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 documents; and it was here
that he discovered, among the accumulated rubbish of the past, the
"scarlet, gold-embroidered letter," and the manuscript 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 Essex 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 spacious 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
grassy 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 clustering
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," passed "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 noble 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 massive 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 glass 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 shore.
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 manuscript 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 illustrious 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 coarse farm attire--and of members of
his family; a fine cabinet of beetles and butterflies 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 associations, 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, Thoreau, 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--passed her later years, and where, not many months ago, she
died, having survived nearly all her associates 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 title 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]
A morning's drive westward through the shade and sheen of a delectable
urban district conveys us to the village of Auburndale, where we find
the tasteful cottage home of Louise Imogen Guiney, with its French
roofs, wide windows, square tower, and embosoming foliage. Here, if we
come properly accredited, we may (or might before she became the
village postmistress) see the gifted poetess of "White Sail" and
"Roadside Harp" and essayist of "English Gallery" and "Prose Idyls"--a
_petite_ and attractive young lady--at her desk, surrounded by her
treasures of books and bric-a-brac and with the portraits of many
friends looking down upon her from the walls of the square upper room
where she writes. She has little to say concerning her own
work,--fascinating as it is to her,--but discourses pleasantly on many
topics and narrates _con amore_ the history of the precious tomes and
the literary relics she has gathered here, and describes the traits and
lineage of her beloved canine pets, who have been execrated by some of
her neighbors.
[Sidenote: Brook Farm]
Nearer Jamaica Plain is the quiet corner of West Roxbury, where the
exalted community of Brook Farmers attempted to realize in external and
material fashion their high ideals and to inaugurate the precursor of an
Arcadian era. In this season, "the sweet o' the year," we find the farm
a delightful spot, fully warranting Hawthorne's eulogium in "Blithedale
Romance." The songful stream which gives the place its name is margined
by verdant and sun-kissed meads which slope away to the circling
Charles; on either side, fields and picturesque pastures--broken here
and there by rocky ledges and copse-covered knolls--swell upward to
feathery acclivities of pine and oak, with rugged escarpments of rock.
From the elevation about the farm-house we overlook most of the domain
of these social reformers,--the many acres of woodlands, the orchards
and fields where Ripley, George William Curtis, Hawthorne, Dwight,
Bedford, Pratt, Dana, and other transcendental enthusiasts held
sublimated discourse while they performed the coarsest farm drudgery,
applied uncelestial fertilizers, "belabored rugged furrows," or delved
for the infinite in a peat-bog. Curtis has said "there never were such
witty potato-patches, such sparkling corn-fields; the weeds were
scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson and Browning." The
farm-house stands above the highway, and is shaded by giant trees
planted by Ripley and his associates. It is a commodious, antiquated
structure of weather-worn wood, two stories in height, with a vast attic
beneath the sloping roofs and an extension which has been recently
enlarged. The original edifice is a ponderous fabric of almost square
form, with an entrance in the middle of the front, massive chimneys at
either end, and contains four spacious lower rooms, besides an outer
scullery. Here we see the sitting-room of the reformers, where at first
Channing sometimes preached and the now "Nestor of American journalism"
sang bass in the choir; their refectory, where Dana served as
head-waiter; and their brick-paved kitchen, where the erudite Mrs.
Ripley and the soulful Margaret Fuller sometimes helped to prepare the
bran bread and baked beans for the exalted brotherhood. Adjoining is the
old "wash-room," where some who have since become famous in literature
or politics pounded the soiled linen in a hogshead with a heavy wooden
pestle; and just without is the turf-carpeted yard where the dignified
and handsome Hawthorne, the brilliant Charles A. Dana (who certainly was
the most popular member of the community), and the genial Curtis were
sometimes seen hanging the moist garments upon the lines, a truly
edifying spectacle for gods and men. It was from Curtis's pockets that
the clothes-pins sometimes dropped during the evening dances. Some of
the trees yet to be seen near the house were rooted from the nursery
established here by Dana.
This old house was the original "Hive" of the community, who added the
extensive wing at the back, but increasing numbers soon forced a
portion of the company to swarm, and other dormitories were erected.
