In order to give an idea of how it happened that our family could return from Europe to Concord with a few great expectations, I will rehearse somewhat of the charm which had been found in the illustrious village when my father and mother first knew it. There a group of people conversed together who have left an echo that is still heard. There also is still heard "the shot fired round the world," which of course returned to Concord on completing its circuit. But even the endless concourse of visitors, making the claims of any region wearisomely familiar, cannot diminish the simple solemnity of the town's historical as well as literary importance; and indeed it has so many medals for various merit that it is no wonder its residents have a way of speaking about it which some of us would call Bostonian. Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, and Alcott dispersed a fragrance that attracted at once, and all they said was resonant with charity and courage.
The first flash of individuality from Emerson could hardly fail to suggest that he resembled the American eagle; and he presided over Concord in a way not unlike our glorious symbol, the Friend of Light. It must have been exhilarating to look forward to many years in Emerson's hamlet. My earliest remembered glimpse of him was when he appeared—tall, side-slanting, peering with almost undue questioning into my face, but with a smile so constant as to seem like an added feature, dressed in a solemn, slender, dark overcoat, and a dark, shadowing hat—upon the Concord highroad; the same yellow thoroughfare which reaches out to. Lexington its papyrus-strip of history. At the onset of Emerson—for psychic men do attack one with their superiority—awe took possession of me; and, as we passed (a great force and a small girl) I wondered if I should survive. I not only did so, but felt better than before. It then became one of my happiest experiences to pass Emerson upon the street. A distinct exaltation followed my glance into his splendid face. Yet I caviled at his self-consciousness, his perpetual smile. I complained that he ought to wait for something to smile at. I could not be sure that he was privately enjoying some joke from Greek fun-makers, remembered under a Concord elm. After a time, I realized that he always had something to smile for, if not to smile at; and that a cheerful countenance is heroic. By and by I learned that he always could find something to smile at, also; for he tells us, "The best of all jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding, from the philosopher's point of view." But, in my unenlightened state, when I saw him begin to answer some question, however trivial, with this smile, slowly, very slowly growing, until it lit up his whole countenance with a refulgent beam before he answered (the whole performance dominated by a deliberation as great and brilliant as the dawn), I argued that this good cheer was out of proportion; that Emerson should keep back a smile so striking and circumstantial for rare occasions, such as enormous surprise; or, he should make it the precursor to a tremendous roar of laughter. I have yet to learn that any one heard him laugh aloud,—which pastime he has called, with certainly a familiar precision that indicates personal experience, a "pleasant spasm," a "muscular irritation."
In maturer years I believed that his smile brought refreshment, encouragement, and waves of virtue to those who saw it. To be sure, it was a sort of questioning; sometimes even quizzical; sometimes only a safeguard; but it was eminently kind, and no one else could do it. His manner was patronizing, in spite of its suavity; but it grew finer every spring, until it had become as exquisitely courteous as Sir Philip Sidney's must have been. The arch of his dark eyebrows sometimes seemed almost angry, being quickly lifted, and then bent in a scowl of earnestness; but as age advanced this sternness of brow grew to be, unchangeably, a calm sweep of infinite kindness.
It was never so well understood at The Wayside that its owner had retiring habits as when Alcott was reported to be approaching along the Larch Path, which stretched in feathery bowers between our house and his. Yet I was not aware that the seer failed at any hour to gain admittance,—one cause, perhaps, of the awe in which his visits were held. I remember that my observation was attracted to him curiously from the fact that my mother's eyes changed to a darker gray at his advents, as they did only when she was silently sacrificing herself. I clearly understood that Mr. Alcott was admirable; but he sometimes brought manuscript poetry with him, the dear child of his own Muse, and a guest more unwelcome than the enfant terrible of the drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered. Out of the mentions made of this effusion I gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott's features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization through talk. Often he was so happy that he could have danced like a child; and he laughed merrily like one; and the quick, upward lift of his head, which his great height induced him to hold, as a rule, slightly bent forward,—this rapid, playful lift, and the glance, bright and eager though not deep, which sparkled upon you, were sweet and good to see. Yet I have noticed his condition as pale and dolorous enough, before the event of his noble daughter's splendid success. But such was not his character; circumstances had enslaved him, and he appeared thin and forlorn by incongruous accident, like a lamb in chains. He might have been taken for a centenarian when I beheld him one day slowly and pathetically constructing a pretty rustic fence before his gabled brown house, as if at the unreasonable command of some latter-day Pharaoh. Ten years afterward he was, on the contrary, a Titan: gay, silvery-locked, elegant, ready to begin his life over again.
Alcott represented to me a fairy element in the up-country region in which I so often saw him. I heard that he walked the woods for the purpose of finding odd coils of tree-roots and branches, which would on the instant suggest to him an ingenious use in his art of rustic building. It was rumored that nobody's outlying curios in this line were safe under his eye, and that if you possessed an eccentric tree for a time, it was fated to close its existence in the keeping of Alcott. I imagined his slightly stooping, yet tall and well-grown figure, clothed in black, and with a picturesque straw hat, twining itself in and out of forest aisles, or craftily returning home with gargoyle-like stems over his shoulders. The magic of his pursuit was emphasized by the notorious fact that his handiwork fell together in the middle, faded like shadows from bronze to hoary pallor; its longevity was a protracted death. In short, his arbors broke under the weight of a purpose, as poems become doggerel in the service of a theorist. Truly, Alcott was completely at the beck of illusion; and he was always safer alone with it than near the hard uses of adverse reality. I well remember my astonishment when I was told that he had set forth to go into the jaws of the Rebellion after Louisa, his daughter, who had succumbed to typhus fever while nursing the soldiers. His object was to bring her home; but it was difficult to believe that he would be successful in entering the field of misery and uproar. I never expected to see him again. Almost the only point at which he normally met this world was in his worship of apple-trees. Here, in his orchard, he was an all-admirable human being and lovely to observe. As he looked upon the undulating arms or piled the excellent apples, red and russet, which seemed to shine at his glance, his figure became supple, his countenance beamed with a ruby and gold akin to the fruit. In his orchard by the highroad, with its trees rising to a great height from a basin-shaped side lawn (which may originally have been marshy ground), he seemed to me a perfect soul. We all enjoyed greatly seeing him there, as we wended to and from our little town. No doubt the garden of children at the beginning of his career inspired him likewise; and in it he must have shown the same tender solicitude and benevolence, and beamed upon his young scholars with a love which exquisitely tempered his fantastical suppositions.
He often spoke humbly, but he never let people think he was humble. His foibles appeared to me ridiculous, and provoked me exceedingly,— the brave cat of the proverb must be my excuse,—but I awakened to the eternal verity that some such husks are rather natural to persons of purely distinctive minds, perhaps shielding them. And I think one comes to value a bent blessed with earnest unconsciousness; a not too clever Argus vision; a childlike gullibility and spontaneity. This untarnished gullibility and gentle confidence, for all his self-laudations, Alcott had, and when he did not emerge either from his apple orchard or his inspirations he was essentially wholesome, full of an ardent simplicity, and a happy faith in the capacities given him by his Creator. So that his outline is one of much dignity, in spite of the somewhat capricious coloring of his character; the latter being not unlike the efforts of a nursery artist upon a print of "The Father of His Country," for whom, as he stands proudly upon the page, a green coat and purple pantaloons were not intended, and are only minor incidents of destiny.
