OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later assembled in this same room—Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow, listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, ProfessorEvangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and he retained, as professor, some of his early habits—seldom being seated while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has related in a charming article on Fay House, written for theHarvard Graduates Magazine(from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old place, printed in a recent number of theRadcliffe Magazine, many of the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company as peculiar to one oranother of them, the professor innocently calling his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be startling.
During the latter part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had with her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had been so famous a beauty in her youth that, on the occasion of her wedding, Harvard students thronged the aisles and climbed the pews of old Christ Church to see her. The wedding receptions of Mrs. Greenough's daughter and granddaughter were held, too, in Fay House. This latter girl was the fascinating and talented Lily Greenough, who was later a favourite at the court of Napoleon and Eugénie, and who, after the death of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, was married in this house to Monsieur De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that timeDanish Minister to the United States, and now minister at Paris. Her daughter, Suzanne Moulton, who has left her name scratched with a diamond on one of the Fay House windows, is now the Countess Suzanne Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Denmark.
In connection with the Fays' life in this house occurred one thing which will particularly send the building down into posterity, and will link for all time Radcliffe and Harvard traditions. For it was in the upper corner room, nearest the Washington Elm, that Doctor Samuel Gilman, Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote "Fair Harvard," while a guest in this hospitable home, during the second centennial celebration of the college on the Charles. Radcliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as they point out to visitors this room and its facsimile copy of the famous song. Yetthey have plenty of pleasant things of their own to remember.
Just one of these, taken at random from among the present writer's own memories of pretty happenings at Fay House, will serve: During Duse's last tour in this country, the famous actress came out one afternoon, as many a famous personage does, to drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Agassiz in the stately old parlour, where Mrs. Whitman's famous portrait of the president of Radcliffe College vies in attractiveness with the living reality graciously presiding over the Wednesday afternoon teacups. As it happened, there was a scant attendance at the tea on this day of Duse's visit. She had not been expected, and so it fell out that some two or three girls who could speak French or Italian were privileged to do the honours of the occasion to the great actress whom they had longworshipped from afar. Duse was in one of her most charming moods, and she listened with the greatest attention to her young hostesses' laboured explanations concerning the college and its ancient home.
The best of it all, from the enthusiastic girl-students' point of view, was, however, in the dark-eyed Italienne's mode of saying farewell. As she entered her carriage—to which she had been escorted by this little group—she took from her belt a beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias, and violets. And as the smart coachman flicked the impatient horses with his whip, Duse threw the girls the precious flowers. Those who caught a camellia felt, of course, especially delighted, for it was as the Dame aux Camellias that Duse had been winning for weeks the plaudits of admiring Boston. My own share of thelargesse consisted of a few fresh, sweet violets, which I still have tucked away somewhere, together with one of the great actress's photographs that bears the date of the pleasant afternoon hour passed with her in the parlour where the "Brothers and Sisters" met.
One of the weddings noted in our Fay House chapter was that of Sophia Dana to George Ripley, an event which was celebrated August 22, 1827, in the stately parlour of the Cambridge mansion, the ceremony being performed by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The time between the date of their marriage and the year 1840, when Mr. and Mrs. Ripley "discovered" the milk-farm in West Roxbury, which was afterward to be developed through their efforts into the most remarkable socialistic experiment America has ever known,represented for the young people joined together in what is now the home of Radcliffe College some dozen years of quiet parsonage life in Boston.
The later years of George Ripley's life held for him a series of disappointments before which his courage and ideals never failed. When the young student left the Harvard Divinity School, he was appointed minister over a Unitarian parish which was gathered for him at the corner of Pearl and Purchase Streets, Boston. Here his ministrations went faithfully on, but inasmuch as his parishioners failed to take any deep interest in the social questions which seemed to him of most vital concern, he sent them, in the October of 1840, a letter of resignation, which they duly accepted, thus leaving Ripley free to enter upon the experiment so dear to him.
