Literary Shrines Part 5

OUT OF BOSTON

III

SALEM: WHITTIER'S OAK-KNOLL AND BEYOND

_Cemetery of Hawthorne's Ancestors--Birthplace of Hawthorne and his Wife--Where Fame was won--House of the Seven Gables--Custom-House-- Where Scarlet Letter was written--Main Street and Witch Hill--Sights from a Steeple--Later Home of Whittier--Norman's Woe--Lucy Larcom-- Parton, etc.--Rivermouth--Thaxter._

[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Salem]

A half-hour's jaunt by train brings us to the shaded streets of quaint old Salem and the scenes of Hawthorne's early life, work, and triumph.

Here we find on Charter Street, in the old cemetery of "Dr. Grimshaw's Secret" and "Dolliver Romance," the sunken and turf-grown graves of Hawthorne's mariner ancestors, some of whom sailed forth on the ocean of eternity nearly two centuries ago. Among the curiously carved gravestones of slate we see that of John Hathorn, the "witch-judge" of Hawthorne's "Note-Books." Close at hand repose the ancestors of the novelist's wife, and the Doctor Swinnerton who preceded "Dolliver" and who was called to consider the cause of Colonel Pyncheon's death in the opening chapter of "The House of the Seven Gables."

The sombre house which encroaches upon a corner of the cemetery enclosure--with the green billows surging about it so closely that its side windows are within our reach from the gravestones--was the home of the Peabodys, whence Hawthorne wooed the amiable Sophia, and where, in his tales, he domiciled Grandsir "Dolliver" and also "Doctor Grimshaw"

with Ned and Elsie. We found it a rather depressing, hip-roofed, low-studded, and irregular edifice of wood, standing close upon the street, and obviously degenerated a little from the degree of respectability--"not sinking below the boundary of the genteel"--which the romancer ascribed to it. The little porch or hood protects the front entrance, and the back door communicates with the cemetery,--a circ.u.mstance which recalls the novelist's fancy that the dead might get out of their graves at night and steal into this house to warm themselves at the convenient fireside.

Not many rods distant, in Union Street, stands the little house where Captain Hathorn left his family when he went away to sea, and where the novelist was born. The street is small, shabby, shadeless, dispiriting,--its inhabitants not select. The house--builded by Hawthorne's grandfather and lately numbered twenty-seven--stands close to the sidewalk, upon which its door-stone encroaches, leaving no s.p.a.ce for flower or vine; the garden where Hawthorne "rolled on a gra.s.s-plot under an apple-tree and picked abundant currants" is despoiled of turf and tree, and the wooden house walls rise bare and bleak. It is a plain, uninviting, eight-roomed structure, with a lower addition at the back, and with a square central chimney-stack rising like a tower above the gambrel roof. The rooms are low and contracted, with quaint corner fireplaces and curiously designed closets, and with protuberant beams crossing the ceilings. From the entrance between the front rooms a narrow winding stair leads to an upper landing, at the left of which we find the little, low-ceiled chamber where, ninety years ago, America's greatest romancer first saw the light. It is one of the most cheerless of rooms, with rude fireplace of bricks, a mantel of painted planks, and two small windows which look into the verdureless yard. In a modest brick house upon the opposite side of the street, and but a few rods distant from the birthplace of her future husband, Hawthorne's wife was born five years subsequent to his nativity.

[Sidenote: The Manning House]

Ab.u.t.ting upon the back yard of Hawthorne's birthplace is the old Manning homestead of his maternal ancestors, the home of his own youth and middle age and the theatre of his struggles and triumph. It is known as number twelve Herbert Street, and is a tall, unsightly, erratic fabric of wood, with nothing pleasing or gracious in its aspect or environment.