Mr. Ellery Channing was, I am sure, the townsman who was most gladly welcome. My parents felt great admiration and friendliness for him, and it would be a sacrifice on my own part not to mention this companion of theirs, although I must beg his pardon for doing so. There is no doubt that Concord would have hung with several added pounds of weight upon our imaginations if it had not been for him. Over his tender-heartedness, as I saw him in the old days, played delicious eccentricities, phosphorescent, fitful, touch-me-not antics of feeling. I was glad to meet the long glance of his gray, dazzling eyes, lowered gracefully at last. The gaze seemed to pass through me to the wall, and beyond even that barrier to the sky at the horizon line. It did not disturb me; it had been too kindly to criticise, or so I thought. No doubt Mr. Channing had made his little regretful, uncomplimentary notes in passing, but it was characteristic of his exquisite comradeship towards all that we did not fear his eyes. I say comradeship, although the power which I believed touched him with its wand so mischievously had induced him to drop (as a boy loses successively all his marbles) all his devoted friends, without a word of explanation, because without a shadow of reason; the only thing to be said about it being that the loss was entirely voluntary on the part of this charming boy. He would cease to bow, as he passed. Then he found the marbles again, pocketed them as if nothing had happened, smiled, called, and hob-nobbed. A man's high-water mark is his calibre; and at high-water mark Mr. Channing's sea was to us buoyant, rich-tinted, sunlit; a great force, darkening and dazzling with beautiful emotions. He was in those days devoted to the outer air, and to the wonders of the nature we do not often understand, even when we trap it and classify it. He always invited his favorites to walk with him, and I once had the honor of climbing a very high hill by his side, in time to look at a Concord sunset, which I myself realized was the finest in the world.
Another peculiar spirit now and then haunted us, usually sad as a pine-tree—Thoreau. His enormous eyes, tame with religious intellect and wild with the loose rein, making a steady flash in this strange unison of forces, frightened me dreadfully at first. The unanswerable argument which he unwittingly made to soften my heart towards him was to fall desperately ill. During his long illness my mother lent him our sweet old music-box, to which she had danced as it warbled at the Old Manse, in the first year of her marriage, and which now softly dreamed forth its tunes in a time-mellowed tone. When he died, it seemed as if an anemone, more lovely than any other, had been carried from the borders of a wood into its silent depths, and dropped, in solitude and shadow, among the recluse ferns and mosses which are so seldom disturbed by passing feet. Son of freedom and opportunity that he was, he touched the heart by going to nature's peacefulness like the saints, and girding upon his American sovereignty the hair-shirt of service to self-denial. He was happy in his intense discipline of the flesh, as all men are when they have once tasted power—if it is the power which awakens perception of the highest concerns. His countenance had an April pensiveness about it; you would never have guessed that he could write of owls so jocosely. His manner was such as to suggest that he could mope and weep with them. I never crossed an airy hill or broad field in Concord, without thinking of him who had been the companion of space as well as of delicacy; the lover of the wood-thrush, as well as of the Indian. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them.
When we drove from the station to The Wayside, in arriving from Europe, on a hot summer day, I distinctly remember the ugliness of the un-English landscape and the forlornness of the little cottage which was to be our home. Melancholy and stupid days immediately followed (at least they were so in my estimation). I marveled at the amount of sand in the flower-borders and at the horrifying delinquencies of our single servant.
For some years I was eager to use all the eloquence I could muster in my epistles to girl friends, in England or anywhere, as to the paucity of life in Concord. Perhaps the following extracts from two letters, one written at Bath, England, and the other at Concord, and never sent, but kept by my mother from the flames with many more of my expressions in correspondence, may convey the feelings of the whole family:—
DEAR HANNAH [Redcar Hannah],—When I go home I think that I shall never have such a nice time as when I go home; for I shall have such a big garden, and I shall have little and big girls to come and see me. Never on earth shall I have such a nice time as when I am at home.
After the transition:—
I am in Concord now, and long to see you again, but I suppose that it is useless to think of it. I am going out, after I have done my lessons, to have a good time.—A very good time indeed, to be sure, for there was nothing but frozen ground, and I had to be doing something to keep myself warm, and I had to come back after a little while. I do not know how to keep myself warm. Happy are you who keep warm all the time in England. The frost has made thick leaves on our windows everywhere, and you can hardly see through them.
I tried to bring the stimulus of great events into the Concord life by writing stories, of which I would report the progress to my one or two confidantes. My father overheard some vainglorious boasts from my lips, one afternoon, when the windows of the little library where he sat were open; and the small girl who listened to me, wide-eyed, and I myself, proud and glad to have reached a thrilling denouement, were standing beside the sweet-clover bed, not dreaming of anything more severe than its white bloom. A few minutes afterwards, my father hung over me, dark as a prophetic flight of birds. "Never let me hear of your writing stories!" he exclaimed, with as near an approach to anger as I had ever seen in him. "I forbid you to write them!" But I believe this command only added a new attraction to authorship, agreeably haunting me as I beckoned imaginary scenes and souls out of chaos. An oasis bloomed at remote seasons, when we went to visit Mr. and Mrs. Fields in Boston. My mother writes of my reviving, and even becoming radiant, as soon as a visit of this fragrant nature breathed upon me. I joyously begin a letter of my mother's with the following greeting: "As soon as we got to Boston. My dear, dear Papa. We will write to you very promptly indeed. We have got here safely, and are also very glad to get here. We had some rich cake and sherry as soon as we got here.—[My mother proceeds:] Annie glided in upon us, looking excellently lovely. Heart's-Ease [Mr. Fields] appeared just before dinner. He declares that the 'Consular Experiences' is superb.—I write in the deep green shade of this wood of a library. We all went to church through the hot sunshine. Mr. Fields walked on the sunny side, and when Mrs. Fields [Mrs. Meadows was the playful name by which we called her] asked him why, he said, 'Because it makes us grow so. Oh, I am growing so fast I can scarcely get along!' Mr. Fields said it made him very sleepy to go to church, and he thought it was because of the deacons.—He says the world is wild with rapture over your 'Leamington Spa.' He did not know how to express his appreciation of it.—We met Mr. Tom Appleton at the gallery, and he was very edifying. There is a good portrait by Hunt. Mr. Appleton called it 'big art,' which took my fancy, it being so refreshing after hearing so much said about 'high art.' There is a portrait of Hunt by himself, which has a line about the brow that is Michelangelic; 'the bars of Michelangelo.' A head of Fremont was handsome, but showing a man incapable of large combinations. He looks eagle-like and loyal and brilliant, but not wise. We felt quite glorious with the war news, and were surprised to see so few flags flying. To breakfast we had Mr. Dysie. It was pleasant to hear his English brogue—a slight excess of Henry Bright's Lancashire accent. To tea we had Mr. and Mrs. Bartol, and Mr. Fields was so infinitely witty that we all died at the tea-table. Mr. Bartol, in gasps, assured him that he had contrived a way to save the food by keeping us in convulsions during the ceremony of eating, and killing us off at the end. Annie had on a scarlet coronet that made her look enchanting, and Mr. Fields declared she was Moses in the burning bush. Oh, do delay the acacia blossoms till I come! Give a sky full of love to Una and Julian."
My father also tasted the piquant flavors of merriment and luxury in this exquisite domicile of Heart's-Ease and Mrs. Meadows.
And at The Wayside, too, we had delightful pleasures, in the teeth and front of simplicity and seclusion, sandy flower-borders, rioting weeds, and intense heats. Concord itself could gleam occasionally, even outside of its perfect Junes and Octobers, as we can see here in the merry geniality of Louisa Alcott, who no more failed to make people laugh than she failed to live one of the bravest and best of lives. In return for a package of birthday gifts she sent us a poem, from which I take these verses:—
"The Hawthorne is a gracious treeFrom latest twig to parent root,For when all others leafless standIt gayly blossoms and bears fruit.On certain days a friendly windWafts from its spreading boughs a storeOf canny gifts that flutter inLike snowflakes at a neighbor's door.
