who came oftenest" was Emerson; "the one who came farthest" was also the poet whom the hermit "took to board for a fortnight," Ellery Channing; the "long-headed farmer," who had "donned a frock instead of a professor's gown," was Thoreau's neighbor and life-long friend Edmund Hosmer, who is celebrated in the poetry of Emerson and Channing; the "last of the philosophers," the "Great Looker—great Expecter," who "first peddledwares and then his own brains," was Bronson Alcott, who spent long evenings here in converse with the hermit, or in listening to chapters from his manuscript. Here came Hawthorne to talk with his "cast-iron man" about trees and arrow-heads; here came George Hilliard and James T. Fields, and others,—sometimes so many that the hut would scarce contain them; the only complaint heard from Thoreau anent the narrowness of his quarters being that there was not room for the words to ricochet between him and his guests. Here, too, came humbler visitors, hunted slaves, who were never denied the shelter of the hermitage nor the sympathy and aid of the hermit.
Another generation of visitors comes now to this spot,—pilgrims from far, like ourselves, to the shrine of a "stoic greater than Zeno or Xenophanes,"—a man whose "breath and core was conscience." We linger till the twilight, for the genius of this shrine seems very near us as we muse in the place where he dwelt incarnate alone with Nature, and there is for us a hint of his healthful spirit in the odor of his pines and of the wild flowers beside his path,—a vague whisper of his earnest, honest thought in the murmur of the clustering boughs and in the lapping of the wavelets upon the mimic strand.
We bring from the shore a stone—the whitest we can find—for his cairn, and place with it a bright leaf, like those his callers in other days left for visiting cards upon his door-step, and then, through the wondrous half-lights of the summer evening, we walk silently away.
VIII
THE HILL-TOP HEARSED WITH PINES
Last Resting-Place of the Illustrious Concord Company—Their Graves beneath the Piny Boughs.
DURING Hawthorne's habitation of the "Old Manse" and his first residence at the Wayside, his favorite walk was to the "Sleepy Hollow," a beautifully diversified precinct of hill and vale which lies a little way eastward from the village. His habitual resting-place here was a pine-shaded hill-top where he often met Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Hoar, Mrs. Ripley, or Margaret Fuller,—for all that sublimated company loved and frequented this spot. More often Hawthorne lounged and mused or chatted here alone with his lovely wife. Their letters and journals of this period make frequent mention of the walks to this place and of "our castle,"—a fanciful structure which, in their happy converse here under the pines, they planned to erect for their habitation on this hill-top. In their pleasant conceit, the terraced path which skirts the verge of the hollow and thence ascends the ridge was the grand "chariot-road"to their castle. This park has become a cemetery,—at its dedication Emerson made an oration and Frank B. Sanborn read a beautiful ode,—and on their beloved hill-top nearly all the transcendent company whom Hawthorne used to meet there, save Margaret Fuller who rests beneath the sea, lie at last in "the dreamless sleep that lulls the dead."
First came Thoreau, to lie among his kindred under the wild flowers and the fallen needles of his dear pines, in a grave marked now by a simple stone graven with his name and age. Next came Hawthorne: with his "half-told tale" and a wreath of apple-blossoms from the "Old Manse" resting on his coffin, and with Emerson, Longfellow, Fields, Ellery Channing, Agassiz, Hoar, Lowell, Whipple, Alcott, Holmes, and George Hilliard walking mournfully by his side, he was borne, through the flowering orchards and up the hill-side path,—which was to have been his "chariot-road,"—to a grave on the site of the "castle" of his fancy; where his dearest friend Franklin Pierce covered him with flowers and James Freeman Clarke committed his mortal part to the lap of earth. Alas, that the beloved cohabitant of his dream-castle must lie in death a thousand leagues away! in no dream of his would such a separation from her have seemedpossible. She tried to mark his tomb by a leafy monument of hawthorn shrubbery, but the rigorous climate prevented; now a low marble, inscribed with the one word "Hawthorne," stands at either extremity of his grave, and a glossy growth of periwinkle covers the spot where sleeps the great master of American romance. Some smaller graves are beside his: in one lies a child of Julian Hawthorne; in another, Rose—the daughter of Hawthorne's age—laid the son which her husband, Parsons Lathrop, commemorates in the lines of "The Flown Soul." Next Mrs. Ripley and Elizabeth Hoar were borne to this "God's acre," and then Emerson—followed by a vast concourse and mourned by all the world—was brought to "give his body back to earth again," in this loved retreat, near Hawthorne and his own "forest-seer" Thoreau. A gigantic pine towers above him here, and a massive triangular boulder of untooled pink quartz—already marred by the vandalism of relic-seekers—is placed to mark the grave of the great "King of Thought." It bore no inscription or device of any sort until a few months ago, when a bronze plate inscribed with his name and years and the lines—
was set in the rough surface of the stone. By Emerson lie his wife, his mother, two children of his son and biographer Dr. Emerson, and his own little child,—the "wondrous, deep-eyed boy" whom Emerson mourned in his matchless "Threnody."
