Literary Shrines Part 2

VI

HAWTHORNE'S WAYSIDE HOME.

_Sometime Abode of Alcott--Hawthorne--Lathrop--Margaret Sidney--Storied Apartments--Hawthorne's Study--His Mount of Vision--Where Septimius Felton and Rose Garfield dwelt._

On the Lexington road, a little way beyond the Orchard House, is the once Wayside home of Hawthorne, the dwelling in which, at a tender age, Louisa M. Alcott made her first literary essay. It is a curious, wide, straggling, and irregular structure, of varying ages, heights, and styles. The central gambrel-roofed portion was the original house of four rooms, described as the residence of "Septimius Felton;" other rooms have been added at different periods and to serve the need of successive occupants, until an architecturally incongruous and altogether delightful mansion has been produced. To the ugly little square house which Alcott found here in 1845 and christened "Hillside"

he added a low wing at each side, the central gable in the front of the old roof, and wide rustic piazzas across the front of the wings. No additions were made during Hawthorne's first residence here, nor during the occupancy of Mrs. Hawthorne's brother, while the novelist was abroad; but when Hawthorne returned to it in 1860, with "most of his family twice as big as when they left," he enlarged one wing by adding the barn to it, heightened the other side-wing, erected two s.p.a.cious apartments at the back, and crowned the edifice with a square third-story study, which, with its great chimney and many gables, overtops the rambling roofs like an observatory, and may have been suggested by the tower of the Villa Montauto, where he wrote "The Marble Faun." No important changes have been made by the subsequent owners of the place.

Hawthorne's widow left the Wayside in 1868. It was afterward occupied by a school for young ladies; then by Hawthorne's daughter Rose--herself a charming writer--with her husband, the gifted and versatile George Parsons Lathrop; later it was purchased by the Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop, and has since been the summer home of his widow, who is widely known as "Margaret Sidney," the creator of "Five Little Peppers," and writer of many delightful books. Hawthorne said, anent his visit to Abbotsford, "A house is forever ruined as a home by having been the abode of a great man,"--a truth well attested by the present amiable mistress of his own Wayside, whose experience with a legion of unaccredited, intrusive, and often insolent persons who come at all hours of the day, and sometimes in the night, demanding to be shown over the place, would be more ludicrous were it less provoking.

Some details of the interior have been beautified by the aesthetic taste of Mrs. Lothrop, but an appreciative reverence for Hawthorne leads her to preserve his home and its belongings essentially unchanged. At the right of the entrance is an antique reception-room, which was Hawthorne's study during his first residence here, as it had long before been the study of "Septimius Felton" in the tale. It is a low-studded apartment with floor of oaken planks, heavy beams strutting from its ceiling, a generous fireplace against a side wall, and with two windows looking out upon the near highway. In this room Hawthorne wrote "Tanglewood Tales" and "Life of Franklin Pierce;" and here that creature of his imagination, "Septimius," brooded over his doubts and questions.

Through yonder windows "Septimius" saw the British soldiery pa.s.s and repa.s.s; above this oaken mantel--now artistically fitted and embellished with rare pottery--he hung the sword of the officer he had slain; before this fireplace he pored over the mysterious ma.n.u.script his dying victim had given him; on this hearth he distilled the mystic potion, and here poor Sibyl quaffed it. The s.p.a.cious room at the left, across the hall, was at first Hawthorne's parlor; but after he enlarged the dwelling this became the library, where he read aloud to the a.s.sembled family on winter evenings, and where his widow afterward transcribed his "Note-Books" for publication. The sunny room above this was the chamber of the unfortunate Una; Hawthorne's own sleeping apartment, on the second floor, is entered from the hall through the narrowest of door-ways. In the upper hall a little wall-closet was the repository of Hawthorne's ma.n.u.scripts, and here, to the surprise of all, an entire unpublished romance was found after his death. From this hall a narrow stairway, so steep that one need cling to the iron rail at the side in order to scale it, ascends to Hawthorne's study in the tower, a lofty room with vaulted ceiling. On one side wall is the Gothic enclosure of the stairs, against which once stood his plain oaken writing-desk; upon it the bronze inkstand he brought from Italy, where it held the ink for "The Marble Faun." In this inkstand, he declared, lurked "the little imp" which sometimes controlled his pen. Attached to a side of the staircase was the high desk or shelf upon which he often wrote standing. Book-closets filled the corners at the back, and a little fireplace with a plain mantel was placed between two of the windows.

