Some Memories of Hawthorne

IV.

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, Margaret Fuller, and Alcott dispersed a fragrance that attracted at once, and all they said was resonant with charity and courage.

In 1852 my mother conveyed to a member of her family unbroken murmurs of satisfaction in the peaceful experiences at The Wayside : —

July 3, 1852.

. . . Last week was memorable in the children’s life by the occurrence of a party. Mrs. Emerson, with magnificent hospitality, invited all the children in town, from babyhood upwards (and their mothers), for a great festival. Rose and I were prevented from going by the arrival of three gentlemen from Boston, who stayed to tea; one being the brilliant Mr. Whipple. . . . First arrived General Solomon McNeil, an old veteran nearly seven feet tall, whose head was amazingly near the ceiling of our low dining-room. His gray hair stood up straight, full of demoniac energy, and his gray eyes flashed beneath overhanging brows. As he entered the room I advanced to meet him, and he said : Mrs. Hawthorne, I presume. I have scarcely seen your husband, but I have known him well for fifteen years.” At this he raised his hand and arm, as if he were wielding a sword with intent to do battle. . . . Mr. Hawthorne came in, and the old gentleman placed his hand with such force on his shoulder that you would have supposed he had dubbed him knight. . . . They left the room for the study, the general brandishing the sword tremendously at every sentence he uttered. . . . The next day I went to see Mrs. Emerson. I found Mr. Emerson sitting on the side doorstep, with Edith on his knee, and Edward riding about the lawn on his pony. Mr. Emerson said that “the show of children was very pretty; but Julian ! He makes his mark everywhere ; there is no child so fine as Julian.” Was not that pleasant to hear, from him ? I told him how singular it was that Julian should find in Concord a pony, the desire of his imagination for two years. He smiled like Sirius. “Well, that is good. Send him this afternoon. ” He called Edward, and bade him go home with me on the pony, mount Julian, and fetch him back. And this was accordingly done. First, however, he invited me to go up on the hilltop opposite his house, whence there is a fine view. . . .

July 4th. Mr. Hawthorne, Una, and Julian have gone to a picnic with Ellen and Edith Emerson. This morning I went to the post-office, and Julian, who always is my shadow, went with me. I stopped at Mrs. Emerson’s to ask her when and how her children were going. I found a superb Washington in the dining-room, nearly as large as life, engraved from Stuart. We saw no one of the family ; but finally a door opened, and the rich music of Mr. Emerson’s voice filled the entry, and Ellen and her father came into the room. Mr. Emerson asked me if that head (pointing to Washington) were not a fine celebration of the Fourth of July. “ He would seem to have absorbed into that face all the serenity of these United States, and left none elsewhere, excepting,” and he laid his hand on Julian, “ excepting what is in Julian. Washington is the Great Repose, and Julian is the Little Repose, hereafter to become also the Great Repose ! ” He asked if Julian were going to the picnic, and I told him “no,” as I was not going. “Oh, but if Una is going, that would be a divided cherry, would it not ? “ Finding that Mrs. Emerson was to go, and that they were all to ride, I of course had no objection. And then Mr. Emerson wanted Mr. Hawthorne to go with him at five o’clock. My lord consented, and so they are all gone. Last evening Mrs. Emerson came to see us, loaded with roses. . . . My husband has sold the grass for thirty dollars, and has cut all his bean-poles in his own woods. We find The Wayside prettier and prettier. . . .

A few words from a letter of Emerson’s, 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 : —

July 11, 1864.

... 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. . . .

R. W. EMERSON.

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, reads : “ Tremont House. Paran Stevens, Proprietor. Dinner for Twelve Persons, at three o’clock.” A superb menu follows, wherein canvasback 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 did not have much 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. Elizabeth Stoddard 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 what was your name?” he ventured.

“ Rose Hawthorne.”

He started, and beamed. “ There ! I thought — but you understand how — if I had made a mistake— Could anything have been worse if you had not been ? 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 the esprit which 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 there would have rapped out a speedy, babbling response at once; but the 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) when it has looked and dwelt ! A light falls upon the place not of land or sea ! How much he did for Salem ! Oh, tbe purple light, the soft haze, that now rests upon our glaring New England! He has done, it, 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 gardenpatch, 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.

