with Thoreau's life at Walden Pond and referred to in his book. The
"landlord and waterlord" of the domain, on which Thoreau 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 title-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 Thoreau'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 manuscript. 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 Thoreau 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 clustering boughs and in
the lapping of the wavelets upon the mimic strand.
We bring from the shore 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 HEARSED WITH PINES
_Last Resting-Place of the Illustrious 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, Thoreau, Bronson
Alcott, Elizabeth Hoar, 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 Thoreau, 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, Agassiz, Hoar, 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 Hoar were borne to this "God'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" Thoreau. A gigantic
pine towers above him here, and a massive 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 passive 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 illustrious 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."
[Illustration: THE GRAVE OF EMERSON]
No other spot of earth holds dust more precious than does this "hill-top
hearsed with pines." We are pleased to find the native beauty of the
place little disturbed,--the trees, the indigenous grasses, 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 clusters 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."
IN AND OUT OF LITERARY BOSTON
IN BOSTON
OUT OF BOSTON
I. Cambridge; Elmwood, etc.
II. Belmont; Wayside Inn; Homes of Whittier
III. The Salem of Hawthorne; Whittier's Oak Knoll
IV. Webster's Marsh-field; Brook Farm and other Shrines
IN BOSTON
_A Golden Age of Letters--Literary Associations--Isms--Clubs--Where
Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham lived--The Corner Book-store--Home of
Fields--Sargent--Hilliard--Aldrich--Deland--Parkman--Holmes--Howells--
Moulton--Hale--Howe--Jane Austin, etc._
Of the cisatlantic cities our "modern Athens" is, to the literary
pilgrim, the most interesting; for, whatever may be the claims of other
cities to the present literary primacy, all must concede that Boston was
long the intellectual capital of the continent and its centre of
literary culture and achievement. If the pilgrim have attained to middle
life and be loyal to the literary idols of his youth, his regard for the
Boston of to-day must be largely reminiscential of a past that is
rapidly becoming historic; for, of the constellation of brilliant
authors and thinkers who first gained for the place its pre-eminence in
letters, few or none remain alive. The requirements of labor and trade
are transforming the old streets; the sedate and comfortable dwellings,
once the abodes or the resorts of the _litterateurs_, are giving place
to palatial shops or great factories; the neighborhood where Bancroft,
Choate, Winthrop, Webster, and Edward Everett dwelt within a few rods
of each other was long ago surrendered to merchandise and mammon; yet
for us the busy scenes are haunted by memories and peopled by presences
which the spirit of trade is powerless to exorcise.
To tread the streets which have daily echoed the foot-falls of the
illustrious company who created here a golden age of learning and
culture were alone a pleasure, but the city holds many closer and more
personal mementos of her dead prophets, as well as the homes of a
present generation who worthily strive to sustain her place and
prestige.
Interwoven with the older Boston are literary associations hardly less
memorable and enduring than its history: in the belfry of its historic
holy of holies--Old South Church--was the study of the historian Dr.
Belknap, and the dove that nested beneath the church-bell is preserved
in the poetry of N. P. Willis; King's Chapel, the sanctuary where the
beloved Dr. Holmes worshipped for so many years, and whence he was not
long ago sadly borne to his burial, figures in the fiction of Fenimore
Cooper; historic Copp's Hill is also a scene in a tale of the same
novelist; the court-house occupies the site of the "beetle-browed"
prison of Hester Prynne of "The Scarlet Letter;" the storied old
State-house marked the place of her pillory; the theatre of the Boston
Massacre is the scene of the thrilling episode of Hawthorne's "Gray
Champion;" his "Legends of Province House" commemorate the ancient
structure which stood nearly opposite the Old South Church; the Tremont
House, where the "Jacobins' Club" used to assemble with Ripley,
Channing, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Peabody, and the extreme
reformers, was the resort of Hawthorne's "Miles Coverdale," as it was of
the novelist himself, and on the street here he saw "ragamuffin Moodie"
of "The Blithedale Romance." On the site of Bowdoin School, Charles
Sumner was born; at one hundred and twenty Hancock Street he lived and
composed the early orations which made his fame; at number one Exeter
Place, Theodore Parker, the Vulcan of the New England pulpit, forged his
bolts and wrote the "Discourses of Religion;" in Essex Street lived and
wrote Wendell Phillips, at thirty-seven Common Street he died; at
thirty-one Hollis Street the gifted Harriet Martineau was the guest of
Francis Jackson; at the corner of Congress and Water Streets Lloyd
Garrison wrote and published "The Liberator." In this older city,
antedating the luxury of the Back Bay district of the new Boston, Mather
wrote the "Magnalia," Paine sang his songs, Allston composed his
tales, Buckminster wrote his homilies, Bowditch translated La Place's
"_Mecanique celeste_." Here Emerson, Motley, Parkman, and Poe were born;
here Bancroft lived, Combe wrote, Spurzheim died. Here Maffit, Channing,
and Pierpont preached; Agassiz, Phillips, and Lyell lectured; Alcott,
Elizabeth Peabody, and Fuller taught. Here Sargent wrote "Dealings with
the Dead," Sprague his "Curiosity," Prescott his "Ferdinand and
Isabella;" here Margaret Fuller held the "Conversations" which attracted
and impressed the leading spirits of the time, and Bronson Alcott
favored elect circles with his Orphic and oracular utterances; here
lived Melvill, pictured in Holmes's "Last Leaf;" here Emerson preached
Unitarianism "until he had carried it to the jumping-off-place," as one
of his quondam parishioners avers, and here commenced his career as
philosopher and lecturer. Here, besides those above mentioned, Dwight,
Brisbane, Quincy, Ripley, Graham, Thompson, Hovey, Loring, Miller, Mrs.
Folsom, and others of similar ability or zeal, discoursed and wrote in
advocacy of the various reforms and "isms" in vogue half a century or
more ago.
It has been said that, according to the local creed, whoso is born in
Boston needs not to be born again, but some decades ago a literary
prowler, like ourselves, discovered that "nobody is born in Boston," the
people who have made its fame in letters and art being usually allured
to it from other places. This is true in less degree of the present age,
since Hale, Robert Grant, Ballou,--of "The Pearl of India,"--Bates,
Guiney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others are "to the manor born;"
but, if Boston has few birthplaces, she cherishes the homes and haunts
of two generations of adult intellectual giants.
Prominent among the literary landmarks is the "Corner Book-store"--once
the shop of the father of Dr. Clarke--at School and Washington Streets,
which, like Murray's in London, has long been the rendezvous of the
_litterateurs_. Here appeared the first American edition of "The Opium
Eater" and of Tennyson's poems. Here was the early home of the
"Atlantic," then edited by James T. Fields, who was the literary partner
of the firm and the presiding genius of the old store. This lover of
letters and sympathetic friend of literary men--always kind of heart and
generous of hand--drew to him here the foremost of that galaxy who first
achieved for America a place in the world of letters. To this literary
Rialto, as familiar loungers, came in that golden age George Hilliard,
Emerson, Ticknor, Saxe, Whipple, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Agassiz,
the "Autocrat," and the rest, to loiter among and discuss the new books,
or, more often, to chat with their friend Fields at his desk, in the
nook behind the green baize curtain. The store is altered some since
Fields left it; the curtained back-corner, which was the domain of the
Celtic urchin "Michael Angelo" and the trysting spot of the literary
fraternity, has given place to shelves of shining books. The side
entrance--used mostly by the authors because it brought them more
directly to Fields's desk and den--is replaced by a window which looks
out upon the spot where, as we remember with a thrill, Fields last shook
Hawthorne's hand and stood looking after him as--faltering with
weakness--he walked up this side street with Pierce to start upon the
journey from which he never returned.
Literary tourists come to the store as to a shrine: thus in later years
Matthew Arnold, Cable, Edmund Gosse, Professor Drummond, Dr. Doyle, and
others like them, have visited the old corner. Nor is it deserted by the
authors of the day; Holmes was often here up to the time of his death,
and the visitor may still see, turning the glossy pages, some who are
writers as well as readers of books: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Scudder,
Alger, Robert Grant,--whose "Reflections" and "Opinions" have been so
widely read,--Miss Winthrop, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton,
and Mrs. Coffin are among those who still come to the familiar place.
Near by, in Washington Street, Hawthorne's first romance, "Fanshawe,"
was published in 1828. From Fields's famous store the transition to the
staid old mansion which was long his home, and in which his widow still
lives, is easy and natural. We find it pleasantly placed below the
western slope of Beacon Hill, overlooking an enchanting prospect of blue
waters and sunset skies. It is one of those dignified, substantial, and
altogether comfortable dwellings--with spacious rooms, wide halls, easy
stairways, and generous fireplaces--which we inherit from a previous
generation. Here Fields, hardly less famed as an author than as the
friend of authors, and his gifted wife--who is still a charming
writer--created in their beautiful home an atmosphere which attracted to
it the best and highest of their kind, and made it what it has been for
more than forty years, a centre and ganglion of literary life and
interest. The old-fashioned rooms are aglow with most precious memories
and teem with artistic and literary treasures, many of them being
_souvenirs_ of the illustrious authors whom the Fields have numbered
among their friends and guests. The letters of Dickens, Hawthorne,
Emerson, and others reveal the quality of the hospitality of this house
and show how it was prized by its recipients. For years this was the
Boston home of Hawthorne; to it came Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier
almost as freely as to their own abodes; here Holmes, Lowell, Charles
Sumner, Greene, Bayard Taylor, Joseph Jefferson, were frequent guests;
and here we see a quaintly furnished bedchamber which has at various
times been occupied by Dickens, Trollope, Arthur Clough, Thackeray,
Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Cushman, and others of equal
fame. Of the delights of familiar intercourse with the starry spirits
who frequented this house, of their brilliant discussions of men and
books, their scintillations of wit, their sage and sober words of
wisdom, Mrs. Annie Fields affords but tantalizing hints in her
reminiscences and the glimpses she occasionally allows us of her
husband's diary and letters. Fields's library on the second
floor--described as "My Friend's Library"--is a most alluring apartment,
where we see, besides the "Shelf of Old Books" of which Mrs. Fields
gives such a sympathetic account, other shelves containing numerous
curious and uniquely precious volumes,--among them the few hundreds of
worn and much annotated books which constituted the library of Leigh
Hunt. In this room Emerson, while awaiting breakfast, wrote one of his
poems, to which the hostess gave title.