The Ripleys, as has been said, had already discovered Brook Farm, a pleasant place, varied in contour, with pine woods close at hand, the Charles River within easy distance, and plenty of land—whether of a sort to produce paying crops or not they were later to learn. That winter Ripley wrote to Emerson: "We propose to take a small tract of land, which, under skilful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm, will be adequate to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with this a school or college in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture." Ripley himself assumed the responsibility for the management and success of the undertaking, and about the middle of April, 1841, he took possession with his wife and sister and some fifteen others, including Hawthorne, of the farmhouse, which, with a large barn, was already on the estate.
BROOK FARM, WEST ROXBURY, MASS.BROOK FARM, WEST ROXBURY, MASS.
The first six months were spent in "getting started," especially in the matter of the school, of which Mrs. Ripley was largely in charge, and it was not until early fall—September 29—that the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was organised as a kind of joint stock company, not incorporated.
A seeker after country quiet and beauty might easily be as much attracted to-day by the undulating acres of Brook Farm as were those who sought it sixty years ago as a refuge from social discouragement. The brook still babbles cheerily as it threads its way through the meadows, and there are still pleasant pastures and shady groves on the large estate. The only one of the community buildings which is still standing, however, is that now known asthe Martin Luther Orphan Home. This house was built at the very start of the community life by Mrs. A. G. Alford, one of the members of the colony.
The building was in the form of a Maltese cross with four gables, the central space being taken by the staircase. It contained only about half a dozen rooms, and probably could not have accommodated more than that number of residents. It is said to have been the prettiest and best furnished house on the place, but an examination of its simple construction will confirm the memory of one of its occupants, who remarked that contact with nature was here always admirably close and unaffected. From the rough dwelling, which resembled an inexpensive beach cottage, to out-doors was hardly a transition, it is chronicled, and at all seasons the external and internal temperatures closely corresponded. Untillately the cottage wore its original dark-brown colour; and it is still the best visible remnant of the early days, and gives a pleasant impression of what the daily life of the association must have been.
Gay and happy indeed were the dwellers in this community during the early stages of its development. Ripley's theory of the wholesomeness of combined manual and intellectual work ruled everywhere. He himself donned the farmer's blouse, the wide straw hat, and the high boots in which he has been pictured at Brook Farm; and whether he cleaned stables, milked cows, carried vegetables to market, or taught philosophy and discussed religion, he was unfailingly cheerful and inspiring.
Mrs. Ripley was in complete accord with her husband on all vital questions, and as the chief of the Wash-Room Group worked blithely eight or ten hours a day. Whetherthis devotion to her husband's ideals grew out of her love for him, or whether she was really persuaded of the truth of his theory, does not appear. In later life it is interesting to learn that she sought in the Church of Rome the comfort which Ripley's transcendentalism was not able to afford her. When she died in 1859 she had held the faith of Rome for nearly a dozen years, and, curiously enough, was buried as a Catholic from that very building in which her husband had preached as a Unitarian early in their married life, the church having in the interim been purchased by the Catholics. With just one glimpse of the later Ripley himself, we must leave this interesting couple. In 1866, when, armed with a letter of introduction from Emerson, the original Brook Farmer sought Carlyle (who had once described him as "a Socinian minister whohad left his pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions"), and Carlyle greeted him with a long and violent tirade against our government, Ripley sat quietly through it all, but when the sage of Chelsea paused for breath, calmly rose and left the house, saying no word of remonstrance.
It is, of course, however, in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the "Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery, the surroundings, andeven trivial details are presented with a well-nigh faultless accuracy.
The characters, as I have said, are not easily traceable, but even in this respect Hawthorne was something of a photographer. Zenobia seems a blend of Margaret Fuller and of Mrs. Barlow, who as Miss Penniman was once a famous Brookline beauty of lively and attractive disposition. In the strongest and most repellant character of the novel, Hollingsworth, Hawthorne seems to have incorporated something of the fierce earnestness of Brownson and the pathetic zeal of Ripley. And those who best know Brook Farm are able to find in the book reflections of other well-known members of the community. For the actual life of the place, however, readers cannot do better than peruse Lindsay Swift's recent delightful work,"Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors."