After our return home, 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.

But I will give a few glimpses of our neighbors and surroundings. It was never so well understood at The Wayside that its owner had somewhat 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 proverbial 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.

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, which softly dreamed forth its tunes in a mellow 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. Walden woods rustled the name of Thoreau whenever we walked in them.

Hawthorne had returned, for the purpose of cherishing American loyalty in his children, from a scene that was after his own heart, even to the actors in it. He had hoped for quietude and the inimitable flavor of home, of course ; but this hope was chiefly a self-persuasion. The title of his first book after returning, Our Old Home, was a concise confession. He would have considered it a base resource to live abroad during the war, bringing up his son in an alien land, however dear and related it might be to our bone and sinew; and if his children did not enjoy the American phase of the universe in its crude stage, he, at any rate, had done his best to make them love it. His loyalty was always something flawless. A friend might treat him with the grossest dishonor, but he would let you think he was himself deficient in perception or in a proper regard for his money before he would let you guess that his friend should be denounced. With loyal love, he had, for his part, wound about New England the purple haze of which Dr. Holmes spoke in ecstasy, because he had found his country standing only half appreciated, though with a wealth of virtue and meaning that makes her fairer every year. With love, also, he came home, after having barely tasted the delights of London and Oxford completeness.

In Concord he entered upon a long renunciation. Of necessity this was beneficial to his art. He was now fully primed with observation, and The Dolliver Romance, hammered out from several beginnings that he successively cast aside, appeared so exquisitely pure and fine because of the hush of fasting and reflection which environed the worker. It is the unfailing history of great souls that they seem to destroy themselves most in relation to the world’s happiness when they most deserve and acquire a better reward. He was starving, but he steadily wrote. He was weary of the pinched and unpromising condition of our daily life, but he smiled, and entertained us and guided us with unflagging manliness, though with longer and longer intervals of wordless reserve. As to anything that interested us, he joined in it at least sufficiently to turn his luminous eyes upon our enthusiasm with his genial “ h’m-m ” of permission. I was never afraid to run to him for his sympathy, as he sat reading in an easy-chair, in some one of those positions of his which looked as if he could so sit and peruse till the end of time. I knew that his response would be so cordially given that it would brim over me, and so melodiously that it would echo in my heart for a great while ; yet it would be as brief as the single murmurous stroke of one from a cathedral tower, half startling by its intensity, but which attracts the birds, who wing by preference to that lofty spot.

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 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 dashed 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. Pigweed 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 yon 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 his 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 alt 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 dogdays 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.

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 dashing 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 greatness, 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 : —

June 23, 1864.

. . . Thank you for your kind remembrance in sending me the volume of Goldsmith. There are some things 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 [1864, the date of Hawthorne’s burial]. . . . I trust you will pardon their deficiencies for the love I bear his memory. More than ever I regret that I postponed from day to day coming to see you in Concord.

With deepest sympathy,

Yours truly,

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

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 Rockferry ; 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 MS. 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 glacés, 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,

H. A. BRIGHT.

A friend of Mr. Bright’s pardons my father’s unfeeling indifference by a request : —

WALTHAM HOUSE, WALTHAM CROSS,

August 10, 1861.

DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE, — Am I not showing my Christian charity when, in spite of the terrible disappointment which I felt at your broken promise to come with Bright to smoke a cigar with me about this time last year, I entreat you, in greeting Mr. Anthony Trollope, who with his wife is about to visit America, to give him an extra welcome and shake of the hand, for the sake of yours most sincerely and respectfully,

W. W. SYNGE.

Then, again, Concord itself sparkled 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 : —

A source of deep enjoyment to my father was a long visit from his sister, Ebie Hawthorne (he having given her that pretty title instead of any other abbreviation of Elizabeth). I came to know her very well in after-years, and was astonished at her magic resemblance to my father in many ways. I always felt her unmistakable power. She was chock-full of worldly wisdom, though living in the utmost monastic retirement, only allowing herself to browse in two wide regions, — the woods and literature. She knew the latest news from the papers, and the oldest classics alongside of them. She was potentially, we thought, rather hazardous, or perverse. But language refuses to explain her. Her brother seemed not to dream of this, yet no doubt relished the fact that a nature as unique as any he had drawn sparkled in his sister. She was a good deal unspiritual in everything : but all besides in her was fine mind, wisdom, and loving-kindness of a lazy, artistic sort. That is to say, she was unregenerate, but excellent ; and she fascinated like a wood-creature seldom seen and observant, refined and untrained. My sister was devoted to her, and says, for the hundredth time, in a passage among many pages of their correspondence bequeathed to me : —