"The spinster who has just been blessedFinds solemn thirty much improved,By proofs that such a crabbed soulIs still remembered and beloved.Kind wishes 'ancient Lu' has storedIn the 'best chamber' of her heart,And every gift on Fancy's stageAlready plays its little part.
"Long may it stand, the friendly tree,That blooms in autumn and in spring,Beneath whose shade the humblest birdMay safely sit, may gratefully sing.Time will give it an evergreen name,Axe cannot harm it, frost cannot kill;With Emerson's pine and Thoreau's oakWill the Hawthorne be loved and honored still!"
My mother's records, moreover, in letters to her husband, refer to the humble labors that almost filled up her devoted year (her daughters tried to imitate her example), and these references indicate the difference we felt between Europe and home:—
Rose raised all the echoes of the county by screaming with joy over her blooming crocuses, which she found in her garden. The spring intoxicates her with "remembering wine." She hugs and kisses me almost to a mummy, with her raptures. Little spots of green grass choke her with unutterable ecstasy.
September 9, 1860. Julian illuminated till tea-time; and after tea I read to both him and Rose a chapter of Matthew, and told them about Paul.—Rosebud has been drawing wonderfully on the blackboard recognizable portraits of Mr. Bennoch, her beloved Charlotte Marston, and Julian. Ben Mann appeared with a letter from dear Nona [Una]; and with one from Bentley, England, modestly asking of thee a book, to publish!—The weeds in the garden now exceed belief. There is not a trace to be seen of the melon or cucumber vines, or squashes, or of the beans towards the lane. All are completely overtopped by gigantic plants, like the Anakins overrunning the Israelites. Such riot of uninvited guests I never imagined. I shall try to do something, but I fear my puny might will not effect much against such hordes. The wet and heat together produce such growths as I never saw except in Cuba. There is a real forest at the back door, between the house and the terraces. The greenness is truly English and Irish.—I picked forty ears of corn to-day.—We all met at the Alcotts' at tea-time. It was a clear, frosty air that bit me as I went in through the sunset. We had a delightful visit. Mr. Alcott was sweet and benign as possible, and Mrs. Alcott looked like Jupiter Olympus.—General Hitchcock has been gone about an hour. Baby had got me some exquisite roses from Mr. Bull's, of various shades from deep crimson to light pink, and I arranged a flat glass dish full on the Roman mosaic table, and a tall glass on the white marble table, and a glass on the Hawthorne tea-table, while the illuminated crocus [a vase] was splendid with dahlias and tiger-lilies beneath the Transfiguration. So the drawing-room looked lovelily, and a fine rose-odor was diffused. All the blinds were open and the shades up, and a glory of greenness refreshed the eyes outside on the plumy, bowery hill and lawn. In this charming apartment I received my General. The most beautiful light of life beamed from his face at my recognition of his ideas, and at any expression of mine which showed a unity with his; or rather with truth. His quiet eyes have gathered innumerable harvests, and his observations are invaluable because impersonal. [He had made a study of the alchemists, and all mystical philosophy.]—Elizabeth Hoar spent the whole of yesterday morning with me. We talked Roman and Florentine talk. She thought our house the most fascinating of mansions. She is always full of St. Paul's charity. On the Roman table was a glass dish of exquisite pond-lilies, which Una brought from the river this morning; and out of the centre of the lilies rose a tall glass of superb cardinal-flowers. On the white table was a glass dish of balsams of every shade of red, from deep crimson through scarlet to pale pink, over to purple and up to white.—Una returned to-day from Boston. She has had a nice visit, and seen many persons, all of whom expressed to her unbounded adoration of you. "Why mamma, how everybody loves, adores him!" said she. Of course.—I had a call from the dancing-master, a most debonair individual, all smile and bow and curvets. I wish you could have seen the man. It was the broad caricature of elegant manners. How funny things are! I can hear you say, "Natur' is cur'ous."—I looked in upon Edith Emerson's party, and she had a large table spread with flowers, cake, and sugar-plums, beneath the trees, and a dozen children were running and laughing round a "pretty Poll," who scolded at them all. Mrs. Emerson was flitting like the spirit of a Lady Abbess in and out, in winged lace headdress and black silk. Your letter was a bomb of joy to me last evening.—I have taken heaps of your clothes to mend. What a rag-fair your closet was—and you did not tell me! Mrs. Alcott brought me some beer made of spruce only, and it was nice. Thou shalt have thy own beer, when you come home.—Bab went to see Mrs. Alcott, and I resumed weeding. At seven I heard thirteen cannon-shots, and did not understand it. Then I possessed The Wayside all alone till near eight of the evening. Not a sound but birds' last notes was to be heard. It was strange and sweet. I thought of you in a sea-breeze with felicity. At about eight I heard little feet racing along the Larch Path, and Baby came to view. She read aloud to me some of your "Virtuoso's Collection," and then to bed, celestial.—A letter came from Mr. Bennoch. He wails like Jeremiah over our war, and longs for a letter from you. He sends cartes de visite of himself and his wife. He looks uncommonly dumpy, with a pair of winged whiskers of astounding effect, and the expression of his face is blandly seraphic.
[From my mother's diary.] January 1, 1862. Letter and wine from General Pierce. I heard Mr. Emerson's lecture on War. Furious wind—There is a lovely new moon; a golden boat.—Papa read "The Heart of Mid-Lothian" aloud in the evening.—I wish I knew whether the lines of my hand are like those of Sir Thomas Browne's.
—My husband has made an anagram of my name: "A hope while in a storm, aha!"—General Pierce arrived at noon. I went to the Town Hall to hear the Quintette Club play the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. Mrs. Alcott came with us. Bright moonlight at midnight. General Pierce remained all night.—My husband made an anagram of the General's name, "Princelie Frank."
—My husband read aloud to me "Sir Launcelot Greaves." Papa read "Anne of Geierstein."—I prepared Julian for acting Bluebeard; and Ellen Emerson lent me the gear. We worked hard all day.—We received the photographs of Una and myself. Mine of course uncomely.—Mr. Ticknor came to dine; and Mr. Burchmore [son of Stephen Burchmore, whose tales at the Custom House were so inimitable] also came.—My husband is not well. I have been very anxious about him; but he is better this evening, thank God.—My right hand is so bad that I have to bathe it in arnica all the time, for I have worn it out by making shoes [and other ornamented articles for a masquerade to which her children were to go].
[The letters to my father continue.] Ellen and Edith Emerson took tea with Una, and they went home early, at about eight. At ten I heard a man's step and a ring at the door-bell. I went to the door, and not opening it, in a voice of command asked, "Who is it?" No reply. I again fiercely inquired, "WHO IS IT?" "Is Ellen here?" pleaded the surprised, quiet voice of Mr. Emerson! I immediately unlocked my portcullis, and in the lowest tone of woman begged the Sage to excuse my peremptory challenge.—The Masquerade was worth the great trouble taken in preparing for it. Una was quite gorgeous with her glittering embroideries of silver and gold, and her exquisite turban gleaming with precious stones and pearls. The most delicate roses bloomed in her cheeks, and her eyes were like two large radiant stars. She danced with Sir Kenneth of Scotland, personated admirably by Edward Emerson, in armor of black and gold, severe and simple.—[My sister adds her own delighted reference to my mother's.] "Oh, father! I did have the most awfully jolly time at the Masquerade that ever anybody had. It was the most perfectly Arabian Nights' scene, and the Princess Scheherezade [herself] at last saw in very fact one of the scenes that her glowing fancy had painted; but being now freed from the fear of death, her mind had lost its terrific stimulus and returned to its normal condition, or perhaps was a little duller than usual from being so long overtaxed; at all events, she did not compose a new story on the occasion, as might have been expected. A great many people spoke to me of the splendor of my dress. Mamma was so delighted with the becomingness of my black velvet jacket, that she has bought me a splendid dress of the same, and has sent for a bushel of seed-pearls to trim it with. The little bill for these items is awaiting you on your desk. I shall set up for a queen for the rest of my life, and if you are still going to call me Onion, you must find out the Persian for it."