Six years after Emerson, Bronson Alcott and his illustrious daughter Louisa were laid here, within a few yards of Hawthorne and the rest, on a spot selected by the "Beth" of the Alcott books who was herself the first to be interred in it. Now all the "Little Women" repose here with their parents and good "John Brooke,"—"Jo" being so placed as to suggest to her biographer that she is still to take care of parents and sisters "as she had done all her life."
The Grave of Emerson
No other spot of earth holds dust more precious than does this "hill-top hearsed with pines." We are pleased to find the native beauty of the place little disturbed,—the trees, the indigenous grasses, ferns, and flowers remaining for the most part as they were known andloved by those who sleep beneath them. The contour of the ground and the foliage which clusters upon the slopes measurably shut out the view of other portions of the enclosure from this secluded hill-top, and, as we sit by the graves under the moaning pines, we seem to be alone with theseourdead. Through the boughs we have glimpses of the motionless deeps of a summer sky; the patches of sunshine which illumine the graves about us are broken by foliate shadows sometimes as still as if painted upon the turf. No discordant sound from the haunts of men disturbs our meditations; the silence is unbroken save by the frequent sighs of the mourning pines.
As we linger, the pervading quiet becomes something more than mere silence, it acquires the air and sense of reserve: the impression is borne into our thought that these asleep here, who once freely gave us their richest and best, are withholding something from us now,—some newly-learned wisdom, some higher thought. Does "an awful spell bind them to silence," or are they vainly repeating to us in the tender monotone of the pines a message we cannot hear or cannot bear? Or have they ceased from all ken or care for earthly things? Do they no longer love this once beloved spot? Do they not rejoice in the beauty of this summerday and the sunshine that falls upon their windowless palace? Are they conscious of our reverent tread on the turf above them, of our low words of remembrance and affection? Do they care that we have come from far to bend over them here?
"For knowledge of all these things, we must"—as the greatest of this transcendent circle once said—"wait for to-morrow morning."
IN AND OUT OF LITERARY BOSTON
IN BOSTON
A Golden Age of Letters—Literary Associations—Isms—Clubs—Where Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham lived—The Corner Book-store—Home of Fields—Sargent—Hilliard—Aldrich—Deland—Parkman—Holmes—Howells—Moulton—Hale—Howe—Jane Austin, etc.
OF the cisatlantic cities our "modern Athens" is, to the literary pilgrim, the most interesting; for, whatever may be the claims of other cities to the present literary primacy, all must concede that Boston was long the intellectual capital of the continent and its centre of literary culture and achievement. If the pilgrim have attained to middle life and be loyal to the literary idols of his youth, his regard for the Boston of to-day must be largely reminiscential of a past that is rapidly becoming historic; for, of the constellation of brilliant authors and thinkers who first gained for the place its pre-eminence in letters, few or none remain alive. The requirements of labor and trade are transforming the old streets; the sedate and comfortable dwellings, once the abodes or the resorts of thelittérateurs, are giving place to palatial shops or great factories; the neighborhood where Bancroft, Choate, Winthrop, Webster, and Edward Everett dwelt within afew rods of each other was long ago surrendered to merchandise and mammon; yet for us the busy scenes are haunted by memories and peopled by presences which the spirit of trade is powerless to exorcise.
To tread the streets which have daily echoed the foot-falls of the illustrious company who created here a golden age of learning and culture were alone a pleasure, but the city holds many closer and more personal mementos of her dead prophets, as well as the homes of a present generation who worthily strive to sustain her place and prestige.