The ugly and commonplace character of his surroundings here during half his life must have been peculiarly depressing to such a sensitive temperament as Hawthorne's, and doubtless accounts for his mental habits. That he had no joyous memories of this old house his letters and journals abundantly show. Its interior arrangement has been somewhat changed to accommodate the several families of laborers who have since inhabited it, and one front room seems to have been used as a shop; but it is not difficult to identify the haunted chamber which was Hawthorne's bed-room and study. This little, dark, dreary apartment under the eaves, with its multipaned window looking down into the room where he was born, is to us one of the most interesting of all the Hawthorne shrines. Here the magician kept his solitary vigil during the long period of his literary probation, shunning his family, declining all human sympathy and fellowship, for some time going abroad only after nightfall; here he studied, pondered, wrote, revised, destroyed, day after day as the slow months went by; and here, after ten years of working and waiting for the world to know him, he triumphantly recorded, "In this dismal chamber FAME was won." Here he wrote "Twice-Told Tales"

and many others, which were published in various periodicals, and here, after his residence at the old Manse,--for it was to this Manning house that he "always came back, like the bad halfpenny," as he said,--he completed the "Mosses." This old dwelling is one of the several which have been fixed upon as being the original "House of the Seven Gables,"

despite the novelist's averment that the Pyncheon mansion was "of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air." The pilgrim in Salem will be persistently a.s.sured that a house which stands near the sh.o.r.e by the foot of Turner Street, and is known as number thirty-four, was the model of Hawthorne's structure. It is an antique edifice of some architectural pretensions, displays five fine gables, and has s.p.a.cious wainscoted and frescoed apartments, with quaint mantels and other evidences of colonial stateliness. It was an object familiar to the novelist from his boyhood,--he had often visited it while it was the home of pretty "Susie" Ingersol,--and it may have suggested the style of architecture he employed for the visionary mansion of the tale. The names Maule and Pyncheon, employed in the story, were those of old residents of Salem.

[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Custom-House]

But a few rods from Herbert Street is the Custom-House where Hawthorne did irksome duty as "Locofoco Surveyor," its exterior being--except for the addition of a cupola--essentially unchanged since his description was written, and its interior being even more somnolent than of yore.

The wide and worn granite steps still lead up to the entrance portico; above it hovers the same enormous specimen of the American eagle, and a recent reburnishing has rendered even more evident the truculent att.i.tude of that "unhappy fowl." The entry-way where the venerable officials of Hawthorne's time sat at the receipt of customs has been renovated, the antique chairs in which they used to drowse, "tilted back against the wall," have given place to others of more modern and elegant fashion, and the patriarchal dozers themselves--lying now in the profounder slumber of death--are replaced by younger and sprightlier successors, who wear their dignities and pocket their emoluments. At the left we find the room, "fifteen feet square and of lofty height," which was Hawthorne's office during the period of his surveyorship: it is no longer "cobwebbed and dingy," but is tastefully refitted and refurnished, and the once sanded floor, which the romancer "paced from corner to corner" like a caged lion, is now neatly carpeted. The "exceedingly decrepit and infirm" chairs, and the three-legged stool on which he lounged with his elbow on the old pine desk, have been retired, and the desk itself is now tenderly cherished among the treasures of the Ess.e.x Inst.i.tute, on Ess.e.x Street, a few blocks distant, where the custodian proudly shows us the name of Hawthorne graven within the lid, in some idle moment, by the thumb-nail of the novelist. Some yellow doc.u.ments bearing his official stamp and signature are preserved at the Custom-House, and the courteous official who now occupies Hawthorne's room displays to us here a rough stencil plate marked "Salem N Hawthorne Surr 1847," by means of which knowledge of Hawthorne's existence was blazoned abroad "on pepper-bags, cigar-boxes, and bales of dutiable merchandise," instead of on t.i.tle-pages. The arched window, by which stood his desk, commands a view upon which his vision often rested, and which seems to us decidedly more pleasing and attractive than he has led us to expect. The picturesque old wharf in the foreground, the white-sailed shipping, and a shimmering expanse of water extending to the farther bold headlands of the coast form, we think, a pleasant picture for the lounger here.