There was, we learn here, a charming happy-go-luckiness about the whole life. Partly from necessity, partly from choice, the young people used to sit on the stairs and on the floor during the evening entertainments. Dishes were washed and wiped to the tune of "Oh, Canaan, Bright Canaan," or some other song of the time. When about their work the women wore short skirts with knickerbockers; the water-cure and the starving-cure both received due attention at the hands of some of the members of the household; at table the customary formula was, "Is the butter within the sphere of your influence?" And very often the day's work ended in a dance, a walk to Eliot's Pulpit, or a moonlight hour on the Charles!
During the earlier years the men, whowere in excess of the young women in point of numbers, helped very largely in the household labours. George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles Dana, who afterward founded theNew York Sun, organised a band of griddle-cake servitors composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the Community!" One legend, which has the air of probability, records that a student confessed his passion while helping his sweetheart at the sink. Of love there was indeed not a little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to have made much havoc in the Community, and though very little mismating is to be traced to the intimacy of the life there, fourteen marriages have been attributed to friendships begun at Brook Farm, and there was even one wedding there, that of John Orvis to John Dwight's sister, Marianne. At this simple ceremony William Henry Channing was the minister, and John Dwight made a speech of exactly five words.
Starting with about fifteen persons, the numbers at the farm increased rapidly, though never above one hundred and twenty people were there at a time. It is estimated, however, that about two hundred individuals were connected with the Community from first to last. Of these all the well-known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, one is to count among the "Farmers" Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very young girl was a teacher in the infant department of the school.
Yet though the Farmers have almost all passed beyond, delicious anecdotes about them are all the time coming to light. There is one story of "Sam" Larned which is almost too good to be true. Larned, it is said, steadily refused to drink milk onthe ground that his relations with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves, and when it was pointed out to him that he ought on the same principle to abandon shoes, he is said to have made a serious attempt to discover some more moral type of footwear.
And then there is another good story of an instance when Brook Farm hospitality had fatal results. An Irish baronet, Sir John Caldwell, fifth of that title, and treasurer-general at Canada, after supping with the Community on its greatest delicacy, pork and beans, returned to the now departed Tremont House in Boston, and died suddenly of apoplexy!
This baronet's son was wont later to refer to the early members of the Community as "extinct volcanoes of transcendental nonsense and humbuggery." But no witty sallies of this sort are able tolessen in the popular mind the reverence with which this Brook Farm essay in idealism must ever be held. For this Community, when all is said, remains the most successful and the most interesting failure the world has ever known.
Any account of Brook Farm which should neglect to dwell upon the part played in the community life by Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, would be almost like the play of "Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark left out. For although Margaret Fuller never lived at Brook Farm—was, indeed, only an occasional visitor there—her influence pervaded the place, and, as we feel from reading the "Blithedale Romance," she was really, whether absent or present, the strongest personality connected with the experiment.
Hawthorne's first bucolic experience was with the famous "transcendental heifer" mistakenly said to have been the property of Margaret Fuller. As a matter of fact, the beast had been named after Cambridge's most intellectual woman, by Ripley, who had a whimsical fashion of thus honouring his friends. According to Hawthorne, the name in this case was not inapt, for the cow was so recalcitrant and anti-social that it was finally sent to Coventry by the more docile kine, always to be counted on for moderate conservatism.
This cow's would-be-tamer, not wishing to be unjust, refers to this heifer as having "a very intelligent face" and "a reflective cast of character." He certainly paid Margaret Fuller herself no such tribute, but thus early in his Brook Farm experience let appear his thinly veiled contempt for the high priestess of transcendentalism.Even earlier his antagonism toward this eminent woman was strong, if it was not frank, for he wrote: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do for which I was very thankful."
The unlovely side of Margaret Fuller must have made a very deep impression upon Hawthorne. Gentle as the great romancer undoubtedly was by birth and training, he has certainly been very harsh in writing, both in his note-book and in his story of Brook Farm, of the woman we recognise in Zenobia. One of the most interesting literary wars ever carried on in this vicinity, indeed, was that which was waged here some fifteen years ago concerning Julian Hawthorne's revelations of his father's private opinion of the Marchesa d'Ossoli. The remarks in question occurred in the great Hawthorne's "Roman Journal," and were certainly sufficiently scathing to call for such warm defence as Margaret's surviving friends hastened to offer. Hawthorne said among other things:
"Margaret Fuller had a strong and coarse nature which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but, of course, it could be only superficially changed.... Margaret has not left in the hearts and minds of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug—of course, with much talent and moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug.... Toward the last there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting herand her clownish husband and their child on board that fated ship.... On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better, though, because she proved herself a very woman after all, and fell as the meanest of her sisters might."