Interwoven with the older Boston are literary associations hardly less memorable and enduring than its history: in the belfry of its historic holy of holies—Old South Church—was the study of the historian Dr. Belknap, and the dove that nested beneath the church-bell is preserved in the poetry of N. P. Willis; King's Chapel, the sanctuary where the beloved Dr. Holmes worshipped for so many years, and whence he was not long ago sadly borne to his burial, figures in the fiction of Fenimore Cooper; historic Copp's Hill is also a scene in a tale of the same novelist; the court-house occupies the site of the "beetle-browed" prison of Hester Prynne of "The Scarlet Letter;" the storied oldState-house marked the place of her pillory; the theatre of the Boston Massacre is the scene of the thrilling episode of Hawthorne's "Gray Champion;" his "Legends of Province House" commemorate the ancient structure which stood nearly opposite the Old South Church; the Tremont House, where the "Jacobins' Club" used to assemble with Ripley, Channing, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Peabody, and the extreme reformers, was the resort of Hawthorne's "Miles Coverdale," as it was of the novelist himself, and on the street here he saw "ragamuffin Moodie" of "The Blithedale Romance." On the site of Bowdoin School, Charles Sumner was born; at one hundred and twenty Hancock Street he lived and composed the early orations which made his fame; at number one Exeter Place, Theodore Parker, the Vulcan of the New England pulpit, forged his bolts and wrote the "Discourses of Religion;" in Essex Street lived and wrote Wendell Phillips, at thirty-seven Common Street he died; at thirty-one Hollis Street the gifted Harriet Martineau was the guest of Francis Jackson; at the corner of Congress and Water Streets Lloyd Garrison wrote and published "The Liberator." In this older city, antedating the luxury of the Back Bay district of the new Boston, Mather wrotethe "Magnalia," Paine sang his songs, Allston composed his tales, Buckminster wrote his homilies, Bowditch translated La Place's "Mécanique céleste." Here Emerson, Motley, Parkman, and Poe were born; here Bancroft lived, Combe wrote, Spurzheim died. Here Maffit, Channing, and Pierpont preached; Agassiz, Phillips, and Lyell lectured; Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Fuller taught. Here Sargent wrote "Dealings with the Dead," Sprague his "Curiosity," Prescott his "Ferdinand and Isabella;" here Margaret Fuller held the "Conversations" which attracted and impressed the leading spirits of the time, and Bronson Alcott favored elect circles with his Orphic and oracular utterances; here lived Melvill, pictured in Holmes's "Last Leaf;" here Emerson preached Unitarianism "until he had carried it to the jumping-off-place," as one of his quondam parishioners avers, and here commenced his career as philosopher and lecturer. Here, besides those above mentioned, Dwight, Brisbane, Quincy, Ripley, Graham, Thompson, Hovey, Loring, Miller, Mrs. Folsom, and others of similar ability or zeal, discoursed and wrote in advocacy of the various reforms and "isms" in vogue half a century or more ago.
It has been said that, according to the local creed, whoso is born in Boston needs not to beborn again, but some decades ago a literary prowler, like ourselves, discovered that "nobody is born in Boston," the people who have made its fame in letters and art being usually allured to it from other places. This is true in less degree of the present age, since Hale, Robert Grant, Ballou,—of "The Pearl of India,"—Bates, Guiney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others are "to the manor born;" but, if Boston has few birthplaces, she cherishes the homes and haunts of two generations of adult intellectual giants.
Prominent among the literary landmarks is the "Corner Book-store"—once the shop of the father of Dr. Clarke—at School and Washington Streets, which, like Murray's in London, has long been the rendezvous of thelittérateurs. Here appeared the first American edition of "The Opium Eater" and of Tennyson's poems. Here was the early home of the "Atlantic," then edited by James T. Fields, who was the literary partner of the firm and the presiding genius of the old store. This lover of letters and sympathetic friend of literary men—always kind of heart and generous of hand—drew to him here the foremost of that galaxy who first achieved for America a place in the world of letters. To this literary Rialto, as familiarloungers, came in that golden age George Hilliard, Emerson, Ticknor, Saxe, Whipple, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Agassiz, the "Autocrat," and the rest, to loiter among and discuss the new books, or, more often, to chat with their friend Fields at his desk, in the nook behind the green baize curtain. The store is altered some since Fields left it; the curtained back-corner, which was the domain of the Celtic urchin "Michael Angelo" and the trysting spot of the literary fraternity, has given place to shelves of shining books. The side entrance—used mostly by the authors because it brought them more directly to Fields's desk and den—is replaced by a window which looks out upon the spot where, as we remember with a thrill, Fields last shook Hawthorne's hand and stood looking after him as—faltering with weakness—he walked up this side street with Pierce to start upon the journey from which he never returned.
