Literary Shrines Part 1

Literary Shrines.

by Theodore F. Wolfe.

PREFACE

For some years it has been the delightful privilege of the writer of the present volume to ramble and sojourn in the scenes amid which his best-beloved authors erst lived and wrote. He has made repeated pilgrimages to most of the shrines herein described, and has been, at one time or another, favored by intercourse and correspondence with many of the authors adverted to or with their surviving friends and neighbors. In the ensuing pages he has endeavored to portray these shrines in pen-pictures which, it is hoped, may be interesting to those who are unable to visit them and helpful and companionable for those who can and will. If certain prominent American authors receive little more than mention in these pages, it is mainly because so few objects and places a.s.sociated with their lives and writings can now be indisputably identified: in some instances the writer has expended more time upon fruitless quests for shrines which proved to be non-existent or of doubtful genuineness than upon others which are themes for the chapters of this booklet.

T. F. W.

I

A VILLAGE OF LITERARY SHRINES

_Abodes of Th.o.r.eau--The Alcotts--Channing--Sanborn--Hudson--h.o.a.r-- Wheildon--Bartlett--The Historic Common--Cemetery--Church._

If to trace the footsteps of genius and to linger and muse in the sometime haunts of the authors we read and love, serve to bring us nearer their personality, to place us _en rapport_ with their aspirations, and thus to incite our own spiritual development and broaden and exalt our moral nature, then the Concord pilgrimage should be one of the most fruitful and beneficent of human experiences.

Familiarity with the physical stand-point of our authors, with the scenes amid which they lived and wrote, and with the objects which suggested the imagery of their poems, the settings of their tales, and which gave tone and color to their work, will not only bring us into closer sympathy with the writers, but will help us to a better understanding of the writings.

A plain, straggling village, set in a low country amid a landscape devoid of any striking beauty or grandeur, Concord yet attracts more pilgrims than any other place of equal size upon the continent, not because it holds an historic battle-field, but because it has been the dwelling-place of some of the brightest and best in American letters, who have here written their books and warred against creeds, forms, and intellectual servitude. It is another Stratford, another Mecca, to which come reverent pilgrims from the Old World and the New to worship at its shrines and to wander through the scenes hallowed by the memories of its ill.u.s.trious _litterateurs_, seers, and evangels. To the literary prowler it is all sacred ground,--its streets, its environing hills, forests, lakes, and streams have alike been blessed by the loving presence of genius, have alike been the theatres and the inspirations of n.o.ble literary achievement.

Our way lies by historic Lexington, and thence, through a pleasant country and by the road so fateful to the British soldiery, we approach Concord. It is a placid, almost somnolent village of villas, abounding with delightful lawns and gardens, with great elms shading its old-fashioned thoroughfares and drooping their pliant boughs above its comfortable homes.

Elizabeth h.o.a.r has said, "Concord is Th.o.r.eau's monument, adorned with inscriptions by his hand;" of the circle of brilliant souls who have given the town its world-wide fame, he alone was native here; he has left his imprint upon the place, and we meet some reminder of him at every turn. By the historic village Common is the quondam home of his grandfather, where his father was reared, and where the "New England Essene" himself lived some time with the unmarried aunt who made the ample homespun suit he wore at Walden. The house of his maternal grandmother, where Henry David Th.o.r.eau was born, stood a little way out on a by-road to Lexington, and a daughter of this home--Th.o.r.eau's winsome aunt Louisa Dunbar--was ineffectually wooed by the famous Daniel Webster. At the age of eight months the infant Th.o.r.eau was removed to the village, in which nearly the whole of his life was pa.s.sed. Believing that Concord, with its sylvan environment, was a microcosm "by the study of which the whole world could be comprehended," this wildest of civilized men seldom strayed beyond its familiar precincts. Alcott declared that Th.o.r.eau thought he dwelt in the centre of the universe, and seriously contemplated annexing the rest of the planet to Concord.