The latter sentences refer to Margaret's marriage to Ossoli, a man some ten years the junior of his gifted wife, and by no means her intellectual equal. That the marriage was a strange one even Margaret's most ardent friends admit, but it was none the less exceedingly human and very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a woman of thirty-seven, whose interests had long been of the strictly intellectual kind, to yield herself at last to the impulses of an affectionate nature.
But we are getting very much ahead of our story, which should begin, of course, far back in May, 1810, when there wasborn, at the corner of Eaton and Cherry Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter to Timothy Fuller and his wife. The dwelling in which Margaret first saw the light still stands, and is easily recognised by the three elms in front, planted by the proud father to celebrate the advent of his first child.
The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and 75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants. The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.
FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.
The class with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard College was that of 1829, which has beenmade by the wit and poetry of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.
"She had a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."
With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the class—William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke—she formed a lifelong friendship, and these gentlemen became her biographers.
Yet, after all, the most important partof a woman's training is that which she obtains from her own sex, and of this Margaret Fuller had quite her share. She was one of those maidens who form passionate attachments to older women, and there were many Cambridge ladies of the college circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty.
"My elder sister," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his biography of Margaret Fuller, "can well remember this studious, self-conscious, over-grown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with kisses, and treasuring her every word. It was the same at other times with other women, most of whom were too much absorbed in their own duties to give more than a passing solicitude to this rather odd and sometimes inconvenient adorer."
The side of Margaret Fuller to which scant attention has been paid heretofore is this ardently affectionate side, and thisit is which seems to account for what has always before appeared inexplicable—her romantic marriage to the young Marchese d'Ossoli. The intellect was in truth only a small part of Margaret, and if Hawthorne had improved, as he might have done, his opportunities to study the whole nature of the woman, he would not have written even for his private diary the harsh sentences already quoted. One has only to look at the heroic fashion in which, after the death of her father, Margaret took up the task of educating her brothers and sisters to feel that there was much besides selfishness in this woman's makeup. Nor can one believe that Emerson would ever have cared to have for the friend of a lifetime a woman who was a "humbug." Of Margaret's school-teaching, conversation classes on West Street, Boston, and labours on theDial, atranscendental paper in which Emerson was deeply interested, there is not space to speak here. But one phase of her work which cannot be ignored is that performed on theTribune, in the days of Horace Greeley.
Greeley brought Boston's high priestess to New York for the purpose of putting the literary criticism of theTribuneon a higher plane than any American newspaper then occupied, as well as that she might discuss in a large and stimulating way all philanthropic questions. That she rose to the former opportunity her enemies would be the first to grant, but only those who, like Margaret herself, believe in the sisterhood of women could freely endorse her attitude on philanthropic subjects.
Surely, though, it could not have been a hard woman of whom Horace Greeley wrote: "If she had been born to largefortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue would have been one of her most cherished and first realised conceptions. She once attended, with other noble women, a gathering of outcasts of their sex, and, being asked how they appeared to her, replied, 'As women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and misfortune.'"
While labouring for theTribune, Margaret Fuller was all the time saving her money for the trip to Europe, which had her life long been her dream of felicity; and at last, on the first of August, 1846, she sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, in December, 1847, she was secretly married, and in September, 1848, her child was born. What these experiences must have meant to her we are able to guess from a glimpse into her private journalin which she had many years before recorded her profoundest feeling about marriage and motherhood.
"I have no home. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see some way into their eventful beauty.... I am myself growing better, and shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere disappoint or need forbearance.... I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyse me...."
The circumstances under which Margaret Fuller and her husband first met are full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's arrival in Rome, early in 1847, she went one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and becoming separated from her friends after the service, she was noted as she examined the church by a young man of gentlemanlyaddress, who, perceiving her discomfort and her lack of Italian, offered his services as a guide in her endeavour to find her companions.