Literary tourists come to the store as to a shrine: thus in later years Matthew Arnold, Cable, Edmund Gosse, Professor Drummond, Dr. Doyle, and others like them, have visited the old corner. Nor is it deserted by the authors of the day; Holmes was often here up to the time of his death, and the visitor may still see,turning the glossy pages, some who are writers as well as readers of books: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Scudder, Alger, Robert Grant,—whose "Reflections" and "Opinions" have been so widely read,—Miss Winthrop, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and Mrs. Coffin are among those who still come to the familiar place. Near by, in Washington Street, Hawthorne's first romance, "Fanshawe," was published in 1828. From Fields's famous store the transition to the staid old mansion which was long his home, and in which his widow still lives, is easy and natural. We find it pleasantly placed below the western slope of Beacon Hill, overlooking an enchanting prospect of blue waters and sunset skies. It is one of those dignified, substantial, and altogether comfortable dwellings—with spacious rooms, wide halls, easy stairways, and generous fireplaces—which we inherit from a previous generation. Here Fields, hardly less famed as an author than as the friend of authors, and his gifted wife—who is still a charming writer—created in their beautiful home an atmosphere which attracted to it the best and highest of their kind, and made it what it has been for more than forty years, a centre and ganglion of literary life and interest. The old-fashioned rooms are aglow with mostprecious memories and teem with artistic and literary treasures, many of them beingsouvenirsof the illustrious authors whom the Fields have numbered among their friends and guests. The letters of Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson, and others reveal the quality of the hospitality of this house and show how it was prized by its recipients. For years this was the Boston home of Hawthorne; to it came Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier almost as freely as to their own abodes; here Holmes, Lowell, Charles Sumner, Greene, Bayard Taylor, Joseph Jefferson, were frequent guests; and here we see a quaintly furnished bedchamber which has at various times been occupied by Dickens, Trollope, Arthur Clough, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Cushman, and others of equal fame. Of the delights of familiar intercourse with the starry spirits who frequented this house, of their brilliant discussions of men and books, their scintillations of wit, their sage and sober words of wisdom, Mrs. Annie Fields affords but tantalizing hints in her reminiscences and the glimpses she occasionally allows us of her husband's diary and letters. Fields's library on the second floor—described as "My Friend's Library"—is a most alluring apartment, where we see, besides the "Shelf of Old Books" ofwhich Mrs. Fields gives such a sympathetic account, other shelves containing numerous curious and uniquely precious volumes,—among them the few hundreds of worn and much annotated books which constituted the library of Leigh Hunt. In this room Emerson, while awaiting breakfast, wrote one of his poems, to which the hostess gave title.
In later years a younger generation of writers came to this mansion: Celia Thaxter was a frequent guest; the princess-like Sarah Orne Jewett, beloved by Whittier as a daughter, has made it her Boston home; Aldrich comes to see the widow of his friend; Miss Preston, Mrs. Ward, and other luminous spirits may be met among the company who assemble in these memory-haunted rooms. For several years Holmes lived in the same street, within a few doors of Fields's house.
At number fifty-four in quaint Pinckney Street, around the corner from Mrs. Fields's and near the former residence of Aldrich, we find the house in which the brilliant George Hilliard lived and died, scarcely changed since the time James Freeman Clarke here married Hawthorne to the lovely Sophia Peabody.
Upon the opposite side, at number eleven, dwells Mrs. E. P. Whipple, widow of the eminentauthor and critic,—herself a lady of refined critical tastes,—who keeps unchanged the home in which her husband died. In his lifetime a select circle of friends usually assembled here on Sunday evenings,—a circle in which Fields, Bronson Alcott, Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Sumner, Clarke, Dr. Bartol, Ole Bull, Lucretia Hale, Edwin Booth, and others of similar eminence in letters or art were included. Just around the corner, in Louisburg Square, Bronson Alcott died in the house of his daughter Mrs. Pratt,—the "Meg" of Louisa Alcott's books.