[The diary resumes.] My husband read to me his paper on his visit to Washington. Dr. George B. Loring and Mr. Pike [of Salem] came to tea in the evening. Mr. Thoreau died this morning.—The funeral services were in the church. Mr. Emerson spoke. Mr. Alcott read from Mr. Thoreau's writings. The body was in the vestibule, covered with wildflowers. We went to the grave. Thence my husband and I walked to the Old Manse and Monument. Then I went to see Annie Fields at Mr. Emerson's.—Fog and sultry. Brobdingnag dropping from eaves.—Superb morning. My husband transplanted sunflowers [of which he was immensely fond, though lilies-of-the-valley were his favorites].—My husband and Julian went to Boston; and Julian walked home in eight and a half hours [twenty miles].—Una's party took place to-night. Papa illuminated it with his presence.—Pleasant day. Papa magnanimously picked some strawberries.—I went on the hilltop with my husband all the morning [of a Sunday in June].—Our wedding-day. It is very hot and smoky. We think it the smokes of battles.—Very warm and fine. Mr. Alcott worked all day, lacking three hours [in constructing a rustic seat at the foot of our hill]. I went on the hilltop with my husband for a long time. Ineffable felicity.—A perfectly lovely day. I read "Christ the Spirit." Rose had a discourse from the Sermon on the Mount; the four verses about giving alms. We have very nice discourses [my mother's]. Una went to church.—Mr. George Bradford came to see us. Una and Julian went to the Emersons' in the evening.—Read again "Leamington Spa." Inimitable, fascinating.—Thanksgiving Day. We invited Ellery Channing, but he could not come.—Julian and I went to Boston. When I came home I found my husband looking very ill. Julian has gone on a visit to the Fields's.—My husband quite ill. Everything seems sad, when he is ill. I sewed all day.—My husband seems much better. He went up on the hill. Papa and the children played whist in the evening, while I read Charles Reade.—Celia cleared the old attic to-day. I found my dear hanging astral, that lighted my husband in his study at the Old Manse, and also Una's baby socks.—Judge Hoar came to invite my husband to tea with Mr. Eustis and Mr. Bemis and Mr. Emerson. He would not go.—I read ominous news of the war, which quite saddened and alarmed me. I read "Christ the Spirit."—I read about Alchemy and Swedenborg. Ellery Channing came to tea and spent the evening. He asked me if he might bring General Barlow to tea on Tuesday.
It was almost immediately after our return home that the first notes of the requiem about to envelop us fell through the sound of daily affairs, at long intervals, because my father, from that year, began to grow less and less vigorous.
There are many references in my mother's diaries and letters to my father's enforced monotony, and also to his gradually failing health, which, by the very instinct of loving alarm, we none of us analyzed as fatal; though, from his expression of face, if for no other reason, I judge he himself understood it perfectly. Death sat with him, at his right hand, long before he allowed his physical decline to change his mode of life. He tried to stem the tide setting against him, because it is the drowning man's part, even if hopeless. He walked a great deal upon the high hill-ridge behind the house, his dark, quietly moving figure passing slowly across the dim light of the mingled sky and branches, as seen from the large lawn, around which the embowered terraces rose like an amphitheatre. A friend tells me that, from a neighboring farm, he sometimes watched my father in an occupation which he had undertaken for his health. A cord of wood had been cut upon the hill, and he deliberately dragged it to the lower level of his dwelling, two logs at a time, by means of a rope. Along the ridge and down the winding pine-flanked path he slowly and studiously stepped, musing, looking up, stopping to solve some point of plot or morals; and meanwhile the cord of wood changed its abiding-place as surely as water may wear away a stone. But his splendid vigor paled, his hair grew snowy white, before the end. My mother wrote to him in the following manner from time to time, when he was away for change of scene:—
September 9, 1860. My crown of glory. This morning I waked to clouds and rain, but for myself I did not care, as you were not here to be depressed by it. There was a clear and golden sunset, making the loveliest shadows and lights on the meadows and across my straight path [over the field to the willows, between firs], and now the stars shine.—The way in which Concordians observe Fast is by loafing about the streets, driving up and down, and dawdling generally. No one seems to mourn over his own or his country's sins. Such behavior must disturb our Puritan fathers even on the other side of the Jordan.—In the evening Julian brought me a letter. "It is from New York," said he, "but not from papa." But my heart knew better, though I did not know the handwriting. I clashed it open, and saw "N. H.," and then, "I am entirely well," not scratched out. Thank God! . . . The sun has not shone to-day, and there is now a stormy wind that howls like a beast of prey over its dead. It is the most ominous, boding sound I ever heard.
March 15, 1862. The news of your appetite sends new life into me, and immediately increases my own.
July. I am afraid you have been in frightful despair at this rainy day. It has flooded here in sheets, with heavy thunder. But I have snatched intervals to weed. I could see and hear everything growing around me in the warm rain. The army corn has hopped up as if it were parched. The yellow lilies are reeling up to the skies. Pig-weed has become camelopard weed. . . . Alas that you should be insulted with dried-apple pie and molasses preserves! Oh, horror! I thought that you would have fresh fruit and vegetables. Pray go to a civilized house and have decent fare.—I know it will do you immense good to make this journey. You should oftener make such visits, and then you would "like things" better. Your spirits get below concert pitch by staying in one place so long at a time. I am glad Leutze keeps you on [to paint Hawthorne's portrait]. Do not come home till the middle of September. Just remember how hot and dead it is here in hot weather, and how you cannot bear it.—I do not think I have a purer pleasure and completer satisfaction, nowadays, than I am conscious of when I get you fairly away from Concord influences. I then sit down and feel rested through my whole constitution. All care seems at an end. I would not have had you here yesterday for all England. It was red-hot from morn to dewy eve. We burned without motion or sound. But you were in Boston, and not under this hill. If you wish me to be happy, you must consent to spend the dog-days at the sea.—After a cool morning followed a red-hot day. It seemed to me more intolerable than any before. You could not have borne such dead weather. The house was a refrigerator in comparison to the outdoor atmosphere.—We have had some intolerably muggy days. That is, they would have been so, if you had not been at the sea.—You have been far too long in one place without change, and I am sure you will get benefit under such pleasant conditions as being the guest of Mr. and Mrs. [Horatio] Bridge, and a witness of such new phases of life as those in Washington.—Splendors upon splendors have been heaped into this day. Loads of silky plumed corn or even sheaves of cardinal-flowers cannot be compared to the new sunshine and the magnificent air which have filled the earth from early dawn. The brook that became a broad river in the flood of yesterday made our landscape perfect. It seemed to me that I must dance and sing, and now I know it was because you were writing to me. Rose and I went down the straight path [called later the Cathedral Aisle] to look at the fresh river. I delayed to be embroidered with gold sun over and over, and through and through. At the gate I was arrested by the tower, also illustrious with the glory of the atmosphere, and very pretty indeed, lifting its nice, shapely head above the decrepit old ridge-pole of the ancient house.—I took my saw and went on a lovely wander, with a fell intent against all dead and confusing branches. How infinitely sweet it is to have access to this woodland virtue! It does me measureless good; and I am sure such air as we have on these fine days must be the effect of heroic and gentle deeds, and is a pledge that there are not tens only, but tens of thousands of heroes on this earth, keeping it in life and being.—Your letter has kindled us all up into lamps of light to-day. But I am wholly dissatisfied with your boarding-house, so full of deaf women, and violin din, and schoolgirls! Pray change your residence and have peace. You will curse your stars if you have to "bellow" for three weeks, when you so hate to speak even in your natural inward tone.—Mary has just sent me a note, saying that there is a paragraph in the paper about your being at Washington, and that the President [Lincoln] received you with especial graciousness. Stay as long as you can, and get great good. I cannot have you return yet.—The President has had a delicious palaver with a deputation of black folk, talking to them as to babies. I suspect the President is a jewel. I like him very well.—If it were not such a bore, I could wish thou mightest be President through this crisis, and show the world what can be done by using two eyes, and turning each thing upside down and inside out, before judging and acting. I should not wonder if thy great presence in Washington might affect the moral air and work good. If you like the President, then give him my love and blessing.—The President's immortal special message fills me with unbounded satisfaction. It is so almost superhumanly wise, moderate, fitting, that I am ready to believe an angel came straight from heaven to him with it. He must be honest and true, or an angel would not come to him. Mary Mann says she thinks the message feeble, and not to the point. But I think a man shows strength when he can be moderate at such a moment as this. Thou hadst better give my high regards to the President. I meant to write to him; but that mood has passed. I wish to express my obligations for the wisdom of his message.