MY OWN DEAR AUNTIE, — I was made very happy by your letter this week. What perfectly charming letters you write ! Now, don’t laugh and say I am talking nonsense; it is really true. You make the simplest things interesting by your way of telling them ; and your observations and humor are so keen that I often feel sorry the world does not know something of them. I never remember you to have told me anything twice, and that can be said of very few people ; but there are few enough people in the least like you, my dearest auntie. . . .

My father began to express his wishes in regard to provision for our aunt in case of his death ; to burn old letters ; and to impart to my mother and Una all that he particularly desired to say to them, among other things his dislike of biographies, and that he forbade any such matter in connection with himself in any distance of the future. This command, respected for a number of years, has been, like all such forcible and prophetic demurs, most signally set aside. It would take long to explain my own modifications of opinion from arguments of fierce resistance to the request for a biographical handling of him ; and it matters, no doubt, very little. Such a man must be thoroughly known, as great saints are always sooner or later known, though endeavoring to hide their victories of holiness and charity. Certainly my father did not like to die, though he now wished to do so. My mother, later, often spoke, in consolation for us and for herself, of his dread of helpless old age ; and she tried to be glad that his desire to disappear before decrepitude had been fulfilled. But such wise wishes are not carried out as we might choose. The sudden transformation which took place in my father after his coming to America was like an instant’s change in the atmosphere from sunshine to dusky cold. I have never had the least difficulty in explaining it to myself ; but I might ramble on unpardonably if I developed here the hints already given of my view.

One large item in the sum of his regrets was his unexpectedly narrowed means. It would have required a generous amount of money to put The Wayside and its grounds into the delectable order at first contemplated, to bring them into any sort of English perfection, and my parents found that they could not afford it; and so all resulted in semi-comfort and rough appearances. This narrowing of means was caused not a little by the want of veracity of a person whom my father had trusted with entire affection and a very considerable loan, about which we none of us ever heard again. A crust becomes more than proverbially dry under these circumstances.

My mother bore every reverse nobly. She writes, after her husband’s death : “ I have ‘ enjoyed life,’ and ‘ its hard pinches ‘ have not too deeply bitten into my heart. But this has been because I am not only hopeful and of indomitable credence by nature, but because this temperament, together with the silent ministry of pain, has helped me to the perfect, the unshadowed belief in the instant providence of God ; in his eternal love, patience, sweetness ; in his shining face, never averted. It is because I cannot be disappointed on account of this belief. To stand and wait after doing all that is legitimate is my instinct, my best wisdom, my inspiration ; and I always hear the still, small voice at last. If man would not babble so much, we could much oftener hear God. The lesson of my life has been patience. It has only made me feel the more humble that God has been so beyond count benignant to me. I have been cushioned and pillowed with tender love from the cradle. Such a mother seldom falls to the lot of mortals. She was the angel of my life. Her looks and tones and her acts of high-bred womanhood were the light and music and model of my childhood. Then God joined my destiny with him who was to be all relations in one. Pain passed away when my husband came. Poverty was lighter than a thistledown with such a power of felicity to uphold it. With 4 lowering clouds ’ I have never been long darkened, because the sun above has been so penetrating that their tissue has directly become silvered and goldened. Our own closed eyelids are too often the only clouds between us and the ever-shining sun. I hold all as if it were not mine, but God’s, and ready to resign it. ”

It seemed to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military selfcommand, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect upon the distinction of the meal. He hated failure, dependence, and disorder, broken rules and weariness of discipline, as he hated cowardice. I cannot express how brave beseemed to me. The last time I saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. My mother was to go to the station with him, — she who, at the moment when it was said that he died, staggered and groaned, though so far from him, telling us that something seemed to be sapping all her strength ; I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return.

Like a snow image of an unbending but an old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed, as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop.