lived his fruitful life and accomplished his work; here he rose to the
zenith of poesy and prophecy; to him here came the "great and grave
transition which may not king or priest or conqueror spare;" from here
his wife, lingering behind him in the eternal march, went a year or two
ago to rejoin him on the piny hill-top; and here his unmarried
daughter--of "saint-like face and nun-like garb"--inhabits his home and
cherishes its treasures.
Emerson's son and biographer some time ago relinquished his medical
practice in Concord, and has since devoted himself to art. He has a
residence a mile or so out of the village, but spends much of his time
abroad. Last year he lectured in London upon the lives and writings of
some of the Concord authors.
V
THE ORCHARD HOUSE AND ITS NEIGHBORS
_Ellery Channing--Margaret Fuller--The Alcotts--Professor Harris--Summer
School of Philosophy--Where Little Women was written and Robert
Hagburn lived--Where Cyril Norton was slain._
A plain little cottage by the road, not far from Emerson's home, was for
some time the abode of the companion of many of his rambles through the
countryside,--the poet Ellery Channing. It was to this simple dwelling,
as the author of "Little Women" once told the writer, that Channing
brought his young wife--sister of Margaret Fuller--before the Alcotts
had come to live in their hill-side home under the wooded ridge, and it
was here he commenced the sequestered life so suited to his nature and
tastes.
Some of his descriptive poems of Concord landscapes were written in this
little cottage. The scenes of one of his earlier winters in the
neighborhood--when he chopped wood in a rude clearing--are portrayed in
the exquisite lines of his "Woodman." In those days he thought his poems
"too sacred to be sold for money," and they were kept for his circle of
friends. Of the poet's modest home Miss Fuller--that "dazzling woman
with the flame in her heart"--was a frequent inmate; it was from Concord
that she went to live in the family of Horace Greeley in New York. At
the time of her visits at Channing's cottage Thoreau was sojourning with
Emerson, and we may be sure that the quartette of starry souls, thus
_juxtapose_, held much soulful and edifying converse. But those of us
who deplore our lack of the supreme transcendental spirit which we
ascribe to the Concord circle may find consolation in reflecting that
some of this gifted company had also earthly tastes, and found even
discourse concerning the "over-soul" sometimes tiresome. The "strained
pitch of intellectual intensity" was, upon occasion, gladly relaxed;
thus we discover the exalted Channing sometime profanely inviting
Hawthorne--"the gentlest man that kindly Nature ever drew"--to visit him
in Concord, alluring the novelist with prospects of strong-waters, pipes
and tobacco without end, and urging, as the utmost inducement, "Emerson
is gone and there is nobody here to bore you."
A few furlongs farther eastward, under the high-soaring elms of the
Lexington road, we come to the "Orchard House" of Bronson Alcott, "the
grandfather of the 'Little Women.'" The tasteful dwelling stands several
rods back from the street, nestling cosily at the foot of a pine-crowned
slope, and having a wide, sunny outlook in front. Embowered in orchards
and vines, and shaded by the overreaching arms of giant elms, it seems a
most delightful home for culture and contemplative study. The cottage
itself is a low, wide, gabled, picturesquely irregular edifice, which
our Pythagorean mystic evolved from a forlorn, box-like farm-house which
he found here when he purchased the place. The rustic fence he set along
the highway is replaced by an ambitious modern structure. On this
hill-side Alcott, the "most transcendent of the transcendentalists,"
lived for nearly thirty years,--but not all of that time in this
house,--coming here first after the failure of his "Fruitlands"
community in 1845, and finally twelve years later. Prior to this he had
been assisted by Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody in his renowned
Boston Temple School, which was a failure in a financial sense only,
since it furnished a theme for Miss Peabody's "Record of a School," and
Louisa Alcott's girlish recollections of it provided her a model for the
delightful "Plumfield" of her books.
Alcott's treatise on "Early Education," his "Gospels" and "Orphic
Sayings," had been published, and his "very best contribution to
literature"--his daughter Louisa--was also extant before he came to this
home, but it was here that his maturer works and most of his charming
essays and "Conversations" were produced.
In this house were held the early sessions of the Summer School of
Philosophy, of which Alcott was the leading spirit; here his daughter,
the "Beth" of "Jo's" books, died. The interior of the "Orchard House" is
roomy and quaint and abounds in surprising nooks and cosy recesses. In
the corner-room Louisa wrote "Little Women" and other delicious books;
in the room behind it, May, "our Madonna,"--who died Madame
Nieriker,--had her studio and practised the art which made her famous
before her untimely end. In the great attic under the sloping roof the
"Little Women" acted the "comic tragedies" written by "Jo" and "Meg"
(some of them now published in a volume with a "Foreword" by "Meg")
until the increasing audiences of Concord children caused the removal of
the mimic stage to the big barn on the hill-side.
Hawthorne makes this house the abode of Robert Hagburn in "Septimius
Felton." Along the brow of the tree-clad ridge which overlooks the
place, and to which Bronson Alcott resorted for the morning and evening
view, the patriots hastened to intercept the retreat of the British
troops, "blackened and bloody." In the depression of the ridge just back
of the house we find the spot where "Septimius Felton" shot the young
officer, Cyril Norton, and buried him under the trees. On the grave here
"Septimius" sat with Rose Garfield and the half-crazed Sibyl Dacy; here
grew the crimson flower which he distilled in his "elixir of
immortality," and here Sibyl came to die after her draught of the
compound.
After the removal of the Alcotts to the Thoreau house in the village,
"Apple Slump"--as Louisa sometimes called this orchard home--became the
property and residence of that disciple of Hegel, Professor
Harris,--once principal of the Summer School of Philosophy, and now the
head of the National Bureau of Education at Washington,--who sometimes
comes here in summer.
The "Hillside Chapel," erected by Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, of New York,
for the sessions of the Summer Philosophers, is placed among the trees
of the orchard adjoining Alcott's old home. It is a plain little
structure of wood, tasteful in design, with pointed gables and
vine-draped porch and windows. Its embowered walls, unpainted and
unplastered, seem "scarcely large enough to contain the wisdom of the
world," but they have held assemblages of such lights as Emerson,
Alcott, Sanborn, Bartol, McCosh, Holland, Porter, Lathrop, Stedman,
Wilder, Hedge, Dr. Jones, Elizabeth Peabody, Ward Howe, Ednah Cheney,
and other like seekers and promoters of fundamental truth.
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 spacious
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 pass and
repass; 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 manuscript his dying victim
had given him; on this hearth he distilled the mystic potion, and here
poor Sibyl quaffed it. The spacious 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 assembled 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 manuscripts, 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 manuscript are tranquil and soothing: across his roofs in
one direction he looked upon the sunny grasslands 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
passed 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,
Thoreau 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
associated 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 clustering 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 Thoreau 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 attitude 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 grass and
flecked with fleeting cloud-shadows, and beyond, the dark forests of
Thoreau'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 THOREAU
_A Transcendental Font--Emerson's Garden--Thoreau'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
shore 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 shore 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 shore,
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
Thoreau 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
Thoreau spent much time during his hermitage, sitting in reverie on its
banks or afloat on its glassy surface, fishing or playing his flute to
the charmed perch. On the shore 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 Thoreau's retreat, on
a gentle hill-side which falls away to the shore 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-hoers, is covered by a growth of pines and dwarf oaks, in places
so dense as to be almost impassable.
Some one has said, "Thoreau 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. Thoreau "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 Thoreau's, who had often watched his "stumpy" figure as he hoed the
beans, and had even once or twice assisted him in that celestial
agriculture, tells us that Thoreau'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.