Not seeing them anywhere, the young Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he, accompanied Miss Fuller home, and they met once or twice again before she left Rome for the summer. The following season Miss Fuller had an apartment in Rome, and she often received among her guests this young patriot with whose labours in behalf of his native city she was thoroughly in sympathy.
When the young man after a few months declared his love, Margaret refused to marry him, insisting that he should choose a younger woman for his wife. "In this way it rested for some weeks," writes Mrs. Story, who knew them both, "during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and unhappy.He was always with Margaret, but in a sort of hopeless, desperate manner, until at length he convinced her of his love, and she married him."
Then followed the wife's service in the hospitals while Ossoli was in the army outside the city. After the birth of their child, Angelo, the happy little family went to Florence.
The letters which passed between the young nobleman and the wife he adored are still extant, having been with the body of her beautiful baby the only things of Margaret Fuller's saved from the fatal wreck in which she and her two loved ones were lost. One of these letters will be enough to show the tenderness of the man:
"Rome, 21 October, 1848.
"Mia Cara:—I learn by yours of the 20th that you have received the ten scudi,and it makes me more tranquil. I feel also Mogliani's indolence in not coming to inoculate our child; but, my love, I pray you not to disturb yourself so much, and not to be sad, hoping that our dear love will be guarded by God, and will be free from all misfortunes. He will keep the child for us and give us the means to sustain him."
In answer to this letter, or one like it, we find the woman whom Hawthorne had deemed hard and cold writing:
"Saturday Evening,28 October, 1848.
"... It rains very hard every day, but to-day I have been more quiet, and our darling has been so good, I have taken so much pleasure in being with him. When he smiles in his sleep, how it makes my heart beat! He has grown fat and very fair, and begins to play and spring. Youwill have much pleasure in seeing him again. He sends you many kisses. He bends his head toward me when he asks a kiss."
Both Madame Ossoli and her husband were very fearful as they embarked on the fated ship which was to take them to America. He had been cautioned by one who had told his fortune when a boy to beware of the sea, and his wife had long cherished a superstition that the year 1850 would be a marked epoch in her life. It is remarkable that in writing to a friend of her fear Madame Ossoli said: "I pray that if we are lost it may be brief anguish, and Ossoli, the babe, and I go together."
They sailed none the less, May 17, 1850, on theElizabeth, a new merchant vessel, which set out from Leghorn. Misfortune soon began. The captain sickened anddied of malignant smallpox, and after his burial at sea and a week's detention at Gibraltar, little Angelo caught the dread disease and was restored with difficulty. Yet a worse fate was to follow.
At noon of July 18, while they were off the coast of New Jersey, there was a gale, followed by a hurricane, which dashed the ship on that Fire Island Beach which has engulfed so many other vessels. Margaret Fuller and her husband were drowned with their child. The bodies of the parents were never recovered, but that of little Angelo was buried in a seaman's chest among the sandhills, from which it was later disinterred and brought to our own Mount Auburn by the relatives who had never seen the baby in life.
And there to-day in a little green grave rests the child of this great woman's great love.
OLD MANSE, CONCORD, MASS.OLD MANSE, CONCORD, MASS.
"The Old Manse," writes Hawthorne, in his charming introduction to the quaint stories, "Mosses from an Old Manse", "had never been profaned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to assume the priestly character. It is awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written here!... Here it was, too, that Emerson wrote'Nature;' for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moon-rise from the summit of our eastern hill."
Emerson's residence in the Old Manse is to be accounted for by the fact that his grandfather was its first inhabitant. And it was while living there with his mother and kindred, before his second marriage in 1835, that he produced "Nature."
