these chapters,--names written on the scroll of fame, blazoned on
title-pages, borne in the hearts of thousands of readers in all
lands,--now, alas! inscribed above their graves. From the eminence of
Mount Auburn, we look upon Longfellow's river "stealing with silent
pace" around the sacred enclosure; the verdant meads along the stream;
the distant cities, erst the abodes of those who sleep about us
here,--for whom life's fever is ended and life's work done. Near this
summit, Charlotte Cushman rests at the base of a tall obelisk, her
favorite myrtle growing dense and dark above her. By the elevated Ridge
Path, on a site long ago selected by him, Longfellow lies in a grave
decked with profuse flowers and marked by a monument of brown stone. On
Fountain Avenue we find a beautiful spot, shaded by two giant trees,
which was a beloved resort of Lowell, and where he now lies among his
kindred, his sepulchre marked by a simple slab of slate: "Good-night,
sweet Prince!" Not far away is the beautiful Jackson plot, where not
long ago the beloved Holmes was tenderly laid in the same grave with his
wife beneath a burden of flowers. Some of the blossoms we lately saw
upon this grave were newly placed by the creator of "Micah Clarke" and
"Sherlock Holmes," Dr. Conan Doyle. By a great oak near the main avenue
is the sarcophagus of Sumner, and one shady slope bears the memorial of
Margaret Fuller and her husband,--buried beneath the sea on the coast of
Fire Island. Near by we find the grave of "Fanny Fern,"--wife of Parton
and sister of N. P. Willis,--with its white cross adorned with
exquisitely carved ferns; the pillar of granite and marble which
designates the resting-place of Everett; the granite boulder--its
unchiselled surface overgrown with the lichens he loved--which covers
the ashes of Agassiz; the simple sarcophagus of Rufus Choate; the
cenotaph of Kirkland; the tomb of Spurzheim; and on the lovely slopes
about us, under the dreaming trees, amid myriad witcheries of bough and
bloom, are the enduring memorials of affection beneath which repose the
mortal parts of Sargent, Quincy, Story, Parker, Worcester, Greene,
Bigelow, William Ellery Channing, Edwin Booth, Phillips Brooks, and many
like them whom the world will not soon forget.
In this sweet summer day, their place of rest is so quiet and
beautiful,--with the birds singing here their lowest and tenderest
songs, the soft winds breathing a lullaby in the leafy boughs, the air
full of a grateful peace and calm, the trees spreading their great
branches in perpetual benediction above the turf-grown graves,--it seems
that here, if anywhere, the restless wayfarer might learn to love
restful death.
OUT OF BOSTON
II
BELMONT: THE WAYSIDE INN: HOME OF WHITTIER
_Lowell's Beaver Brook--Abode of Trowbridge--Red Horse Tavern--Parsons
and the Company of Longfellow's Friends--Birthplace of Whittier--
Scenes of his Poems--Dwelling and Grave of the Countess--Powow Hill--
Whittier's Amesbury Home--His Church and Tomb._
A few miles westward from the classic shades of Cambridge we found,
perched upon a breezy height of Belmont, a picturesque, red-roofed
villa, for some years the summer home of our "Altrurian Traveller." From
its verandas he overlooked a slumberous plain, diversified with meads,
fields, country-seats, and heavy-tinted copses, and bordered by a circle
of verdant hills; while on the eastern horizon rises the distant city,
crowned by the resplendent dome of the capitol. In his dainty white
study here, with its gladsome fireplace and curious carvings and
mottoes, Howells wrote--besides other good things--his "Lady of the
Aroostook," in which some claim to have discerned an answer to Henry
James's "Daisy Miller."
In this neighborhood is the valley of "Beaver Brook," a favorite haunt
of Lowell, to which he brought the English poet Arthur Clough. The old
mill is removed, but we find the water-fall and the other romantic
features little changed since the poet depicted the ideal beauties of
this dale, in what has been adjudged one of the most artistic poems of
modern times.
In a charming retreat among the hills of Arlington, scarce a mile away
from Howells's sometime Belmont home, dwells and writes that genial and
gifted poet and novelist, John T. Trowbridge, whose books--notably his
war-time tales--have found readers round the world.
[Sidenote: Longfellow's Wayside Inn]
Westward again from Belmont, a prolonged drive through a delightful
country brings us to "Sudbury town" and the former hostelry of 'Squire
Howe,--the "Wayside Inn" of Longfellow's "Tales." Our companion and
guide is one who well knew the old house and its neighborhood in the
halcyon days when Professor Treadwell, Parsons,--the poet of the "Bust
of Dante,"--and the quiet coterie of Longfellow's friends came, summer
after summer, to find rest and seclusion under its ample roof and
sheltering trees, among the hills of this remote region. The environment
of fragrant meadow and smiling field, of deep wood glade and
forest-clad height, is indeed alluring. About the ancient inn remain
some of the giant elms and the "oak-trees, broad and high," shading it
now as in the day when the "Tales" immortalized it with the "Tabard" of
Chaucer; while through the near meadow circles the "well-remembered
brook" of the poet's verse, in which his friends saw the inverted
landscape and their own faces "looking up at them from below."