Loving hands have neatly decorated the ceiling, and painted upon the walls mottoes commemorative of the master who wrought here. The views he beheld through the windows of this sanctum when he lifted his eyes from his book or ma.n.u.script are tranquil and soothing: across his roofs in one direction he looked upon the sunny gra.s.slands of the valley; in another he saw placid slopes of darkly-wooded hills and a reach of the elm-bordered road; in a third direction, smiling fields and the vineyards where the famous Concord grape first grew met his vision; and through his north windows appeared the thick woods that crowned his own hill-top,--so near that he "could see the nodding wild flowers" among the trees and breathe the woodland odors.

Local tradition declares that, to prevent intrusion into this den, Hawthorne habitually sat upon a trap-door in the floor, which was the only entrance. Without this precaution he found in this eyrie the seclusion he coveted, and here, among the birds and the tree-tops, remote from the tumult of life and above ordinary distracting influences, he could linger undisturbed in that border-land between shadow and substance which was his delight, could evoke and fix upon his pages the weird creatures of his fancy. Several hours of each day he pa.s.sed here alone in musing or composition, and here, besides some papers for the "Atlantic," he wrote "Our Old Home," "Grimshaw's Secret,"

"Septimius Felton," and the "Dolliver Romance" fragment. Years before, Th.o.r.eau told him, the Wayside had once been inhabited by a man who believed he would never die. The thus suggested idea, of a deathless man a.s.sociated with this house, seems to have clung to Hawthorne in his last years, and was embodied in both his later works,--the scene of "Septimius Felton" being laid here at the Wayside. No one knew aught of its composition, and the author, rereading the tale in the solitude of this study and finding it in some way lacking the perfection of his ideal, laid it away in his closet, and, in weariness and failing health, commenced and vainly tried to finish the "Dolliver Romance" from the same materials.

The house is separated from the highway by a narrow strip of sward, out of which grow elms planted by Bronson Alcott and cl.u.s.tering evergreens rooted by Hawthorne himself. The greater part of his domain lies along the dark slope and the wooded summit of the ridge which rises close behind the house. At the extremity of the grounds nearest the Orchard House, a depression in the turf marks the site of the little house where dwelt the Rose Garfield of "Septimius." Hawthorne planted sunflowers in this hollow, and Julian, his son, remembers seeing the novelist stand here and contemplate their wide disks above the old cellar.

On the steep hill-side remain the rough terraces Alcott fashioned when he occupied the place, and many of the flowering locusts and fruit-trees he and Th.o.r.eau planted. Here, too, are the sombre spruces and firs which Hawthorne sent from "Our Old Home" or planted after his return, and all are grown until they overshadow the whole place and fairly embower the house with their branches. Along the hill-side are the famous "Acacia path" of Mrs. Hawthorne and other walks planned by the novelist, some of them having been opened by him in the last summer of his life. By one path, once familiar to his feet, we find our way up the steep ascent among the locusts to the "Mount of Vision,"--as Mrs. Hawthorne named the ridge to which the novelist daily resorted for study and meditation.

The hill-top is clothed with a tangled growth of trees which hides it from the lower world and renders it a fitting trysting-place for the wizard romancer and the mystic figures which abound in his tales. Along the brow we trace, among the ferns, vestiges of the pathway worn by his feet. In the safe seclusion of this spot he spent delectable hours, lying under the trees "with a book in his hands and an unwritten book in his thoughts," while the pines murmured to him of the mystery and shadow he loved. More often he sat on a rustic seat between yonder pair of giant trees, or paced his foot-path hour after hour, as he pondered his plots and worked out the mystic details of many romances, some of them never to be written. Walking here with Fields he unfolded his design of the "Dolliver" tale, which he left half told. Here he composed the weird story of "Septimius Felton," while trudging on the very path he describes as having been worn by his hero,--Hawthorne himself habitually walking, with hands clasped behind him and with eyes bent on the ground, in the very att.i.tude he ascribes to "Septimius" as Rose saw him "treading, treading, treading, many a year," on this foot-path by the grave of the officer he had slain. In this refuge Hawthorne remained a whole day alone with his grief, when tidings came to him of the loss of his sister in the burning of the "Henry Clay." Here he sat with Howells one memorable afternoon. In the last years his wife was often with him here, sometimes walking, but more frequently sitting, with him,--as did Rose with "Septimius,"--and looking out, through an opening in the foliage near the western end of his path, upon the restful landscape, not less charming to-day than when his eyes lovingly lingered upon it.

We see the same broad, sun-kissed meadows awave with lush gra.s.s and flecked with fleeting cloud-shadows, and beyond, the dark forests of Th.o.r.eau's Walden and the gentle outlines of low-lying hills which shut in the valley like a human life.