I was once asked to write of my father's "literary methods," and the idea struck me as delightfully impossible. I wish I knew just what those methods were—I might hope to write a romance. But as the bird on the tree-bough catches here and there a glimpse of what men are about, although he hardly aspires to plough the field himself, or benefit by human labor until the harvest comes, so I have observed some facts and gathered some notions as to how my father thought out his literary work.
One method of obtaining his end was to devote himself constantly to writing, whether it brought him money or not. He might not have seemed to be working all the time, but to be enjoying endless leisure in walking through the country or the city streets. But even a bird would have had more penetration than to make such a mistake as to think this. Another wise provision was to love and pity mankind more than he scorned them, so that he never created a character which did not possess a soul—the only puppet he ever contrived of straw, "Feathertop," having an excellent soul until the end of the story. Still another method of gaining his success was to write with a noble respect for his own best effort, on which account he never felt satisfied with his writing unless he had exerted every muscle of his faculty; unless every word he had written seemed to his severest self-criticism absolutely true. He loved his art more than his time, more than his ease, and could thrust into the flames an armful of manuscript because he suspected the pages of weakness and exaggeration.
One of his methods of avoiding failure was to be rigorous in the care of his daily existence. A preponderance of frivolous interruption to a modicum of thorough labor at thinking was a system utterly foreign to him. He would not talk with a fool; as a usual thing he would not entertain a bore. If thrown with these common pests, he tried, I think, to study them. And they report that he did so very silently. But he did not waste his time, either by politely chattering with people whom he meant to sneer at after they had turned their backs, or in indulgences of loafing of all sorts which leave a narcotic stupidity in their wake. He had plenty of time, therefore, for thought, and he could think while walking either in the fresh air, or back and forth in his study. Men of success detest inactivity. It is a hardship for them to be as if dead for a single moment. So, when my father could not walk out-of doors during meditation, he moved back and forth in his room, sturdily alert, his hands clasped behind him, quietly thinking, his head either bent forward or suddenly lifted upward with a light in his gray eyes.
He wrote principally in the morning, with that absorption and regularity which characterize the labor of men who are remembered. When his health began to show signs of giving way, in 1861, it was suggested by a relative, whose intellect, strength of will, and appetite for theories were of equally splendid proportions, that my father only needed a high desk at which to stand when writing, to be restored to all his pristine vigor. With his usual tolerance of possible wisdom he permitted such a desk to be arranged in the tower-study at The Wayside; but with his inexorable contempt for mistakes of judgment he never, after a brief trial, used it for writing. Upon his simple desk of walnut wood, of which he had nothing to complain, although it barely served its purpose, like most of the inexpensive objects about him, was a charming. Italian bronze ink-stand, over whose cover wrestled the infant Hercules in the act of strangling a goose—in friendly aid of "drivers of the quill." My father wrote with a gold pen, and I can hear now, as it seems, the rapid rolling of his chirography over the broad page, as he formed his small, rounded, but irregular letters, when filling his journals, in Italy. He leaned very much on, his left arm while writing, often holding the top of the manuscript book lovingly with his left hand, quite in the attitude of a boy. At the end of a sentence or two he would sometimes unconsciously bow his head, as if bidding good-by to a thought well rid of for the present in its new garb of ink.
In writing he had little care for paper and ink. To be sure, his large, square manuscript was firmly bound into covers, and the paper was usually of a neutral blue; and when I say that he had little care for his mechanical materials I mean that he had no servile anxiety as to how they looked to another person, for I am convinced that he himself loved his manuscript books. There was a certain air of humorous respect about the titles, which he wrote with a flourish, as compared with the involved minuteness of the rest of the script, and the latter covers every limit of the page in a devoted way. His letters were formed obscurely, though most fascinatingly, and he was almost frolicsome in his indifference to the comfort of the compositor. Still he had none of the frantic reconsiderations of Scott or Balzac. If he made a change in a word it was while it was fresh, and no one could obliterate what he had written with a more fearless blot of the finger, or one which looked more earnest and interesting. There was no scratching nor quiddling in the manner with which he fought for his art. Each day he thought out the problems he had set himself before beginning to write, and if a word offended him, as he recorded the result, he thrust it back into chaos before the ink had dried. I think that the manuscript of "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" is an exception, to some extent. There are many written self-communings and changes in it. My father was declining in health while it was being evolved. But yet, in "The Dolliver Romance," the last work of all in process of development, written while he was physically breaking down, we see the effect of will and heroic attempt. It is the most beautiful of his compositions, because his mind was greater at that time than ever, and because death could not frighten him, and in its very face he desired to complete the proof of his whole power, as the dying soldier rises to the greatest act of his life, having given his life-blood for his country's cause. Though the script of this manuscript is extremely difficult to read, the speculation had evidently been done before taking up the pen. I am not sure but that my father sometimes destroyed first drafts, of which his family knew nothing. Indeed, we have his own word for it that "he passed the day in writing stories and the night in burning them." Nevertheless, his tendency we know to have been that of thinking out his plots and scenes and characters, and transcribing them rapidly without further change.
Since he did not write anything wholly for the pleasure of creative writing, but had moral motives and perfect artistic harmony to consider, he could not have indulged in the spontaneous, passionate effusions which are the substance of so much other fiction. He was obliged to train his mind to reflection and judgment, and therefore he never tasted luxury of any kind. The mere enjoyment of historical settings in all their charm and richness, rehabilitated for their own sake or for worldly gain; and that of caricatures of the members of the human family, because they are so often so desperately funny; the gloating over realistic pictures of life as it is found, because life as it is found is a more absorbing study than that of geology or chemistry; the tasting of redundant scenes of love and intrigue, which flatter the reader like experiences of his own,—these excesses he was not willing to admit to his art, a magic that served his literary palate with still finer food. He wrote with temperateness, and in pitying love of human nature, in the instinctive hope of helping it to know and redeem itself. His quality was philosophy, his style forgiveness. And for this temperate and logical and laconic work—giving nothing to the world for its mere enjoyment, but going beyond all that to ennoble each reader by his perfect renunciation of artistic claptrap and artistic license—for this aim he needed a mental method that could entirely command itself, and, when necessary, weigh and gauge with the laborious fidelity of a coal-surveyor, before the account was rendered with pen and ink upon paper. When he brought within his art the personality of a human devil, he honored its humanity, and proved that the real devil is quite another thing. In fact, perhaps he would not have permitted the above epithet. In one of her letters my mother remarks, "I think no sort of man can be called a devil, unless it be a slanderer."