On Beacon Hill, in the next—Mount Vernon—street, we find near the "hub of the Hub" a tall, deep-roomed dwelling, surmounted by an observatory which commands a charming view of the city and its environs, and this is the elegant city home of the poet, novelist, and prince of conversationalists, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His library, full of treasures, is on a lower floor, but the study in which he pens his delightful compositions is high above the distractions of the world. As one sees the author of "Marjorie Daw" and the recent "Unguarded Gates" among his books, there is no hint of his sixty years in his fresh, ruddy face, with its carefully waxed moustache, nor in his sprightly speech and manner.
In the same street, the spacious mansion of ex-Governor Claflin was long a resort of a wise, earnest, and dazzling company of sublimated intellects. This house was in later years the usual haven of Whittier, the gentle Quaker bard, during his visits to Boston; and here, protected by the hostess from the eager kindness of his numerous friends, he spent many restful days when rest was most needed.
Near by, on the same hill-side, the talented authoress of "John Ward, Preacher" inhabits a many-windowed home of sober brick. Within, we find everywhere evidences of the fastidious personality of Mrs. Margaret Deland. In her parlors are dainty articles of furniture and bric-à-brac, wide fireplaces, deep windows full of flowers, many pictures, many more books. In her study and work-room, her desk stands near another fireplace, about it are still more flowers, pictures and books galore; here, not long ago, that tragedy of selfishness—"Philip and His Wife"—was written.
At the sumptuous home of the Sargents in the adjoining street have been held some of theséancesof the noted Radical Club, in which, as Mrs. Moulton says, "somebody read a paper and everybody else pulled it to pieces." At these sessions such spirits as Emerson, BronsonAlcott, Holmes, Edward Everett Hale, Carl Schurz, the genial Colonel Higginson, the serene James Freeman Clarke, the mystic Dr. Bartol,—who still lives in retirement in his old home,—and other representatives of advanced thought have discussed the ethics of life as well as of letters.
A plain brick house of three stories in the same quiet street was the abode of Francis Parkman's sister, where, after the death of his wife, the historian spent his winters, his study here being a simple front room on the upper floor, with open fireplace and book-lined walls.
In Park Street, above the Common, the ample mansion of George Ticknor—the chronicler of "Spanish Literature" and the autocrat of literary taste—was during many years a haunt of the best of Boston culture. We find its stately walls still standing, but the interior has been surrendered to the Philistines.
On Beacon Street, but a door or two removed from the birthplace of Wendell Phillips, in a house whose number the poet-lover said he "remembered by thinking of the Thirty-Nine Articles," Longfellow won Miss Appleton to be his wife. Just across the Common, in Carver Street, Hawthorne's son was born.
At many of the homes here mentioned were held the assemblages of the Ladies' Social Club.Among its readers were Agassiz, Emerson, Greene, Whipple, Clarke, and E. E. Hale. It was ironically styled the "Brain Club," and died after many years because, according to one ex-member, "the newer members brought into it too much Supper and Stomach and no Brain at all." A successor has been the Round Table Club, with Colonel Higginson for first president,—its meetings for essays and discussions being held in the homes of its literary or artistic members.