For some months after the election to the Presidency of his friend Franklin Pierce, the Wayside was frequented by office-seekers; but ordinarily Hawthorne had few visitors besides his Concord friends.

Fields, Holmes, Hilliard, Whipple, Longfellow, Howells, Horatio Bridge, the poet Stoddard, Henry Bright, came to him here. The visits of "Gail Hamilton" (Miss Abigail Dodge), mentioned by Hawthorne as "a sensible, healthy-minded woman," were especially enjoyed by him. His own visits were very infrequent; "Orphic" Alcott said that in the several years he lived next door Hawthorne came but twice into his house: the first time he quickly excused himself "because the stove was too hot," next time "because the clock ticked too loud."

The Wayside was the only home Hawthorne ever owned. To it he came soon after his removal from the "little red house" in Berkshire, and to it he returned from his sojourn abroad; here, with failing health and desponding spirits, he lived in the gloomy war-days,--writing in his study or, with steps more and more uncertain, pacing his hill-top; from here he set out with his life-long friend Pierce on the last sad journey which ended so quickly and quietly.

VII

THE WALDEN OF Th.o.r.eAU

_A Transcendental Font--Emerson's Garden--Th.o.r.eau's Cove--Cairn-- Beanfield--Resort of Emerson--Hawthorne--Channing--Hosmer--Alcott, etc._

One long-to-be-remembered day we follow the shady foot-paths, once familiar to the sublimated Concord company, through their favorite forest retreats to "the blue-eyed Walden,"--sung by many a bard, beloved by transcendental saint and seer. After a delightful stroll of a mile or more, we emerge from the wood and see the lovely lakelet "smiling upon its neighbor pines." We find it a half-mile in diameter, with bold and picturesquely irregular margins indented with deep bays and mostly wooded to the pebbles at the water's edge. From this setting of emerald foliage it scintillates like a gem: its wavelets lave a narrow pebbly sh.o.r.e within which a bottom of pure white sand gleams upward through the most transparent water ever seen. At one point where the railway skirts the margin, the woods are disfigured with pavilions and tables for summer pleasure-seekers, and a farther wooded slope has recently been ravaged by fire; but most of the sh.o.r.e has escaped both profanation and devastation, so that the literary pilgrim will find the shrines he seeks little disturbed since the Concord luminaries here had their haunt.

From the summit of the forest ledge which rises from the southern sh.o.r.e, the lakelet seems a foliage-framed patch of the firmament. This rocky eminence affords a wide and enchanting prospect, and was the terminus and object of many excursions of Emerson and the other "Walden-Pond-Walkers," as the transcendentalists were styled by their more prosy and orthodox neighbors. It was upon this elevation in the midst of a portion of his estate which he celebrates in his poetry as "My Garden"--whose "banks slope down to the blue lake-edge"--that Emerson proposed to erect a lodge or retreat for retirement and thought.

A mossy path, once trodden almost daily by the philosopher and his friends, brings us to the beautiful and secluded cove where Emerson and Th.o.r.eau kept a boat, and where the shining ones often came to bathe in this limpid water. Ablution here seems to have been a sort of transcendent baptism, and many a visitor, eminent in art, thought, or letters, has boasted that he walked and talked with Emerson in Walden woods and bathed with him in Walden water. In this romantic nook Th.o.r.eau spent much time during his hermitage, sitting in reverie on its banks or afloat on its gla.s.sy surface, fishing or playing his flute to the charmed perch. On the sh.o.r.e of this cove he procured the stones for the foundations and the sand for the plastering of his cabin. From the water's edge an obscure path, bordered by the wild flowers he loved, winds among the murmuring pines up to the site of Th.o.r.eau's retreat, on a gentle hill-side which falls away to the sh.o.r.e a few rods distant. A cairn of small stones, placed by reverent pilgrims, stands upon or near the spot where he erected his dwelling at an outlay of twenty-eight dollars and lived upon an income of one dollar per month.

The hermit would hardly know the place now; his young pines are grown into giants that allow but glimpses of the shimmering lake; even the "potato hole" he dug under his cabin, whence the squirrels chirped at him from beneath the floor as he sat to write, and where he kept his winter store,--the "beans with the weevil in them" and the "potatoes with every third one nibbled by chipmunks,"--is obliterated and overgrown with the glabrous sumach. His near-by field, where he learned to "know beans" and gathered relics of a previous and aboriginal race of bean-h.o.e.rs, is covered by a growth of pines and dwarf oaks, in places so dense as to be almost impa.s.sable.