In later years a younger generation of writers came to this mansion:
Celia Thaxter was a frequent guest; the princess-like Sarah Orne Jewett,
beloved by Whittier as a daughter, has made it her Boston home; Aldrich
comes to see the widow of his friend; Miss Preston, Mrs. Ward, and other
luminous spirits may be met among the company who assemble in these
memory-haunted rooms. For several years Holmes lived in the same street,
within a few doors of Fields's house.
At number fifty-four in quaint Pinckney Street, around the corner from
Mrs. Fields's and near the former residence of Aldrich, we find the
house in which the brilliant George Hilliard lived and died, scarcely
changed since the time James Freeman Clarke here married Hawthorne to
the lovely Sophia Peabody.
Upon the opposite side, at number eleven, dwells Mrs. E. P. Whipple,
widow of the eminent author and critic,--herself a lady of refined
critical tastes,--who keeps unchanged the home in which her husband
died. In his lifetime a select circle of friends usually assembled here
on Sunday evenings,--a circle in which Fields, Bronson Alcott, Lowell,
Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Sumner, Clarke, Dr. Bartol, Ole Bull,
Lucretia Hale, Edwin Booth, and others of similar eminence in letters or
art were included. Just around the corner, in Louisburg Square, Bronson
Alcott died in the house of his daughter Mrs. Pratt,--the "Meg" of
Louisa Alcott's books.
On Beacon Hill, in the next--Mount Vernon--street, we find near the "hub
of the Hub" a tall, deep-roomed dwelling, surmounted by an observatory
which commands a charming view of the city and its environs, and this is
the elegant city home of the poet, novelist, and prince of
conversationalists, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. His library, full of
treasures, is on a lower floor, but the study in which he pens his
delightful compositions is high above the distractions of the world. As
one sees the author of "Marjorie Daw" and the recent "Unguarded Gates"
among his books, there is no hint of his sixty years in his fresh, ruddy
face, with its carefully waxed moustache, nor in his sprightly speech
and manner.
In the same street, the spacious mansion of ex-Governor Claflin was long
a resort of a wise, earnest, and dazzling company of sublimated
intellects. This house was in later years the usual haven of Whittier,
the gentle Quaker bard, during his visits to Boston; and here, protected
by the hostess from the eager kindness of his numerous friends, he spent
many restful days when rest was most needed.
Near by, on the same hill-side, the talented authoress of "John Ward,
Preacher" inhabits a many-windowed home of sober brick. Within, we find
everywhere evidences of the fastidious personality of Mrs. Margaret
Deland. In her parlors are dainty articles of furniture and bric-a-brac,
wide fireplaces, deep windows full of flowers, many pictures, many more
books. In her study and work-room, her desk stands near another
fireplace, about it are still more flowers, pictures and books galore;
here, not long ago, that tragedy of selfishness--"Philip and His
Wife"--was written.
At the sumptuous home of the Sargents in the adjoining street have been
held some of the _seances_ of the noted Radical Club, in which, as Mrs.
Moulton says, "somebody read a paper and everybody else pulled it to
pieces." At these sessions such spirits as Emerson, Bronson Alcott,
Holmes, Edward Everett Hale, Carl Schurz, the genial Colonel Higginson,
the serene James Freeman Clarke, the mystic Dr. Bartol,--who still lives
in retirement in his old home,--and other representatives of advanced
thought have discussed the ethics of life as well as of letters.
A plain brick house of three stories in the same quiet street was the
abode of Francis Parkman's sister, where, after the death of his wife,
the historian spent his winters, his study here being a simple front
room on the upper floor, with open fireplace and book-lined walls.
In Park Street, above the Common, the ample mansion of George
Ticknor--the chronicler of "Spanish Literature" and the autocrat of
literary taste--was during many years a haunt of the best of Boston
culture. We find its stately walls still standing, but the interior has
been surrendered to the Philistines.
On Beacon Street, but a door or two removed from the birthplace of
Wendell Phillips, in a house whose number the poet-lover said he
"remembered by thinking of the Thirty-Nine Articles," Longfellow won
Miss Appleton to be his wife. Just across the Common, in Carver Street,
Hawthorne's son was born.