On the south side of the elm-shaded Main street of the village we find a pleasant and comfortable, old-fashioned wooden dwelling,--the home which, in his later years, the philosopher, poet, and mystic shared with his mother and sisters. About it are great trees which Th.o.r.eau planted; a stairway and some of the part.i.tion walls of the house are said to have been erected by him. In the second story of an extension at the back of the main edifice, some of the family worked at their father's trade of pencil-making. In the large room at the right of the entrance, afterward the sitting-room of the Alcotts, some of Th.o.r.eau's later writing was done, and here, one May morning of 1862, he breathed out a life all too brief and doubtless abbreviated by the storms and drenchings endured in his pantheistic pursuits. In this house Th.o.r.eau's "spiritual brother,"

John Brown of Osawatomie, was a welcome guest, and more than one wretched fugitive from slavery found shelter and protection. From his village home Th.o.r.eau made, with the poet Ellery Channing, the journey described in his "Yankee in Canada," and several shorter "Excursions,"--shared with Edward h.o.a.r, Channing, and others,--which he has detailed in the delightful manner which gives him a distinct position in American literature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE Th.o.r.eAU-ALCOTT HOUSE]

After the removal of Sophia, the last of Th.o.r.eau's family, his friend Frank B. Sanborn occupied the Th.o.r.eau house for some years, and then it became the home of the Alcott family. Here Mrs. Alcott, the "Marmee"

of "Little Women," died; here Bronson Alcott was stricken with the fatal paralysis; here commenced the malady which contributed to the death of his ill.u.s.trious daughter Louisa; here lived "Meg," the mother of the "Little Men" and widow of "John Brooke" of the Alcott books; and here now lives her son, while his brother, "Demi-John," dwells just around the corner in the next street. In the room at the left of the hall, fitted up for her study and workshop, Louisa Alcott wrote some of the tales which the world will not forget. An added apartment at the right of the sitting-room was long the sick-room of the Orphic philosopher and the scene of Louisa's tender care. Here the writer saw them both for the last time: Alcott helpless upon his couch, his bright intelligence dulled by a veil of darkness; the daughter at his bedside, sedulous of his comfort, devoted, hopeful, helpful to the end. A cherished memento of that interview is a photograph of the Th.o.r.eau-Alcott mansion, made by one of the "Little Men," and presented to the writer, with her latest book, by "Jo" herself. The front fence has since been removed, and the ill.u.s.tration shows the present view.

In Th.o.r.eau's time, a modest dwelling, with a low roof sloping to the rear,--now removed to the other side of the street,--stood directly opposite his home, and was for some time the abode of his friend and earliest biographer, the sweet poet William Ellery Channing. Th.o.r.eau thought Channing one of the few who understood "the art of taking walks," and the two were almost constant companions in saunterings through the countryside, or in idyllic excursions upon the river in the boat which Th.o.r.eau kept moored to a riverside willow at the foot of Channing's garden. The beneficent influence of their comradeship is apparent in the work of both these recluse writers, and many of the most charming of Channing's stanzas are either inspired by or are poetic portrayals of the scenes he saw with Th.o.r.eau,--the "Rudolpho" and the "Idolon" of his verse. Th.o.r.eau's last earthly "Excursion" was with this friend to Monadnoc, where they encamped some days in 1860. To this home of Channing came, in 1855, Sanborn, who was welcomed to Concord by all the literary galaxy, and quickly became a familiar a.s.sociate of each particular star. To go swimming together seems to have been, among these earnest and exalted thinkers, the highest evidence of mutual esteem, and so favored was Sanborn that he is able to record, "I have swum with Alcott in Th.o.r.eau's Cove, with Th.o.r.eau in the a.s.sabet, with Channing in every water of Concord."

In this home Sanborn entertained John Brown on the eve of his Virginia venture; here escaping slaves found refuge; here fugitives from the Harper's Ferry fight were concealed; here Sanborn was arrested for supposed complicity in Brown's abortive schemes, and was forcibly rescued by his indignant neighbors. This modest dwelling gave place to the later residence of Frederic Hudson, the historian of journalism, who here produced many of his contributions to literature. Professor Folsom, of "Translations of the Four Gospels," and the popular auth.o.r.ess Mrs.

Austin have also lived in this neighborhood.

For some years Sanborn had a famous select school on a street back of Th.o.r.eau's house, not far from the recent hermit-home of his friend Channing, at whose request Hawthorne sent some of his children to this school, in which Emerson's daughter--the present Mrs. Forbes--was a beloved pupil, and where, also, the daughters of John Brown were for some time placed.