It is to the parson, the Reverend William Emerson, that we owe one of the most valuable Revolutionary documents that have come down to us. Soon after the young minister came to the old Manse (which was then the New Manse), he had occasion to make in his almanac this stirring entry:
"This morning, between one and two o'clock, we were alarmed by the ringing of the bell, and upon examination foundthat the troops, to the number of eight hundred, had stole their march from Boston, in boats and barges, from the bottom of the Common over to a point in Cambridge, near to Inman's farm, and were at Lexington meeting-house half an hour before sunrise, where they fired upon a body of our men, and (as we afterward heard) had killed several. This intelligence was brought us first by Doctor Samuel Prescott, who narrowly escaped the guard that were sent before on horses, purposely to prevent all posts and messengers from giving us timely information. He, by the help of a very fleet horse, crossing several walks and fences, arrived at Concord, at the time above mentioned; when several posts were immediately dispatched that, returning, confirmed the account of the regulars' arrival at Lexington and that they were on their way toConcord. Upon this, a number of our minute-men belonging to this town, and Acton, and Lincoln, with several others that were in readiness, marched out to meet them; while the alarm company was preparing to receive them in the town. Captain Minot, who commanded them, thought it proper to take possession of the hill above the meeting-house, as the most advantageous situation. No sooner had our men gained it, than we were met by the companies that were sent out to meet the troops, who informed us that they were just upon us, and that we must retreat, as their number was more than treble ours. We then retreated from the hill near the Liberty Pole, and took a new post back of the town upon an eminence, where we formed into two battalions, and waited the arrival of the enemy.
"Scarcely had we formed before wesaw the British troops at the distance of a quarter of a mile, glittering in arms, advancing toward us with the greatest celerity. Some were for making a stand, notwithstanding the superiority of their numbers, but others, more prudent, thought best to retreat till our strength should be equal to the enemy's by recruits from the neighbouring towns, that were continually coming in to our assistance. Accordingly we retreated over the bridge; when the troops came into the town, set fire to several carriages for the artillery, destroyed sixty barrels flour, rifled several houses, took possession of the town-house, destroyed five hundred pounds of balls, set a guard of one hundred men at the North Bridge, and sent a party to the house of Colonel Barrett, where they were in the expectation of finding a quantity of warlike stores. But these were happily secured just beforetheir arrival, by transportation into the woods and other by-places.
"In the meantime the guard sent by the enemy to secure the pass at the North Bridge were alarmed by the approach of our people; who had retreated as before mentioned, and were now advancing, with special orders not to fire upon the troops unless fired upon. These orders were so punctually observed that we received the fire of the enemy in three several and separate discharges of their pieces before it was returned by our commanding officer; the firing then became general for several minutes; in which skirmish two were killed on each side, and several of the enemy wounded. (It may here be observed, by the way, that we were the more cautious to prevent beginning a rupture with the king's troops, as we were then uncertain what had happened at Lexington,and knew not that they had begun the quarrel there by first firing upon our people, and killing eight men upon the spot.) The three companies of troops soon quitted their post at the bridge, and retreated in the greatest disorder and confusion to the main body, who were soon upon their march to meet them.
"For half an hour the enemy, by their marches and countermarches, discovered great fickleness and inconstancy of mind,—sometimes advancing, sometimes returning to their former posts; till at length they quitted the town and retreated by the way they came. In the meantime, a party of our men (one hundred and fifty), took the back way through the Great Fields into the East Quarter, and had placed themselves to advantage, lying in ambush behind walls, fences, and buildings, readyto fire upon the enemy on their retreat."[12]
Here ends the important chronicle, the best first-hand account we have of the battle of Concord. But for this alone the first resident of the Old Manse deserves our memory and thanks.
Mr. Emerson was succeeded at the Manse by a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar who left behind him a reputation for learning and sanctity which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most learned woman in the little Concord circle which Hawthorne soon after his marriage came to join.
Few New England villages have retained so much of the charm and peacefulness of country life as has Concord, andfew dwellings in Concord have to-day so nearly the aspect they presented fifty years ago as does the Manse, where Hawthorne passed three of the happiest years of his life.
In the "American Note-Book," there is a charming description of the pleasure the romancer and his young wife experienced in renovating and refurnishing the old parsonage which, at the time of their going into it, was "given up to ghosts and cobwebs." Some of these ghosts have been shiveringly described by Hawthorne himself in the marvellous paragraph of the introduction already referred to: "Our [clerical] ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlour, and sometimes rustle paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper entry—where, nevertheless, he was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fellthrough the eastern window. Not improbably he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.
"Once while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown sweeping through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible.
"A yet stranger business was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labour—although no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude—some ill-starched ministerial band—disturbed the poor damsel in her grave, and kept her at work without wages."