The house is a great, old-fashioned, bare and weather-worn edifice of
wood,--"somewhat fallen to decay."--standing close upon the highway. Its
two stories of spacious rooms are supplemented by smaller chambers in a
vast attic; two or three chimneys, "huge and tiled and tall," rise
through its gambrel roofs among the bowering foliage; a wing abuts upon
one side and imparts a pleasing irregularity to the otherwise plain
parallelogram. The wide, low-studded rooms are lighted by windows of
many small panes. Among the apartments we find the one once occupied by
Major Molineaux, "whom Hawthorne hath immortal made," and that of Dr.
Parsons, the laureate of this place, who has celebrated it in the
stanzas of "Old House at Sudbury" and other poems. But it is the old
inn parlor which most interests the literary visitor,--a great, low,
square apartment, with oaken floors, ponderous beams overhead, and a
broad hearth, where in the olden time blazed a log fire whose ruddy glow
filled the room and shone out through the windows. It is this room which
Longfellow peoples with his friends, who sat about the old fireplace and
told his "Tales of a Wayside Inn." The "rapt musician" whose
transfiguring portraiture we have in the Prelude is Ole Bull; the
student "of old books and days" is Henry Wales; the young Sicilian, "in
sight of Etna born and bred," is Luigi Monti, who dined every Sunday
with Longfellow; the "Spanish Jew from Alicant" is Edrelei, a Boston
Oriental dealer; the "Theologian from the school of Cambridge on the
Charles" is Professor Daniel Treadwell; the Poet is T. W. Parsons, the
Dantean student and translator of "Divina Commedia;" the Landlord is
'Squire Lyman Howe, the portly bachelor who then kept this "Red Horse
Tavern," as it was called. Most of this goodly circle have been here in
the flesh, and our companion has seen them in this old room, as well as
Longfellow himself, who came here years afterward, when the Landlord was
dead and the poet's company had left the old inn forever. In this room
we see the corner where stood the ancient spinet, the spot on the wall
where hung the highly colored coat of arms of Howe and the sword of his
knightly grandfather near Queen Mary's pictured face, the places on the
prismatic-hued windows where the names of Molineaux, Treadwell, etc.,
had been inscribed by hands that now are dust.
Descendants of the woman who died of the "Shoc o' Num Palsy" are said to
live in the neighborhood, as well as some other odd characters who are
embalmed in Parsons's humorous verse. But the ancient edifice is no
longer an inn; the Red Horse on the swinging sign-board years ago ceased
to invite the weary wayfarer to rest and cakes and ale; the
memory-haunted chambers, where starry spirits met and tarried in the
golden past, were later inhabited by laborers, who displayed the rooms
for a fee and plied the pilgrim with lies anent the former famed
occupants. The storied structure has recently passed to the possession
of appreciative owners,--Hon. Herbert Howe being one of them,--who have
made the repairs needful for its preservation and have placed it in the
charge of a proper custodian.
A longer way out of Boston, in another direction, our guest is among the
haunts of the beloved Quaker bard. On the bank of the Merrimac--his
own "lowland river"--and among darkly wooded hills of hackmatack and
pine, we find the humble farm-house, guarded by giant sentinel poplars,
where eighty-eight years agone Whittier came into the world.
[Sidenote: Scenes of Whittier's Poems]
Among the plain and bare apartments, with their low ceilings, antique
cross-beams, and multipaned windows, we see the lowly chamber of his
birth; the simple study where his literary work was begun; the great
kitchen, with its brick oven and its heavy crane in the wide fireplace,
where he laid the famous winter's evening scene in "Snow-Bound,"
peopling the plain "old rude-furnished room" with the persons he here
best knew and loved. We see the dwelling little changed since the time
when Whittier dwelt--a dark-haired lad--under its roof; it is now
carefully preserved, and through the old rooms are disposed articles of
furniture from his Amesbury cottage, which are objects of interest to
many visitors.
All about the place are spots of tender identification of poet and poem:
here are the brook and the garden wall of his "Barefoot Boy;" the scene
of his "Telling the Bees;" the spring and meadow of "Maud Muller;" not
far away, with the sumachs and blackberries clustering about it still,
is the site of the rude academy of his "School Days;" and beyond the low
hill the grasses grow upon the grave of the dear, brown-eyed girl who
"hated to go above him." We may still loiter beneath the overarching
sycamores planted by poor Tallant,--"pioneer of Erin's outcasts,"--where
young Whittier pondered the story of "Floyd Ireson with the hard heart."