The apartment opposite to Hawthorne's was, in his day, occupied by the brave warrior General James Miller, who is graphically described as the "old Collector" in the introduction to "Scarlet Letter;" the room directly above it--which is the private office of the present chief executive, the genial Collector Waters--a portrait of the hero of Lundy's Lane now looks down from the wall upon the visitor; but no picture of Hawthorne is to be found in the edifice.

An ample room at the right of the hall on the second floor, now handsomely fitted and furnished, was in Hawthorne's time open and unfinished, its bare beams festooned with cobwebs and its floor lumbered with barrels and bundles of musty official doc.u.ments; and it was here that he discovered, among the acc.u.mulated rubbish of the past, the "scarlet, gold-embroidered letter," and the ma.n.u.script of Surveyor Prue,--Hawthorne's ancient predecessor in office,--which recorded the "doings and sufferings" of Hester Prynne.

A short walk from the Custom-House brings us to the spot where, with "public notices posted upon its front and an iron goblet chained to its waist," stood that "eloquent monologist," the town-pump of Hawthorne's famous "Rill." Already its locality, at the corner of Ess.e.x and Washington Streets, is pointed out with pride as being among the sites memorable in the town's history, and thus the playful prophecy with which Hawthorne terminates the sketch of his official life is more than fulfilled.

The s.p.a.cious and well-preserved old frame house at number fourteen Mall Street--a neighborhood superior to that of his former residences--was Hawthorne's abode for three or four years. It was here that he, on the day of his official death, announced to his wife, "Well, Sophie, my head is off, so I must write a book;" and here, in the ensuing six months, disturbed and distressed by illness of his family, by the death of his mother, and by financial needs, he wrote our most famous romance, "The Scarlet Letter." A bare little room in the front of the third story was his study here, and while he wrote in solitude his wife worked in a sitting-room just beneath, decorating lamp-shades whose sale helped to sustain the household.

[Sidenote: Salem--Witch Hill]

As we saunter along the "Main Street" of Hawthorne's sketch and the other shady avenues he knew so well, the curious old town, which in his discontent he called tame and unattractive, seems to our eyes picturesque and beautiful, with its wide elm-bordered streets, its gra.s.sy waysides, its many gardens and square, embowered dwellings, not greatly changed since he knew them. If we follow "the long and lazy street" to the Witch Hill, which the novelist describes in "Alice Doane's Appeal," we may behold from that unhappy spot, where men and women suffered death for imagined misdoing, the whole of Hawthorne's Salem, with the environment he pictures in "Sights from a Steeple." We see the house-roofs of the town--half hidden by cl.u.s.tering foliage--extending now from the slopes of the fateful hill to the glinting waters of the harbor; the farther expanse of field and meadow, dotted with white villages and scored with shadowy water-ways; the craggy coast, with the Atlantic thundering endlessly against its headlands. Yonder is the steeple of Hawthorne's vision, beyond is the scene of the exquisite "Footprints in the Sand," and across the blue of the rippling sea we behold the place of the fierce fight in which the gallant Lawrence lost at once his ship and his life.

Not far from Salem is Oak-Knoll, where the white-souled Whittier, "wearing his silver crown," pa.s.sed "life's late afternoon" with his devoted relatives. It is a delightful, sheltered old country-seat, with wide lawns, and scores of broad acres wooded with n.o.ble trees, beneath which the poet loved to stroll or sit, soothed and inspirited by the gracious and generous beauty of the scene about him.

One spot in the glimmering shade of an overarching oak is shown as his favorite resort. Close by the house is a circular, green-walled garden, where, in summer mornings, he delighted to work with rake and hoe among the flowers. The mansion is a dreamful, old-fashioned edifice, with wide and lofty piazzas, whose roofs are upheld by ma.s.sive columns; and, with its grand setting of trees, it presents a pleasing picture. Whittier's study--a pleasant, cheerful room, with a delightful outlook and sunny exposure, a friendly-looking fireplace, and a gla.s.s door opening upon the veranda--was especially erected for him in a corner of the house, and here his later poems were penned. A bright and ample chamber above the parlor was his sleeping-apartment.

[Sidenote: Whittier--Longfellow, etc.]