Though he dealt with romance he never gave the advantage of an inch to the wiles of bizarre witchery, the grotesque masks of wanton caprice in imagination—those elements which exhibit the intoxication of talent. His terrors were those of our own hearts; his playfulness had the merit of the sunlight. In short, he was artistically con-. secrated, guiding the forces he used with the reins of truth; and he could do this unbrokenly because he governed his character by Christian fellowship. If he shrank from unnecessary interruptions, which jarred the harmony of his artistic life, he nevertheless met courteously any that were to him inevitable. Could he have written with the heart's blood of old Hepzibah if he had failed to put his own shoulder to the domestic wheel, on the plea that it was too deep in the slough of disaster to command his assistance? He did not dread besmirching his hands with any affairs sent him by God.
"The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy;" and the joy and the bitterness of creative work are not intermeddled with as much as one might suppose by the outside weather of praise or non-comprehension, if the artist is great enough to keep his private self-respect. I am of the opinion that my father enjoyed his own indifference to his accomplished work, yet knew its value to the minutest ray of the diamond; that he had sharply challenged the enchantment of his first conception, and heard the right watchword, yet recognized that no human conception can fathom the marvels of the superhuman. I believe that the men we admire most, in the small group of great minds, are sufficiently necromantic to look two ways at once—to appreciate and to condemn themselves. So my father heard himself praised with composure, and blamed his skill rejoicingly.
Some passages from a copy of an article in "The North British Review" of Edinburgh during 1851 were capable of filling a wife's heart with exultation, and my mother quotes: "'The most striking features in these tales are the extraordinary skill and masterly care which are displayed in their composition. . . . It would be difficult to pick out a page which could be omitted without loss to the development of the narrative and the idea, which are always mutually illustrative to a degree not often attained in any species of modern art. . . . His language, though extraordinarily accurate, is always light and free. . . . We know of nothing equal to it, in its way [the portrayal of Dimmesdale], in the whole circle of English literature;' and much more in the same superlative vein."
But if my father could weigh his artistic success with the precision of a coal-heaver, who will ever be able to weigh and gauge the genius which carries methods and philosophies and aims into an atmosphere of wonderful power, where the sunlight and the color and the lightning and frowning clouds transfigure the familiar things of life in glorious haste and inspiration? While following his rules and habits my father was constantly attended by the rapturous spirit of such a genius, transmuting swarming reality into a few symbolic types.
Another way in which he effected telling labor was to conserve his force in the matter of wrangling. He kept his temper. He was not without the fires of life, but he banked them. He did not permit disgust at others or at the adverse destiny of the moment to absorb his vitality, by throwing it off in long harangues of rage, long seasons of the sulks. There are no such good calculators as men of consummate genius. They dread the squandering of energy of an Edgar Allan Poe or of a boiling Walter Savage Landor. Temperateness implies the control of fierce elements; and in all management of volcanic power we perceive sweetness and beauty.
When my father handled sin, it became uncontaminating tragedy; when he handled vulgarity, as in "The Artist of the Beautiful," it became inevitable pathos; when he handled suspicion, as in "The Birthmark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter," it evolved devoted trust.
The frequent question as to whether Hawthorne drew from his family or friends in portraying human nature shows an unfamiliarity with literary art. Portraiture is not art, in literature, though a great artist includes it, if he chooses, in the category of his productions. To any one permeated by the atmosphere of art (though not quite of it) as I was, it seems strange that a truly artistic work should be thought to be an imitation of individual models. The distance of inspiration is the distance of a heavenly fair day, or of a night made luminous by mystery, giving a new quality and a new species of delight to facts about us. In reading the sympathetic merriment of the introduction to "The Scarlet Letter," and then the story itself, we perceive the difference between the charm of a Dutch-like realism and the thrill of imaginative creation, which uses material made incomprehensibly wonderful by God in order to make it comprehensibly wonderful to men. But, of course, the material thus transmuted by the distance of inspiration is only new and fine to men who have ears to hear and eyes to see. My father never imitated the men and women he met, nor man nor woman, and such conceptions of his way would bring us to a dense forest of mistake.
In the afternoon my father went, if practicable, into the open spaces of nature, or at least into the fresh air, to gather inspiration for his work. He had no better or stronger or more lavish aids than air and landscape, unless I except his cigar. He never, I think, smoked but one cigar a day, but it was of a quality to make up for this self-denial, and I am sure that he reserved his most puzzling literary involutions for the delicious half-hour of this dainty enjoyment.
In 1861 and thereafter he traversed, as has been said, the wooded hilltop behind his home, which was reached by various pretty climbing paths that crept under larches and pines, and scraggy, goat-like apple-trees. We could catch sight of him going back and forth up there, with now and then a pale blue gleam of sky among the trees, against which his figure passed clear. Along this path, made by his own steps only, he thought out the tragedy of "Septimius Felton," who buried the young English officer at the foot of one of the large pines which my father saw at each return. At one end of the hilltop path was a thicket of birch and maple trees; and at the end towards the west and the village was the open brow of the hill, sloping rapidly to the Lexington Road, and overlooking meadows and distant wood-ranges, some of the cottages of humble folk, and the neighboring huge, owlet-haunted elms of Alcott's lawn. Along this path in spring huddled pale blue violets, of a blue that held sunlight, pure as his own eyes. Masses also of sweet-fern grew at the side of these abundant bordering violets, and spacious apartments of brown-floored pine groves flanked the sweet-fern, or receded a little before heaps of blackberry branches and simple flowers. My father's violets were the wonder of the year to us. We never saw so many of these broad, pale-petaled ones anywhere else, until the year of his death, when they greeted him with their celestial color as he was borne into Sleepy Hollow, as if in remembrance of his long companionship on The Wayside hill.
It is well with those who forget themselves in generous interest for the hopes, possibilities, and spiritual loftiness of human beings all over the world. Such men may remain poor, may never in life have the full praise of their fellows; but they could easily give testimony as to the delights of praise from God,—that which comes to our lips after little spiritual victories, like spring water on a hot day, and of which the workers in noble thought or adventure drink so deep. These representative men, if they cheer their fancy with fair thoughts of wide public approbation, choose the undying sort, that blooms like the edelweiss beyond the dust of sudden success. Hawthorne worked hard and nobly. Not even the mechanic who toils for his family all day, all week-days of the year, and never swears at wife or child, toils more nobly than this sensitive, warm-hearted, brave, recluse, much-seeing man. He teaches the spiritual greatness of the smallest fidelity, and the spiritual destruction in the most familiar temptations. The Butterfly which he describes floats everywhere through his pages, and it is broken wherever the heart of one of his characters breaks, for there sin has clutched its victim. It floats about us lovingly to attract our attention to higher things; and I am sure the radiant delicacy of the winged creature throbbed on a flower near David Swan, as he slept honestly through the perils of evil.
Every touch of inner meaning that he gives speaks of his affection, his desire to bring us accounts of what he has learned of God's benevolence, in his long walks on the thoroughfares and in the byways, and over the uncontaminated open country, of human hope. Poverty, trouble, sin, fraudulent begging, stupidity, conceit,—nothing forced him absolutely to turn away his observation of all these usual rebuffs to sympathy, if his inconvenience could be made another's gain. But he was firm with a manliness that was uncringing before insolence, and did not shrink from speaking home truths that pruned the injurious branches of the will; yet he never could be insulting, because he had no selfish end. As a comrade he led to higher perceptions and moods. The men who chatted with him in the Salem Custom House, the Liverpool Consulate, and elsewhere, never forgot that he was the most inspiring man they had known. All this was work. The idle man, lazy in a drunken carouse, is in a world of his own. His sphere stretches out no connecting tendrils to the spheres of others; he seems to Us dead in spirit; he will tell you he believes in no one's true friendship, and wishes for no companionship; we do not know how to touch his heart, nor in what language to make him hear when we call,—he is in Mars. But the sentinel, still as marble, or moving like a well-adjusted machine that will not defy law—he stirs us by his energy, his laboring vigilance. His care for others would make him surrender his life at once. The trusted soldier has left selfishness and cowardice on the first tenting-ground, and works hard, though he stands statue-like. It is his business to be of use, and he is never useless. So with a great artist. He is brother to gentleman or churl. Hawthorne had not an atom of the poison of contempt. As I have said before, if he did not love stupidity, he forgave it.