Delightful rambles through the country-side bring us to many scenes
familiar to the tender poet and by him made familiar to all the world.
Thus we come to the "stranded village" of Aunt Mose,--"the muttering
witch-wife of the gossip's tale,"--where Whittier found the materials
out of which he wrought the touching poem "The Countess," and where we
see the poor low rooms in which pretty, blue-eyed Mary Ingalls was born
and lived a too brief life of love, and her sepulchre--now reclaimed
from a tangle of brake and brier--in the lonely old burial-ground that
"slopes against the west." Her grave is in the row nearest the dusty
highway, and is marked by a mossy slab of slate, which is now protected
from the avidity of relic-gatherers by a net-work of iron, bearing the
inscription, "The Grave of the Countess."
Thus, too, we come to the ruined foundation of the cottage of "Mabel
Martin, the Witch's Daughter," and look thence upon other haunts of the
beloved bard, as well as upon his river "glassing the heavens" and the
wave-like swells of foliage-clad hills which are "The Laurels" of his
verse. In West Newbury, the town of his "Northman's Written Rock," we
find the comfortable "Maplewood" homestead where lived and lately died
the supposed sweetheart of the poet's early manhood.
[Sidenote: Whittier's Amesbury Cottage]
Whittier's beloved Amesbury, the "home of his heart," is larger and
busier than he knew it, but, as we dally on its dusty avenues, we find
them aglow with living memories of the sweet singer. In Friend Street
stands--still occupied by Whittier's former friends--the plain little
frame house which was so long his home. A bay window has been placed
above the porch, but the place is otherwise little changed since he left
it; the same noble elms shade the front, the fruit-trees he planted and
pruned and beneath which the saddened throng sat at his funeral are in
the garden; here too are the grape-vines which were the especial objects
of his loving care,--one of them grown from a rootlet sent to him in a
letter by Charles Sumner.
Within, we see the famous "garden room," which was his sanctum and
workshop, and where this gentle man of peace waged valiant warfare with
his pen for the rights of man. In this room, with its sunny outlook
among his vines and pear-trees, he kept his chosen books, his treasured
souvenirs; and here he welcomed his friends,--Longfellow, Fields,
Sumner, Lowell, Colonel Higginson, Bayard Taylor, Mrs. Thaxter, Mrs.
Phelps-Ward, Alice Cary, Lucy Larcom, Sarah Orne Jewett, and many
another illustrious child of genius.
A quaint Franklin fireplace stood by one side wall,--usually surmounted
in summer by a bouquet; in the nook between this and the sash-door was
placed an old-fashioned writing-desk, and here he wrote many of the
poems which brought him world-wide fame and voiced the convictions and
the conscience of half the nation. Here are still preserved some of his
cherished books. Above the study was Whittier's bedchamber, near the
rooms of his mother, his "youngest and dearest" sister, and the "dear
aunt" (Mercy) of "Snow-Bound," who came with him to this home and shared
it until their deaths. After the others were gone, the brother and
sister long dwelt here alone, later a niece was for some years his
house-keeper, and at her marriage the poet gave up most of the house to
some old friends, who kept his study and chamber in constant readiness
for his return upon the prolonged sojourns which were continued until
his last year of life,--this being always his best-loved home.
Near by are the "painted shingly town-house" of his verse, where during
many years he failed not to meet with his neighbors to deposit "the
freeman's vote for Freedom," and the little, wooden Friends'
meeting-house, where he loved to sit in silent introspection among the
people of his faith. The trees which now shade its plain old walls with
abundant foliage were long ago planted by his hands. The "Powow Hill" of
his "Preacher" and "The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall" rises steeply near
his home, and was a favorite resort, to which he often came, alone or
with his guests. One who has often stood with Whittier there pilots us
to his accustomed place on the lofty rounded summit, whence we overlook
the village, the long reach of the "sea-seeking" river, and the
entrancing scene pictured by the poet in the beautiful lines of
"Miriam."
[Sidenote: Whittier's Tomb]
From these precious haunts our pilgrim shoon trace the revered bard to
the peaceful precincts of the God's-acre--just without the town--where,
in a sequestered spot beneath a dark cedar which sobs and soughs in the
summer wind, his mortal part is forever laid, with his beloved sister
and kindred, within
"the low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings."
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
circumstance 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 space
for flower or vine; the garden where Hawthorne "rolled on a grass-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]
Abutting 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 assured that a house which stands near the
shore 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 spacious
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
attitude 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
Essex Institute, on Essex 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
documents 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 title-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.