The sweet poetess Miss Preston and the sprightly and versatile "Gail Hamilton" dwelt in the neighborhood and came often to this room to talk with the "transplanted prophet of Amesbury." Lucy Larcom and that "Sappho of the isles," Celia Thaxter, came less frequently. The place is still occupied by the relatives Whittier loved, who have preserved essentially unchanged the scenes he here inhabited.

A little farther up the rock-bound coast are the scene of Lucy Larcom's touching poem "Hannah's at the Window Binding Shoes;" the hearth-stone where Longfellow saw his "Fire of Drift-Wood;" and the bleak sea-side home of "Floyd Ireson" of Whittier's verse. Beyond these lie the sometime summer homes of the poet Dana, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Fields, and Whipple, with that Mecca of the tourist, the savage reef of Norman's Woe,--celebrated in Longfellow's pathetic poem as the scene of "The Wreck of the Hesperus,"--not far away; while across the harbor a summer resort of the gifted Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward stands--an "Old Maid's Paradise" no longer--among the rocks of the sh.o.r.e.

By the mouth of Whittier's "lowland river" we find the birthplace of Lloyd Garrison, the ancestral abode of the Longfellows, the tomb of Whitefield beneath the spot where he preached, the once sojourn of Talleyrand. Here, too, still inhabited by his family, we find the large, three-storied corner house in which Parton spent his last twenty years of busy life, and the low book-lined attic study where, in his cherished easy-chair with his ma.n.u.script resting upon a lap-board, he did much of his valuable work.

Still farther northward, we come to the ancient town of Aldrich's "Bad Boy"-hood,--immortalized as the "Rivermouth" of his prose,--the place of Longfellow's "Lady Wentworth," the home of Hawthorne's Sir William Pepperell; and to the picturesque island realm of that "Princess of Thule," Celia Thaxter, and her gifted poet-brother Laighton;--but these shrines are worthy of a separate pilgrimage.

OUT OF BOSTON

IV

WEBSTER'S MARSHFIELD: BROOK FARM, ETC

_Scenes of the Old Oaken Bucket--Webster's Home and Grave--Where Emerson won his Wife--Home of Miss Peabody--Parkman--Miss Guiney--Aldrich's Ponkapog--Farm of Ripley's Community--Relics and Reminiscences._

One day's excursion out of Boston is southward through the birthplace and ancestral home of the brilliant essayist Quincy to the boyhood haunts of Woodworth and the scenes which inspired his sweetest lyric. In Scituate, by the village of Greenbush, we find the well of the "Old Oaken Bucket" remaining at the site of the dwelling where the poet was born and reared. Most of the "loved scenes" of his childhood--the wide-spreading pond, the venerable orchard, the flower-decked meadow, the "deep-tangled wildwood"--may still be seen, little changed since he knew them; but the rock of the cataract has been removed and the cascade itself somewhat altered by the widening of the highway; the "cot of his father" has given place to a modern farm-house; and the "moss-covered bucket that hung in the well" has been supplanted by a convenient but unpoetical pump.

[Sidenote: Webster's Home and Grave]

A few miles beyond this romantic spot we come to the Marshfield home of Daniel Webster, set in the midst of a pleasant rural region, not far from the ancient abode of Governor Winslow of the Plymouth colony. On the site of Webster's farm-house of thirty rooms--destroyed by fire some years ago--his son's widow erected a pretty and tasteful modern cottage, in which she preserved many relics of the ill.u.s.trious statesman and orator, which had been rescued from the flames. Some of the relics were afterward removed to Boston, and, the family becoming extinct with the death of Mrs. Fletcher Webster, the place found an appreciatory proprietor in Mr. Walton Hall, a Boston business-man who was reared in this neighborhood, where Webster's was "a name to conjure by."