A few rods westward from his former dwelling we find Sanborn in a tasteful modern villa,--spending life's early autumn among his books.

He abounds with memories of his friends of the by-gone time, and his reminiscences and biographies of some of them have largely employed his pen in his pleasant study here.

Some time ago the sweet singer Channing suffered in his hermitage a severe illness, which prompted his appreciative friend Sanborn to take him into his own home; so we find two surviving witnesses or partic.i.p.ants in the moral, intellectual, and political renaissance dwelling under the same roof. In the kindly atmosphere of this home, the shy poet--who in his age is more recluse than ever, and scarce known to his neighbors--so far regained physical vigor that he has resumed his frequent visits to the Boston library, long time a favorite haunt of his. The world refused to listen to this exquisite singer, and now "his songs have ceased." He has been celebrated by Emerson in the "Dial," by Th.o.r.eau in his "Week," by Hawthorne in "Mosses" and "Note-Books," by the generous and sympathetic Sanborn in many ways and places; but even such poems as "Earth-Spirit," "Poet's Hope," and "Reverence" found few readers,--the dainty little volumes fewer purchasers.

Below the Th.o.r.eau-Alcott house on the village street was a prior home of Th.o.r.eau, from which he made, with his brother, the voyage described in his "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and from which, in superb disdain of "civilization" and social conventionalities, he went to the two years' hermitage of "Walden."

Nearly opposite the earlier residence of the stoic is the home of the h.o.a.rs, where lived Th.o.r.eau's comrade Edward h.o.a.r, and Edward's sister,--styled "Elizabeth the Wise" by Emerson, of whom she was the especial friend and favorite, having been the _fiancee_ of his brother Charles, who died in early manhood. The adjacent s.p.a.cious mansion was long the home of Wheildon, the historian, essayist, and pamphleteer.

Nearer the village Common lived John A. Stone, dramatist of "The Ancient Briton" and of the "Metamora" in which Forrest won his first fame. In this part of the village the eminent correspondent "Warrington," author of "Manual of Parliamentary Law," was born and reared; and in Lowell Street, not far away, lives the gifted George B. Bartlett, of the "Carnival of Authors,"--poet, scenic artist, and local historian.

In the public library we find copies of the printed works of the many Concord authors, and portraits or busts of most of the writers. Among the treasures of the inst.i.tution are priceless ma.n.u.scripts of Curtis, Motley, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, Hawthorne, Th.o.r.eau, and others.

Among the thickly-strewn graves on the hill-side above the Common repose the ashes of Emerson's ancestors; about them lie the fore-fathers of the settlement,--some of them asleep here for two centuries, reckless alike of the resistance to British oppression and of the later struggle for freedom of thought which their townsmen have waged. A tree on the Common is pointed out as that beneath which Emerson made an address at the dedication of the soldiers' monument, and Bartlett records the tradition that the grandfather of the Concord sage stood on the same spot a hundred years before to harangue the "embattled farmers" on the morning of the Concord fight.

Near by is the ancient church where Emerson's ancestors preached, and within whose framework the Provincial Congress met. Of the religious services here Emerson was always a supporter, often an attendant; here he sometimes preached in early manhood; here his children were christened by the elder Channing,--"the first minister he had known who was as good as they;" here Emerson's daughter is a devout worshipper.

The comparatively few of the transcendental company who prayed within a pew came to this temple, but here all were brought at last for funeral rites: here lay Th.o.r.eau among his thronging townsmen while Emerson and Bronson Alcott made their touching eulogies and Ellery Channing read a dirge in a voice almost hushed with emotion; here James Freeman Clarke, who had married Hawthorne twenty-two years before, preached his funeral sermon above the lifeless body which bore upon its breast the unfinished "Dolliver Romance;" before the pulpit here lay the coffined Emerson,--"his eyes forever closed, his voice forever still,"--while a vast concourse looked upon him for the last time, and his neighbor Judge h.o.a.r p.r.o.nounced one of the most impressive panegyrics that ever fell from human lips, and the devoted Alcott read a sonnet.