He was fond of using his hands for work, too; and he had skill in whatever he did. His activity of this manual sort may be inferred from the fact that when a young man he gradually whittled away one of the leaves of his writing-table, while musing over his stories. He did not know, unpleasantly, that he was doing it. What fun he must have had! Think of the rich scenery of thought that spread about him, the people, the subtle motives, the eerie truths, the entrancing outlooks into divine beauty, that entertained him as his sharp blade carved and sliced his table, which gladly gave itself up to such destruction! When he was writing "The Scarlet Letter," as Julian's nurse Dora long delighted to tell, his wife with her dainty care in sewing was making the little boy a shirt of the finest linen, and was putting in one sleeve, while the other lay on the table. Dora saw Hawthorne, who was reading, lay down his book and take up something which he proceeded to cut into shreds with some small scissors that exactly suited him.
"Where can the little sleeve be which I finished, and wished to sew in here, my love?" said his blissful wife. Hawthorne (blissfully thinking of his novel) only half heard the question; but on the table was a heap of delicate linen shavings, and the new scissors testified over them.
His jack-knife was a never-ending source of pleasure, and he was seldom without the impulse, if a good opportunity offered, to subject a sapling to it for a whistle, or to make some other amusing trifle, or to cut a bit of licorice with a slow, sure movement that made the black lump most acceptable.
His mind was never in a stound. It was either observing, or using observations. Of course he lost his way while walking, and destroyed commonplace things while musing; and the world hung just so much the less heavily upon his moving pinions of thought.
His diligence of mind is reported of him at an early age. His sister, Ebie Hawthorne, gave me a bust of John Wesley, in clerical white bib, and of a countenance much resembling Alcott's, even to the long, white, waving hair. Its very aspect cried out, though never so mercifully, "My sermon is endless!"
Aunt Ebie, hunching her shoulders in mirthful appreciation, said,"Nathaniel always hated it!"
Why not? At four years of age he had already had enough of Wesley; and my aunt, with a rejoicing laugh, described how, not being able to induce his elders to act upon his abhorrence of the melancholy, tinted object, at last, in dead of winter, he filled it with water through a hole in the pedestal, which had revealed its hollowness. He then stood the bust upside down against the wall in a cold place, confidently awaiting the freezing of the water, in which event it was to be hoped that the puppet sermonizer would burst, like a pitcher under similar odds. But John Wesley never burst, to the disgust of a broader mind and the offended wonder of childish eyes.
A few words from a letter of Emerson's to my mother, written after my father's death, will give a true impression of the friendship which existed strongly between the two lovers of their race, who, though they did not have time to meet often, may be said to have been together through oneness of aim:—
CONCORD, 11th July [1864].
DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,—Guests and visitors prevented me from writing you, last evening, to thank you for your note, and to say how much pleasure it gives me, that you find succor and refreshment in sources so pure and lofty. The very selection of his images proves Behman poet as well as saint, yet a saint first, and poet through sanctity. It is the true though severe test to put the Teacher to,—to try if his solitary lessons meet our case. And for these thoughts and experiences of which you speak, their very confines and approaches lift us out of the world. I have twice lately proposed to see you, and once was on my way, and unexpectedly prevented. I have had my own pain in the loss of your husband. He was always a mine of hope to me, and I promised myself a rich future in achieving at some day, when we should both be less engaged to tyrannical studies and habitudes, an unreserved intercourse with him. I thought I could well wait his time and mine for what was so well worth waiting. And as he always appeared to me superior to his own performances, I counted this yet untold force an insurance of a long life. Though sternly disappointed in the manner and working, I do not hold the guarantee less real. But I must use an early hour to come and see you to say more.
If my father expected a full renewal of comradeship with American men of his own circle, and even the deeper pleasure of such friendship in a maturer prime alluded to by Emerson, circumstances sadly intervened. The thunderstorm of the war was not the only cause of his retiring more into himself than he had done in Europe, although he felt that sorrow heavily. Or perhaps I might say with greater correctness that when he appeared, it was without the joyous air that he had lately displayed in England, among his particular friends, when his literary work was over for the time being after the finishing of "Monte Beni." I remember that he often attended the dinners of the Saturday Club. A bill of fare of one of the banquets, but belonging to an early date, 1852, read: "Tremont House. Paran Stevens, Proprietor. Dinner for Twelve Persons, at three o'clock." A superb menu follows, wherein canvas-back ducks and madeira testify to the satisfaction felt by the gentlemen whose names my father penciled in the order in which they sat; Mr. Emerson, Mr. Clough, Mr. Ellery Channing, Mr. Charles Sumner, Mr. Theodore Parker, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Greenough, Mr. Samuel Ward, and several others making the shining list. His keen care for the health of his forces induced him to hold back from visits even to his best friends, if he were very deeply at work, or paying more rapidly than usual from his capital of physical strength, which had now begun to sink. Lowell tried to fascinate him out of seclusion, in the frisky letter given in "A Study of Hawthorne;" but very likely did not gain his point, since Longfellow and others had infrequent success in similar attempts.
I chanced to discover the impression my father made upon Dr. Holmes, as we sat beside each other at a dinner given by the Papyrus Club of Boston more than fifteen years ago, on ladies' night. That same evening I dashed down a verbatim account of part of our conversation, which I will insert here.
He passed his card over to my goblet, and took mine. "That is the simplest way, is it not?" he asked.
"I was just going to introduce myself," said I. Then Mrs. ElizabethStoddard sat down by me, and I turned to speak with her.
In a moment Dr. Holmes held my card forward again. "Now let me see!" he said.
"And you don't know who I am, yet?" I asked.
He smiled, gazed at the card through his eyeglasses, and leaned towards me hesitatingly. "And whatwasyour name?" he ventured.
"Rose Hawthorne."
He started, and beamed. "There!—Ithought—but you understand how—if I had made a mistake—Could anything have been worse if you hadnotbeen? I was looking, you know, for the resemblance. Some look I seemed to discover, but "——
"The complexion," I helped him by interrupting, "is entirely different."
He went on: "I was—no, I cannot say I was intimate with your father, as others may have been; and yet a very delightful kind of intercourse existed between us. I did not see him often; but when I did, I had no difficulty in making him converse with me. My intercourse with your mother was also of a very gratifying nature." To this I earnestly replied respecting the admiration of my parents for him. "I delighted in suggesting a train of thought to your father," Dr. Holmes ran on, in his exquisitely cultured way, and with theespritwhich has surprised us all by its loveliness. "Perhaps he would not answer for some time. Sometimes it was a long while before the answer came, like an echo; but it was sure to come. It was as if the high mountain range, you know!—The house-wall therewould have rapped out a speedy, babbling response at once; butthe mountain!—I not long ago was visiting the Custom House at Salem, the place in which your father discovered those mysterious records that unfolded into 'The Scarlet Letter.' Ah, how suddenly and easily genius renders the spot rare and full of a great and new virtue (however ordinary and bare in reality) whenithas looked and dwelt! A light falls upon the place not of land or sea! How much he did for Salem! Oh, the purple light, the soft haze, that now rests upon our glaring New England! He hasdoneit, and it will never be harsh country again. How perfectly he understood Salem!"
"Salem is certainly very remarkable," I responded.