The objects connected with the memory of the statesman have been as far as possible preserved, and we find the cottage partially furnished with his former belongings. Here we see his writing-table, covered with ink-stained green baize; his phenomenally large arm-chair with seat of leather; the andirons from his study fireplace; the heavy cane he used in his walks about the farm; portraits of the great _genius loci_--one of them representing him in his coa.r.s.e farm attire--and of members of his family; a fine cabinet of beetles and b.u.t.terflies presented to him by the Emperor of Brazil; and a number of paintings, articles of furniture, and bric-a-brac which had once been Webster's.

Near the house stand the great memorial elms, each planted by Webster's hand at the death of one of his children. His favorite tree, beneath which his coffined figure lay at his funeral, was injured by the fire and has since been removed. Behind the house is a pretty lakelet, on whose surface--by his desire--lights were kept burning at night during his last illness, so that he might see them from his bed in the Pink Room where he died.

His study window looked out through a colonnade of trees upon the hill-side cemetery--a furlong distant--where he now sleeps in a spot he loved and chose for his sepulchre. His tomb, on the brow of the hill, is marked by a huge mound of earth crowned by a ponderous marble slab. The memorial stones about it were erected by him to commemorate his family, already sleeping in the vault here before he came to lie among them:--all save one, and that one died at Bull Run.

Not far away lie Governor Winslow and the Peregrine White who was born on the Mayflower. From among the neglected graves we look abroad upon the acres Webster tilled, the creeks he fished, the meadows he hunted, the haunts of his leisure during many years: on the one hand, we see a stretch of verdant pastures and lowly hills dotted by white cottages and bounded by distant forests; on the other hand, across the wave-like dunes and glistening sands we see a silver rim flecked with white sails,--the ocean, whose low-sounding monotone, eternally responding to some whisper of the infinite, mayhap lulls the dreamless sleepers beneath our feet.

Southward again, we come to historic old Plymouth, with its many Puritan shrines and a.s.sociations, which did not prevent its becoming a shire-town of Transcendentalism. Here we see the house (framed in England, and erected here upside down) where Emerson, the fountain-head of that great "wave of spirituality," wooed and won Miss Jackson to be his wife; and not far away the lovely spot where, among his gardens, groves, and orchards, Marston Watson had his "Hillside" home,--to which resorted Emerson, Theodore Parker, Peabody, Th.o.r.eau, and Bronson Alcott, and which the latter celebrated in a sonnet. Here, too, we find the church where Kendall preached, and the farm of Morton, the earliest historian of the Western world.

[Sidenote: Miss Peabody]

In the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain we find, near the station, the modest apartments where Miss Elizabeth Peabody--the "Saint Elizabeth" of her friends--pa.s.sed her later years, and where, not many months ago, she died, having survived nearly all her a.s.sociates in the earlier struggle for the enlargement of the bounds of spiritual freedom. She had been the intimate friend of Emerson, Channing, Theodore Parker, and the rest; and of the wider spirituality which they proclaimed she was esteemed a prophetess. Most of her literary work was done before she came to this home; and the latest literary effort of her life, her autobiography (which was undertaken here in age and weariness), was frustrated by her increasing infirmities.

[Sidenote: Parkman]

In the same delightful suburb was the ideally beautiful home of the historian Francis Parkman. His wide and tasteful dwelling surmounted an elevation overlooking a pretty lakelet, and was environed by ample grounds filled with choicest shrubbery and flowers, where there were roods of the roses and lilies he loved and studied. In this place he lived thirty-four years, and, although practically blind and rarely free from torturing pain, he here produced many volumes and accomplished the work which places him among the foremost historians of the age. In this home he died a year or so ago: his grounds having been taken for a public park, it is now proposed to erect here a bronze memorial of the great historian amid the floral beauty he created and cherished.

In the remoter region of Canton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich has a sometime summer home, erected among enchanting landscapes, where he has pondered and written much of his dainty prose and daintier poesy. The curious name of this rural retreat is preserved in the t.i.tle of his entertaining volume of travel-sketches, "From Ponkapog to Pesth." The tree near his door was the home of the pair of birds he described in the delightful sketch "Our New Neighbors at Ponkapog."

[Sidenote: Miss Guiney]