Boston's Belgravia occupies a district which has been reclaimed from the waters of the "Back Bay" of the Charles River,—on whose shore Hawthorne placed the shunned and isolated thatched cottage of Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter," and the windows of many of Boston's Four Hundred overlook the same delightful vista of water, hills, and western skies which to the sad eyes of Hester and little Pearl were a daily vision. On the water side of Beacon Street, within this select region, is the four-floored, picturesque mansion of brick—its front embellished with a growth of ivy which clusters about the bay-windows—where not long ago we found the gentle and genial Holmes sitting among his books, serene in the golden sunset of life, happy in the love of friends andin the benedictions of the thousands his work has uplifted and beatified. The mansion is redolent of literary associations, and throughout its apartments were tastefully disposed articles of virtu, curios, and mementos—literary, artistic, or historic—of affection and regard from Holmes's many friends at home and abroad. His study was a large room at the back of the house, occupying the entire width of the second floor. Its broad window commands a sweep of the Charles, with its tides and its many craft, beyond which the poet could see, as he said, Cambridge where he was born, Harvard where he was educated, and Mount Auburn where he expected to lie in his last sleep. We last saw the "Autocrat" in his easy-chair, among the treasures of this apartment, with a portrait of his ancestress "Dorothy Q" looking down at him from a side wall. His hair was silvered and his kindly face had lost its smoothness,—for he was eighty-five "years young," as he would say,—but his faculties were keen and alert, and, in benign age, his greeting was no less cordial and his outlook upon men and affairs was no less cheery and optimistic than in the flush and vigor of early manhood. In this luxurious study were written several of his twenty-five volumes,—"Over the Teacups" being the most popular of those produced here,—andwe found him still devoting some hours of each day to light literary tasks, oftenest dictating materials for his memoirs, which are yet to be published.
Above the study, and overlooking the river on which he used to row and the farther green hills, is the chamber immortalized in "My Aviary;" and here, as he sat in his favorite chair, surrounded by his family, death came to him, and his spirit peacefully passed into the eternal silence. Then the "Last Leaf" had fallen, to be mourned by all the world.
A door or two from Holmes sometime dwelt the versatile novelist, poet, playwright, and "Altrurian Traveller." A popular print of "Howells in his Library" is an interior of his Beacon Street house; the view of the glassy river-basin, with the roofs and spires of Cambridge rising from banks and bowers of foliage beyond,—which he pictures from the new house of "Silas Lapham" on this street,—is the one Howells daily beheld from his study window here. His latest Boston home was in the same district on the superb Commonwealth Avenue, near the statue of Garrison, and here, in a sumptuous, six-storied, bow-fronted mansion, he wrote "The Shadow of a Dream" and other widely read books.
A modest, old-fashioned house on Beacon Street has long been the home of the poet and starry genius Julia Ward Howe, writer of the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic." Other members of her singularly gifted family have sojourned here, and the "home of the Howes" has been frequented by men and women eminent for culture and thought and for achievement in literature or art.
In the adjacent Marlborough Street recently died the polished author and orator Robert C. Winthrop, and here, too, was the home of Dr. Ellis, the friend of Lowell's father.
Farther away in this newer Boston of luxury and culture is the charming and hospitable home of the poet, essayist, novelist, and critic Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, whose American admirers complain that in late years she remains too much in London. When at home, she inhabits a delightful dwelling which, from entrance to attic, teems with pictures, rare books, curios, and othersouvenirsof her many friends in many lands. In her library, where much of "Garden of Dreams," "Swallow Flights," and other books was written, and where more of all "the work nearest her heart" was accomplished, are preserved many autograph copies of books by recent writers—several of them dedicated to Mrs.Moulton—and a priceless collection of letters from illustrious literary workers. In her drawing-rooms one may meet many of the famed authors of the day,—Higginson, Wendell, Horsford, Bynner, Nora Perry of the charming books for girls, Miss Conway, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney, Mrs. Howe, Arlo Bates, Adams, the jocosely serious Robert Grant, and others of Boston's newer lights of literature.
If we "drive on down Washington Street" with "Silas Lapham," we shall find in Chester Square the "Nankeen Square" where he dwelt in his less ambitious days, and the pretty oval green with the sturdy trees which the worthy colonel saw grow from saplings.
In a pleasant dwelling on the contiguous street lives and works the bright and busy Lucretia P. Hale, sister of the author-divine. She was the favorite scholar of Miss Elizabeth Peabody; and she has, through her writings and her classes, acquired an influence and discipleship little smaller than that which Margaret Fuller once possessed.