The little drawing-room once remodelled, however, and the kitchen given over to the Hawthorne pots and pans—in which the great Hawthorne himself used often to have a stake, according to the testimony of his wife, who once wrote in this connection, "Imagine those magnificent eyes fixed anxiously upon potatoes cooking in an iron kettle!"—the ghosts came no more. Of the great people who in the flesh passed pleasant hours in the little parlour, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Emerson, and Margaret Fuller are names known by everybody as intimately connected with the Concord circle.
Hawthorne himself cared little for society. Often he would go to the village and back without speaking to a single soul, he tells us, and once when his wife wasabsent he resolved to pass the whole term of her visit to relatives without saying a word to any human being. With Thoreau, however, he got on very well. This odd genius was as shy and ungregarious as was the dark-eyed "teller of tales," but the two appear to have been socially disposed toward each other, and there are delightful bits in the preface to the "Mosses" in regard to the hours they spent together boating on the large, quiet Concord River. Thoreau was a great voyager in a canoe which he had constructed himself (and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the use of his paddle as the redman who had once haunted the same silent stream.
Of the beauties of the Concord River Hawthorne has written a few sentences that will live while the silver stream continues to flow: "It comes creeping softlythrough the mid-most privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet, while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and the clustering foliage...."
Concerning the visitors attracted to Concord by the great original thinker who was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the romancer speaks with less delicate sympathy: "Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom look upon themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet are simply bores of a very intense character." A bit further on Hawthorne speaks of these pilgrims as "hobgoblins of flesh and blood," people, he humourouslycomments, who had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, and "came to Emerson as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of metaphysical intercourse with the great philosopher.
It was while on the way home from his friend Emerson's one day that Hawthorne had that encounter with Margaret Fuller about which it is so pleasant to read because it serves to take away the taste of other less complimentary allusions to this lady to be found in Hawthorne's works:
"After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining nearthe path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows whose voices Margaret hadheard; and about the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high and low philosophy."
Nothing that Hawthorne has ever written of Concord is more to be cherished to-day than this description of a happy afternoon passed by him in Sleepy Hollow talking with Margaret Fuller of "matters of high and low philosophy." For there are few parts of Concord to which visitors go more religiously than to the still old cemetery, where on the hill by Ridge Path Hawthorne himself now sleeps quietly, with the grave of Thoreau just behind him, and the grave of Emerson, his philosopher-friend, on the opposite side of the way. A great pine stands at the head of Hawthorne's last resting-place, and a huge unhewn block of pink marble is his formal monument.
Yet the Old Manse will, so long as it stands, be the romancer's most intimate relic, for it was here that he lived as a happy bridegroom, and here that his first child was born. And from this ancient dwelling it was that he drew the inspiration for what is perhaps the most curious book of tales in all American literature, a book of which another American master of prose[13]has said, "Hawthorne here did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country; another Wizard of the North, he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history, and summoned the great dead again to live and move among us."
Of the romantic figures which grace the history of New England in the nineteenth century, none is to be compared in dash and in all those other qualities that captivate the imagination with the figure of Frederick Townsend Ward, the Salem boy who won a generalship in the Chinese military service, suppressed the Tai-Ping rebellion, organised the "Ever-Victorious Army"—for whose exploits "Chinese" Gordon always gets credit in history—and died fighting at Ning Po for a nation of which he had become one, a fair daughter of which he had married, and by which he is to-day worshipped as a god. Very far certainly did this soldier of fortune wander in the thirty short years of his life from the peaceful red-brick Townsend mansion (now, alas! a steam bread bakery), at the corner of Derby and Carleton Streets, Salem, in which, in 1831, he was born.
This house was built by Ward's grandfather, Townsend, and during Frederick's boyhood was a charming place of the comfortable colonial sort, to which was joined a big, rambling, old-fashioned garden, and from the upper windows of which there was to be had a fascinating view of the broad-stretching sea. To the sea it was, therefore, that the lad naturally turned when, after ending his education at the Salem High School, he was unable to gain admission to the military academy at West Point and follow the soldier career in which it had always been his ambition toshine. He shipped before the mast on an American vessel sailing from New York. Apparently even the hardships of such a common sailor's lot could not dampen his ardour for adventure, for he made a number of voyages.