II

THE OLD MANSE

_Abode of Dr. Ripley--The Emersons--Hawthorne--Learned Mrs. Ripley--Its Famed Study and Apartments--Grounds--Guests--Ghosts--A Transcendental Social Court._

Northward from the village Common, a delightful stroll along a shaded highway, less secluded now than when Hawthorne "daily trudged" upon it to the post-office or trundled the carriage of "baby Una," brings us to the famous "Old Manse" about which he culled his "Mosses."

This antique mansion was first tenanted by Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandsire, and next by Dr. Ezra Ripley, who married the previous occupant's widow and became guardian of her children,--born under its roof,--of whom Emerson's father was one. When his father died Emerson found a secondary home here with Dr. Ripley. The Manse was again the abode of Emerson and his mother in 1834-35, when he here wrote his first volume. In 1842, the year following the demise of the good Dr. Ripley, the Manse was profaned by its first lay occupant, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

He brought here his bride, lovely Sophia Peabody (who, with the gifted Elizabeth and Mrs. Horace Mann, formed a famous triune sisterhood), and for four years lived here the ideal life of which his "Note-Books" and "Mosses" give us such delicious glimpses. Hawthorne's landlord, Samuel Ripley, was related to the George Ripley with whom Hawthorne had recently been a.s.sociated at Brook Farm. He was uncle of Emerson, and preached his ordination sermon; was himself reared in the old Manse, and succeeded Hawthorne as resident there. His widow, born Sarah Bradford, and celebrated as "the most learned woman ever seen in New England," the close friend of Emerson and of the brilliant Concord company, survived here until 1876. She made a valuable collection of lichens, and sometimes trained young men for Harvard University. Conway records that a _savant_ called here one day and found her hearing at once the lesson of one student in Sophocles and that of another in Differential Calculus, while rocking her grandchild's cradle with one foot and sh.e.l.ling peas for dinner. The place is now owned by her daughters, who reside in Cambridge, and is rented in summer.

It is little changed since the time Emerson's ancestor hurried thence to the gathering of his parishioners by his church-door before the Concord battle,--still less changed since the halcyon days when the great wizard of romance dwelt--the "most unknown of authors"--within its shades. It is still the unpretentious Eden, "the El Dorado for dreamers," which so completely won the heart of the sensitive Hawthorne.

The picturesque old mansion stands amid greensward and foliage, its ample grounds divided from the highway by a low wall. The gate-way is flanked by tall posts of rough-hewn stone, whence a gra.s.s-grown avenue, bordered by a colonnade of overarching trees, leads to the house. Within the scattered sunshine and shade of the avenue, a row of stone slabs sunken in the turf like gravestones paves the path paced by Ripley, Emerson, and Hawthorne as they pondered and planned their compositions.

Of the trees aligned upon either side, some, gray-lichened and broken, are survivors of Hawthorne's time; others are set to replace fallen patriarchs and keep the stately lines complete. At the right of the broad _allee_ and extending away to the battle-ground is the field, waving now with lush gra.s.s, where Hawthorne and Th.o.r.eau found the flint arrow-heads and other relics of an aboriginal village. Upon the s.p.a.ce which skirts the other side of the avenue, Hawthorne had the garden which engaged so much of his time and thought, and where he produced for us abundant crops of something better than his vegetables. Here his Brook-Farm experience was useful. Pa.s.sing neighbors would often see the darkly-clad figure of the recluse hoeing in this "patch," or, as often, standing motionless, gazing upon the ground so fixedly and so long--sometimes for hours together--that they thought him daft. Of the delights of summer mornings spent here with his peas, potatoes, and squashes, he gives us many glimpses in his record of that happy time; but the "Note-Books" show us, alas! that this simple pleasure was not without alloy, for, although his "garden flourished like Eden," there are hints of "weeds," next "more weeds," then a "ferocious banditti of weeds" with which "the other Adam" could never have contended. But a greater woe came with the foes who menaced his artistic squashes,--"the unconscionable squash-bugs," "those infernal squash-bugs," against which he must "carry on continual war." For the moments that we contemplate the scene of his entomic warfare, the greater battle-field, a few rods away, seems hardly more impressive. Few of the trees which in Hawthorne's time stood nearest the house remain; the producers of the peaches and "thumping pears" have gone the way of all trees. So has Dr.