Farther south, in the Roxbury district, we seek the abode of the famed author of "The Man without a Country." Sauntering along the shady and delectable Highland Street, we interrogate a uniformed guardian of the law, whoheartily rejoins, "Dr. Hale's is a temple on the right a block further on: and if any man's fit to live in a temple, it's him." As we walk the "block further on" we think that, however defective his grammar, the policeman's estimate of Hale is beyond criticism and agrees with that of the thousands of readers and friends of the indefatigable author, lecturer, preacher, editor, reformer, and promoter of all good. We find the house—very like a Greek temple—standing back from the street in the midst of an ample lawn, shaded by noble trees and decked with a wealth of shrubbery and bloom. The mansion is a large square edifice, with great dormer-windows in its roofs, surmounted by a cupola, and having in front a lofty portico upheld by heavy Ionic pillars, between which interlacing woodbine forms a leafy screen. Within is a wide hall, and opening out of it are generously proportioned rooms, some of them lined from floor to ceiling with thousands of books. The study is a commodious room, with a "pamphlet-annex" adjoining it on the garden side, and is crammed with book-shelves and drawers, while piles of books, magazines, portfolios, manuscripts, and memoranda are disposed on cases, tables, and stands about the apartment. Everything is obviously arranged for convenient andready use, and well it may be so, for this is the work-room and "thinking-shop" of the hardest-working literary man in America. The books which made his first fame were written before he came to this house; of all the works produced in this study, the numerous poems, romances, histories, essays, editorials, reviews, discussions, translations,—to say nothing of the many hundreds of well-considered and carefully written sermons,—we may not here mention even the names, for no writer since Voltaire is more fruitful of finished and masterly work. It is notable that Hale regards "In His Name" as his best work from a literary point of view; of his other productions, he thinks some of the poems of the latest collection, "For Fifty Years," as good as anything,—"always excepting his sermons." Among the abundant treasures of his study, Hale has a most interesting and valuable collection of autograph letters, of which he is justly proud. His father was Nathan Hale of the Boston "Advertiser," his mother was sister to Edward Everett and herself an author and translator, his wife is niece to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, his son Robert has already acquired a reputation in the domain of letters. The doctor himself has been a writer from childhood, his earliest contributions beingto his father's paper. His illustrious sister declares that in their nursery days she and her brother used to take their meals with the "Advertiser" pinned under their chins,—a practice to which their literary precocity has been attributed. We find Hale at the age of seventy-three blithe and hopeful, working as much and manifestly accomplishing more than ever before.
A little farther out on the same street is the dwelling where William Lloyd Garrison spent his last years, and in this neighborhood lived Mrs. Blake, poet of "Verses Along the Way." Here also are the early home of Miss Guiney and the school to which she was first sent,—or rather "carried neck and heels," because she refused to walk. Close by we find the pleasant home in which Jane G. Austin wrote some of her famed colonial tales and where she died not many months ago; and in the same delightful suburb, a half-mile beyond Hale's house, is the retreat where the beloved author of "Little Women" breathed out her too brief life.
OUT OF BOSTON
I
CAMBRIDGE: ELMWOOD: MOUNT AUBURN
Holmes's Church-yard—Bridge, Smithy, Chapel, and River of Longfellow's Verse—Abodes of Lettered Culture—Holmes—Higginson—Agassiz—Norton—Clough—Howells—Fuller—Longfellow—Lowell—Longfellow's City of the Dead and its Precious Graves.
CROSSING the Charles by "The Bridge" of Longfellow's popular poem, a stroll along elm-shaded streets brings us to the ancient Common of Cambridge and a vicinage which has much besides its historic traditions to allure the literary pilgrim. For centuries the site of a celebrated college and a conspicuous centre of learning, it has long been the abiding-place of representatives of the best and foremost in American culture and mental achievement.
Close by the Common, and opposite the remains of the elm beneath which Washington assumed the command of the patriot army, stood the old gambrel-roofed house in which that "gentlest of autocrats," Holmes, was born and reared, and upon whose door-post was first displayedhis "shingle," on which he whimsically proposed to inscribe "The Smallest Fevers Thankfully Received;" across the college grounds is the home-like edifice where lived the erudite Professor Felton, loved by Dickens and oft mentioned in his letters; not far away, at the corner of Broadway, was the home of Agassiz, since occupied by his son; and a few rods eastward is the picturesque residence of the witty and profound Colonel Higginson,—poet, essayist, novelist, and reformer. In the adjacent Kirkland Street dwelt the delightful Dr. Estes Howe, brother-in-law to Lowell, with whom the poet sometime lived and whom he celebrated as "the Doctor" in the "Fable for Critics." Dr. C. C. Abbott formerly lived in this neighborhood, and the collections on which his best-known books are founded are preserved in the near-by Peabody Museum, beyond which we find the tasteful abode of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, the friend and literary executor of Lowell. Near the Common, too, dwelt for a year or so that rare poet Arthur Clough, author of "The Bothie" and "Qua Cursum Ventus;" and the sweet singer Charlotte Fiske Bates—the intimate friend of Longfellow—had her habitation in the same neighborhood. Opposite the southern end of the Common is the ancient village cemeterycelebrated in the poetry of Holmes and Longfellow; a little way westward, Howells lived in a delightful rose-embowered cottage and pleasantly pictured many features of the old town in the "Charlesbridge" of his "Suburban Sketches." Two or three furlongs distant, within the grounds of the Botanic Garden, long lived the American Linnæus, Professor Asa Gray.