Some one has said, "Th.o.r.eau experienced Nature as other men experience religion." Certainly the life at Walden, which he depicted in one of the most fascinating of books, was in all its details--whether he was ecstatically hoeing beans in his field or dreaming on his door-step, floating on the lake or rambling in forest and field--that of an ascetic and devout worshipper of Nature in all her moods. Th.o.r.eau "built himself in Walden woods a den" in 1845,--after his return from tutoring in the family of Emerson's brother at Staten Island; here he wrote most of "Walden" and the "Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and much more that has been posthumously published; from here he went to jail for refusing to pay a tax on his poll, from here he made the excursion described in "The Maine Woods."

He finally removed from Walden in the autumn of 1847, to reside in the house of Emerson during that sage's absence in Europe. An old neighbor of Th.o.r.eau's, who had often watched his "stumpy" figure as he hoed the beans, and had even once or twice a.s.sisted him in that celestial agriculture, tells us that Th.o.r.eau's hut was removed by a gardener to the middle of the bean-field and there occupied for some years. Later it was purchased by a farmer, who set it upon wheels and conveyed it to his farm some miles distant, where it has decayed and gone to pieces.

In Concord it is not difficult to identify the personages a.s.sociated with Th.o.r.eau's life at Walden Pond and referred to in his book. The "landlord and waterlord" of the domain, on which Th.o.r.eau was "a squatter," was Waldo Emerson; the owner of the axe which the hermit borrowed to hew the frame of his hut was Bronson Alcott; the "honorable raisers" of the structure were Emerson, Curtis the Nile "Howadji,"

Alcott, Hosmer, and others; the lady who made the sketch of the hermitage which appears on the t.i.tle-page of "Walden" was the author's sister Sophia. Of the hermit's visitors here, "the one who came oftenest" was Emerson; "the one who came farthest" was also the poet whom the hermit "took to board for a fortnight," Ellery Channing; the "long-headed farmer," who had "donned a frock instead of a professor's gown," was Th.o.r.eau's neighbor and life-long friend Edmund Hosmer, who is celebrated in the poetry of Emerson and Channing; the "last of the philosophers," the "Great Looker--great Expecter," who "first peddled wares and then his own brains," was Bronson Alcott, who spent long evenings here in converse with the hermit, or in listening to chapters from his ma.n.u.script. Here came Hawthorne to talk with his "cast-iron man" about trees and arrow-heads; here came George Hilliard and James T.

Fields, and others,--sometimes so many that the hut would scarce contain them; the only complaint heard from Th.o.r.eau anent the narrowness of his quarters being that there was not room for the words to ricochet between him and his guests. Here, too, came humbler visitors, hunted slaves, who were never denied the shelter of the hermitage nor the sympathy and aid of the hermit.

Another generation of visitors comes now to this spot,--pilgrims from far, like ourselves, to the shrine of a "stoic greater than Zeno or Xenophanes,"--a man whose "breath and core was conscience." We linger till the twilight, for the genius of this shrine seems very near us as we muse in the place where he dwelt incarnate alone with Nature, and there is for us a hint of his healthful spirit in the odor of his pines and of the wild flowers beside his path,--a vague whisper of his earnest, honest thought in the murmur of the cl.u.s.tering boughs and in the lapping of the wavelets upon the mimic strand.

We bring from the sh.o.r.e a stone--the whitest we can find--for his cairn, and place with it a bright leaf, like those his callers in other days left for visiting cards upon his door-step, and then, through the wondrous half-lights of the summer evening, we walk silently away.

VIII

THE HILL-TOP HEa.r.s.eD WITH PINES

_Last Resting-Place of the Ill.u.s.trious Concord Company--Their Graves beneath the Piny Boughs._

During Hawthorne's habitation of the "Old Manse" and his first residence at the Wayside, his favorite walk was to the "Sleepy Hollow," a beautifully diversified precinct of hill and vale which lies a little way eastward from the village. His habitual resting-place here was a pine-shaded hill-top where he often met Emerson, Th.o.r.eau, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth h.o.a.r, Mrs. Ripley, or Margaret Fuller,--for all that sublimated company loved and frequented this spot. More often Hawthorne lounged and mused or chatted here alone with his lovely wife. Their letters and journals of this period make frequent mention of the walks to this place and of "our castle,"--a fanciful structure which, in their happy converse here under the pines, they planned to erect for their habitation on this hill-top. In their pleasant conceit, the terraced path which skirts the verge of the hollow and thence ascends the ridge was the grand "chariot-road" to their castle. This park has become a cemetery,--at its dedication Emerson made an oration and Frank B.