Ripley's famous willow--celebrated in Emerson's and Channing's exquisite verse and in Hawthorne's matchless prose--which veiled the western face of the mansion and through which Hawthorne's study-windows peeped out upon orchard, river, and mead. In the orchard that has borne such luscious fruit of fancy, some of the contorted and moss-grown trees, whose branches--"like withered hands and arms"--hold out the sweet blossoms on this June day, are the same that Hawthorne pictures among his "Mosses," and beneath which he lay in summer reverie. Few vines now clamber upon the house-walls, lilacs still grow beneath the old study-window, and a tall ma.s.s of their foliage screens a corner of the venerable edifice, which time has toned into perfect harmony with its picturesque environment. It is a great, square, wooden structure of two stories, with added attic rooms beneath an overwhelming gambrel roof, which is the conspicuous feature of the edifice and contributes to its antique form. The heavy roof settles down close upon the small, multipaned windows. From above the door little convex gla.s.ses, like a row of eyes, look out upon the visitor as he applies for admission.

A s.p.a.cious central hall, rich in antique panelling and sombre with grave tints, extends through the house. From its dusk and coolness we look out upon the bright summer day through its open doors; through one we see the "hill of the Emersons" beyond the highway, the other frames a pleasing picture of orchard and sward with glimpses of the river shining through its bordering shrubbery. The quaint apartments are darkly wainscoted and low-ceiled, with ma.s.sive beams crossing overhead. Some of these rooms Hawthorne has shown us. The one at the left, which the novelist believed to have been the sleeping-room of Dr. Ripley, was the parlor of the Hawthornes, and--decked with a gladsome carpet, pictures, and flowers daily gathered from the river-bank--Hawthorne averred it was "one of the prettiest and pleasantest rooms in the whole world." To this room then came the sage Emerson "with a sunbeam in his face;" the "cast-iron man" Th.o.r.eau, "long-nosed, queer-mouthed, ugly as sin," but with whom to talk "is like hearing the wind among the boughs of a forest tree;" Ellery Channing, with his wife and her ill.u.s.trious sister, Margaret Fuller; the gifted George William Curtis, then tilling a farm not far from the Manse, long before he lounged in an "Easy Chair;"

genial Bradford, relative of Ripley, and a.s.sociate and firm friend of Hawthorne; Horatio Bridge, of the "African Cruiser" and of the recent Hawthorne "Recollections;" the critic George Hillard, at whose house Hawthorne was married; "Prince" Lowell, the large-hearted; Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne's life-long friend. Concerning the discussion of things physical and metaphysical, to which these old walls then listened, the host gives us little hint. Sometimes the guests were "feasted on nectar and ambrosia" by the new Adam and Eve; sometimes they "listened to the music of the spheres which, for private convenience, is packed into a music-box,"--left here by Th.o.r.eau when he went to teach in the family of Emerson's brother; once here before this wide fireplace they sat late and told ghost stories,--doubtless suggested by the clerical phantom whose sighs they used to hear in yonder dusky corner, and whose rustling gown sometimes almost touched the company as he moved about among them. In this room Dr. Ripley penned, besides his "History of the Concord Fight" and "Treatise on Education," three thousand of his protracted homilies,--a fact upon which Hawthorne found it "awful to reflect,"--and here in our day the gifted George B. Bartlett wrote some part of his Concord sketches, etc. Here, too, and in the larger room opposite, the erudite and versatile Mrs. Samuel Ripley held her social court and received the exalted Concord conclave, with other earnest leaders of thought.

In the front chamber at the right Hawthorne's first child, the hapless Una,--named from Spenser's "Faerie Queene,"--was born. Behind this is the "ten-foot-square" apartment which was Hawthorne's study and workshop. Two windows of small, prismatic-hued panes look into the orchard, and upon one of these Hawthorne has inscribed,--

"Nath^{l}. Hawthorne.

This is his study, 1843."

Below this another hand has graven,--

"Inscribed by my husband at Sunset Apr 3^{d} 1843 In the gold light S. A. H.

Man's accidents are G.o.d's purposes.