Of all the Cambridge thoroughfares, the shady and venerable Brattle Street, which curves westward from the University Press, is most interesting and attractive. Near the Press building stands the historic Brattle House,—its beautiful stairway and other antique features preserved by the Social Club, to whom the property now belongs,—where Margaret Fuller, the priestess and queen of modern Transcendentalism, passed much of her youth and young womanhood, and where her sister, wife to the poet Ellery Channing, was reared. Margaret, who is said to have stood for the Theodora of Beaconsfield's "Lothair," first saw the light in a modest little dwelling in Main Street nearer the Boston bridge, and here attended school with Holmes and Richard Henry Dana; but it was in this Brattle House that her marvellous, and in some respects unique, intellectual career commenced. Hereshe acquired the moral and mental equipment which fitted her for leadership in the most vital epoch of American culture and thought, and here she attracted and attached all the wisest and noblest spirits within her range. To her here came Theodore Parker, the older Channing, Harriet Martineau, James Freeman Clarke,—the earnest, brilliant, and thoughtful of all ages and conditions. One noble soul who knew her here speaks of her friendship as a "gift of the gods," and some eminent in thought and achievement testify that they have ever striven toward standards set up for them by her in that early period of her residence here.
Close by Miss Fuller's home, "under a spreading chestnut-tree" at the intersection of Story Street, stood the smithy of Pratt, who was immortalized by Longfellow as "The Village Blacksmith." To the poet, passing daily on the way between his home and the college, the "mighty man" at his anvil in the shaded smithy was long a familiar vision. The tree—a horse-chestnut—has been removed, the shop has given place to a modern dwelling, and years ago the worthy smith rejoined his wife, "singing in Paradise."
A few steps westward from the site of the smithy is the "Chapel of St. John" of anothersweet poem of Longfellow; and just beyond this we find, bowered by lilacs and environed by acres of shade and sward, the colonial Cragie House, once the sojourn of Washington, but holding for us more precious associations, since Sparks, Worcester, and Everett have lived within its time-honored walls, and our popular poet of grace and sentiment for near half a century here had his home, and from here passed into the unknown. The picturesque mansion wears the aspect of an old acquaintance, and the interior, with its princely proportioned rooms, spacious fireplaces, wide halls, curious carvings and tiles, has much that Longfellow has shared with his readers. On the entrance door is the ponderous knocker; a landing of the broad stairway holds "The Old Clock on the Stairs;" the right of the hall is the study, with its priceless mementos of the tender and sympathetic bard who wrought here the most and best of his life-work, from early manhood onward into the mellow twilight of sweet and benign age. Here is his chair, vacated by him but a few days before he died; his desk; his inkstand which had been Coleridge's; his pen with its "link from the chain of Bonnivard;" the antique pitcher of his "Drinking Song;" the fireplace of "The Wind over the Chimney;" the arm-chair carved fromthe "spreading chestnut-tree" of the smithy, which was presented to him by the village children and celebrated in his poem "From my Arm-Chair." About us here are his cherished books, his pictures, his manuscripts, all his precious belongings, and from his window we see, beyond the Longfellow Memorial Park, the river so often sung in his verse, "stealing onward, like the stream of life." In this room Washington held his war councils. Of the many intellectualséancesits walls have witnessed we contemplate with greatest pleasure the Wednesday evening meetings of the "Dante Club," when Lowell, Howells, Fields, Norton, Greene, and other friends and scholars sat here with Longfellow to revise the new translation of Dante.