Sanborn read a beautiful ode,--and on their beloved hill-top nearly all the transcendent company whom Hawthorne used to meet there, save Margaret Fuller who rests beneath the sea, lie at last in "the dreamless sleep that lulls the dead."

First came Th.o.r.eau, to lie among his kindred under the wild flowers and the fallen needles of his dear pines, in a grave marked now by a simple stone graven with his name and age. Next came Hawthorne: with his "half-told tale" and a wreath of apple-blossoms from the "Old Manse"

resting on his coffin, and with Emerson, Longfellow, Fields, Ellery Channing, Aga.s.siz, h.o.a.r, Lowell, Whipple, Alcott, Holmes, and George Hilliard walking mournfully by his side, he was borne, through the flowering orchards and up the hill-side path,--which was to have been his "chariot-road,"--to a grave on the site of the "castle" of his fancy; where his dearest friend Franklin Pierce covered him with flowers and James Freeman Clarke committed his mortal part to the lap of earth.

Alas, that the beloved cohabitant of his dream-castle must lie in death a thousand leagues away! in no dream of his would such a separation from her have seemed possible. She tried to mark his tomb by a leafy monument of hawthorn shrubbery, but the rigorous climate prevented; now a low marble, inscribed with the one word "Hawthorne," stands at either extremity of his grave, and a glossy growth of periwinkle covers the spot where sleeps the great master of American romance. Some smaller graves are beside his: in one lies a child of Julian Hawthorne; in another, Rose--the daughter of Hawthorne's age--laid the son which her husband, Parsons Lathrop, commemorates in the lines of "The Flown Soul."

Next Mrs. Ripley and Elizabeth h.o.a.r were borne to this "G.o.d's acre," and then Emerson--followed by a vast concourse and mourned by all the world--was brought to "give his body back to earth again," in this loved retreat, near Hawthorne and his own "forest-seer" Th.o.r.eau. A gigantic pine towers above him here, and a ma.s.sive triangular boulder of untooled pink quartz--already marred by the vandalism of relic-seekers--is placed to mark the grave of the great "King of Thought." It bore no inscription or device of any sort until a few months ago, when a bronze plate inscribed with his name and years and the lines--

"The pa.s.sive master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned"--

was set in the rough surface of the stone. By Emerson lie his wife, his mother, two children of his son and biographer Dr. Emerson, and his own little child,--the "wondrous, deep-eyed boy" whom Emerson mourned in his matchless "Threnody."

"O child of paradise, Boy who made dear his father's home, In whose deep eyes Men read the welfare of the times to come,-- I am too much bereft."

Six years after Emerson, Bronson Alcott and his ill.u.s.trious daughter Louisa were laid here, within a few yards of Hawthorne and the rest, on a spot selected by the "Beth" of the Alcott books who was herself the first to be interred in it. Now all the "Little Women" repose here with their parents and good "John Brooke,"--"Jo" being so placed as to suggest to her biographer that she is still to take care of parents and sisters "as she had done all her life."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GRAVE OF EMERSON]

No other spot of earth holds dust more precious than does this "hill-top hea.r.s.ed with pines." We are pleased to find the native beauty of the place little disturbed,--the trees, the indigenous gra.s.ses, ferns, and flowers remaining for the most part as they were known and loved by those who sleep beneath them. The contour of the ground and the foliage which cl.u.s.ters upon the slopes measurably shut out the view of other portions of the enclosure from this secluded hill-top, and, as we sit by the graves under the moaning pines, we seem to be alone with these _our_ dead. Through the boughs we have glimpses of the motionless deeps of a summer sky; the patches of sunshine which illumine the graves about us are broken by foliate shadows sometimes as still as if painted upon the turf. No discordant sound from the haunts of men disturbs our meditations; the silence is unbroken save by the frequent sighs of the mourning pines.

As we linger, the pervading quiet becomes something more than mere silence, it acquires the air and sense of reserve: the impression is borne into our thought that these asleep here, who once freely gave us their richest and best, are withholding something from us now,--some newly-learned wisdom, some higher thought. Does "an awful spell bind them to silence," or are they vainly repeating to us in the tender monotone of the pines a message we cannot hear or cannot bear? Or have they ceased from all ken or care for earthly things? Do they no longer love this once beloved spot? Do they not rejoice in the beauty of this summer day and the sunshine that falls upon their windowless palace?

Are they conscious of our reverent tread on the turf above them, of our low words of remembrance and affection? Do they care that we have come from far to bend over them here?

"For knowledge of all these things, we must"--as the greatest of this transcendent circle once said--"wait for to-morrow morning."