"Yes, certainly so," he agreed. "Strange folk! Salem had a type of itself in its very harbor. The ship America, at Downer's wharf, grew old and went to pieces in that one spot, through years. Bit by bit it fell to atoms, but never ceded itself to the new era. So with Salem, precisely. It is the most delightful place to visit for this reason, because it so carefully retains the spirit of the past; and 'The House of the Seven Gables'!" Dr. Holmes smiled, well knowing the intangibility of that house.
Said I: "The people are rich in extraordinary oddities. At every turn a stranger is astonished by some intense characteristic. One feels strongly its different atmosphere."
"And their very surroundings bear them out!" Dr. Holmes cried, vivacious in movement and glance as a boy. "Where else are the little door-yards that hold their glint of sunlight so tenaciously, like the still light of wine in a glass? Year after year it is ever there, the golden square of precious sunbeams, held on the palm of the jealous garden-patch, as we would hold the vial of radiant wine in our hand! Do you know?" He so forcibly appealed to my ability to follow his thought that I seemed to know anything he wished. "I hope I shall not be doing wrong," he continued,—"I hope not,—in asking if you have any preference among your father's books; supposing you read them, which I believe is by no means always the case with the children of authors."
"I am surprised by that remark. After the age of fifteen, when I read all my father's writings except 'The Scarlet Letter,' which I was told to reserve till I was eighteen, I did not study his books thoroughly till several years ago, in order to cherish the enjoyment of fresh effects,—except 'The Marble Faun,' which I think I prefer."
He answered: "I feel that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the greatest. It will be, it seems to me, the one upon which his future renown will rest."
I admitted that I also considered it the greatest. In the above conversation I was entranced by what I have experienced often: the praise of my father's personality or work (in many cases by people who have never met him) is not only the courtesy that might be thought decorous towards a member of his family, or the bright zest of a student of literature, but also the glowing ardor of a creature feeling itself a part of him in spirit; one who longs for the human sweetness of the grasp of his hand; who longs to hear him speak, to meet his fellowship, but finds the limit reached in saying, at a distance of time and space, "I love him!" I have lowered my eyes before the emotion to be observed in the faces of some of his readers who were trying to reach him through a spoken word of eagerness. Very few have seen him, but how glad I am to cross their paths! Dr. Holmes's warmth of enthusiasm was so radiant that it could not be forgotten. It lit every word with the magic of the passion we feel for what is perfect, unique, and beyond our actual possession, now and forever.
Towards the last an unacknowledged fear took hold of my mother's consciousness, so that she gave every evidence of foretelling my father's death without once presenting the possibility to herself. This little note of mine, dated April 4, 1864, six weeks before he died, shows the truth:—
"I am so glad that you are getting on so well; but for your own sake I think you had better stay somewhere till you get entirely well. Mamma thought from the last letter from Mr. Ticknor that you were not so well; but Julian explained to her that, as Mr. Ticknor said in every line that you were better, he did not see how it could possibly be. I do not either."
From the first year of our return to America letters and visitors from abroad had interrupted the sense of utter quiet; and many friends called in amiable pilgrimage. But a week of monotony is immensely long, and a few hours of zest are provokingly short. Nature and seclusion are welcome when, at our option, we can bid them good-by. All England is refreshing with the nearness of London. In the rush of cares and interruptions which we suppose will kill the opportunity, while we half lose ourselves and our intellectual threads of speculation, the flowers of inspiration suddenly blow, the gems flash color. This is a pleasant, but not always an essential satisfaction; yet, in my father's case, I think his life suffered with peculiar severity from the sudden clashing aside of manly interests which he had already denied to himself, or which circumstances had denied to him, with the utmost persistence ever known in so perceptive a genius. He undoubtedly had a large store of inherited experiences to draw upon; he was richly endowed with these, and could sit and walk alone, year after year (except for occasional warm reunions with friends of the cleanest joviality), and feel the intercourse with the world, of his ancestors, stirring in his veins. He tells us that this was ghostly pastime; but it is an inheritance that makes a man well equipped and self-sustained, for all that. When too late, the great men about him realized that they had estimated his presence very cheaply, considering his worth. Should he frequently have sought them out, and asked if they were inclined to spare a chat to Hawthorne; or should they have insisted upon strengthening their greatness from his inimitably pure and unerring perception and his never weary imagination? It is impossible to ignore the superiority of his simplicity of truth over the often labored searchings for it of the men and women he knew, whose very diction shows the straining after effect, the desire to enchant themselves with their own minds, which is the bane of intellect, or else the uneasy skip and jump of a wit that dares not keep still. As time ripens, these things are more and more apparent to all, as they were to him. In a manner similar to Emerson's, who spoke of his regret for losing the chance of associating fully with my father, Longfellow wrote to my mother:—
CAMBRIDGE, June 23, 1864.
DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,—I have long been wishing to write to you, to thank you for your kind remembrance, in sending me the volume of Goldsmith, but I have not had the heart to do it. There are some things that one cannot say; and I hardly need tell you how much I value your gift, and how often I shall look at the familiar name on the blank leaf—a name which, more than any other, links me to my youth.
I have written a few lines trying to express the impressions of May 23, and I venture to send you a copy of them. I had rather no one should see them but yourself; as I have also sent them to Mr. Fields for the "Atlantic." I feel how imperfect and inadequate they are; but I trust you will pardon their deficiencies for the love I bear his memory. More than ever I now regret that I postponed from day to day coming to see you in Concord, and that at last I should have seen your house only on the outside! With deepest sympathy, Yours truly,
To go back to our Concord amusements. Mr. Bright caroled out a greeting not very long after our return:—
WEST DERBY, September 8, 1860.
MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,—Of course not!—I knew you 'd never write to me, though you declared you would. Probably by this time you've forgotten us all, and sent us off into mistland with Miriam and Donatello; possibly all England looks by this time nothing but mistland, and you believe only in Concord and its white houses, and the asters on the hill behind your house, and the pumpkins in the valley below. Well, at any rate I have not forgotten you or yours; and I feel that, now you have left us, a pleasure has slipped out of our grasp. Do you remember all our talks in that odious office of yours; my visits to Rock-ferry; my one visit, all in the snow, to Southport; our excursions into Wales, and through the London streets, and to Rugby and to Cambridge; and how you plucked the laurel at Addison's Bilton, and found the skeleton in Dr. Williams's library; and lost your umbrella in those dark rooms in Trinity; and dined at Richmond, and saw the old lady looking like a maid of honor of Queen Charlotte's time; and chatted at the Cosmopolitan; and heard Tom Hughes sing the "Tight Little Island;" and—But really I must stop, and can only trust that now at last you will be convinced of my existence, and remember your promise, and write me a good long letter about everything and everybody. "The Marble Faun" [manuscript] is now in process of binding. The photograph came just as I had begun to despair of it, and I lost not a moment in putting the precious manuscript into my binder's hands. I've been for a week's holiday at Tryston, and met several friends of yours: Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hughes, Mrs. and Miss Procter, Mrs. Milnes. The latter spoke most affectionately about you. And so did Mrs. Ainsworth, whom I met two days ago. But she says you promised to write her the story of the Bloody Footstep ["The Ancestral Footstep "], and have never done it. I'm very fond of Mrs. Ainsworth; she talks such good nonsense. She told us gravely, the other day, that the Druses were much more interesting than the Maronites, because they sounded like Drusus and Rome, whereas the Maronites were only like marrons glaces, etc. The H——s are at Norris Green. Mrs. H. is becoming "devout," and will go to church on Wednesdays and Fridays. I want news from your side. What is Longfellow about? Tell me about "Leaves of Grass," which I saw at Milnes's. Who and what is the author; and who buy and who read the audacious (I use mildest epithet) book? I must now bring this letter to an end. Emerson will have forgotten so humble a person as I am; but I can't forget the pleasant day I spent with him. Ask Longfellow to come over here very soon. And for yourself, ever believe me most heartily yours,