Of these we find vestiges of the "Eyrie"--which was also used as a
school-house--upon a commanding ledge at a little distance from the
house, and nearer the grove where the rural festivals of the association
were held. Of the "Nest," the little house where Miss Ripley lived, the
"Cottage," where Margaret Fuller lodged during her sojourns at the farm,
the large barn, where social _seances_ were held while the starry
company prepared vegetables for the market, and the other steading
erected by the community, only the cellars and broken foundations
remain. In the wood at some distance from the house is the "Eliot's
Pulpit" of Coverdale's narrative, a mass of rock crowning a knoll and
having a great fissure through its core; in the forest beyond we may
find "Coverdale's Walk," and the "Hermitage" where he heard by accident
the colloquy of Westervelt and Zenobia.
After the day of Ripley's brilliant colony the broad acres of Brook Farm
were tilled by the town poor, and--"to what base uses!"--the pretty
cottage of Margaret Fuller became a loathsome small-pox pest-house; the
rooms of the "Hive," after six years of familiarity with ideal refiners
and reformers, became the abode of paupers, and at this day are aswarm
with an odorous multitude of German orphans, wards of a Lutheran
society that now owns the place.
While the pilgrim may find but few traces of the physical labors of the
choice spirits who once inhabited this spot, the beneficent results of
the mental and moral work here accomplished--especially among the
young--are manifest and ineffaceable. These infertile fields yielded but
scant returns for the manual toil of the optimistic philosophers, but
their earnest strivings toward social and mental emancipation have borne
abundant fruit.
IN BERKSHIRE WITH HAWTHORNE
I. The Graylock and Hoosac Region
II. Lenox and Middle Berkshire
I
THE GRAYLOCK AND HOOSAC REGION
_North Adams and about--Hawthorne's Acquaintances and Excursions--Actors
and Incidents of Ethan Brand--Kiln of Bertram the Lime-Burner--Natural
Bridge--Graylock--Thoreau--Hoosac Mountain--Deerfield Arch--
Williamstown--Bryant._
The Hawthorne pilgrimage has drawn us to many shrines: the sunny scenes
of "The Marble Faun," the peaceful landscapes of "Our Old Home," the now
busy city of "The Scarlet Letter," the elm-shaded Salem of "Dr.
Grimshaw" and "The House of the Seven Gables," the Manse of the
"Mosses," the Wayside of "Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver
Romance,"--these and many another resort of the subtile romancer, in the
Old World and the New, have held our lingering feet.
Amid the splendors of a New England September we follow him into the
"headlong Berkshire" of "Ethan Brand" and "Tanglewood Tales."
Hawthorne was more than most writers influenced by environment; the
situations and circumstances under which his work was produced often
determined its tone and color, while the persons, localities, and
occurrences observed by his alert senses in the real world about him
were skilfully wrought into his romance. His residence in Berkshire
affected not only the books written there, but some subsequently
produced, and the scenery of this loveliest corner of New England
supplied the setting for many of his tales. Some of the best passages of
his "American Note-Books" are records of his observations in this
region,--sundry scenes, characters, and incidents being afterward
literally transcribed therefrom into his fiction,--while a few of his
shorter stories seem to have been suggested by legends once current in
Berkshire. It passes, therefore, that for us the greatest charm of this
realm of delights is that all its beauties--the grandeur of its
mountains, the enchantment of its valleys, the glamour of its autumn
woods, the sheen of its lakelets, the sapphire of its skies--serve to
bring us into closer sympathy with Hawthorne, to whom these beauties
were once a familiar vision.
He first came to Berkshire in the summer of 1838. For thirteen years he
had bravely "waited for the world to know" him. His "Twice-Told Tales"
had brought him little fame or money, but they had procured him the
friendship of the Peabodys, and it would appear that he and the lovely
Sophia already loved each other. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth,
written early in the summer, Sophia says, "Hawthorne came one morning
for a take-leave call, looking radiant. He said he was not going to tell
any one, not even his mother, where he should be for the next months; he
thought he should change his name, so that if he died no one would be
able to find his gravestone. We asked him to keep a journal while he was
gone. He at first said he would not write anything, but finally
concluded it would suit very well for hints for future stories." It was
from his journal of these months of mysterious retirement that, forty
years later, the gentle Sophia--then his widow--transcribed those pages
of the "Note-Books" which contain the account of his sojourn in upper
Berkshire and of his observations and meditations there. How far the
journal furnished "hints for future stories" the literary world well
knows.
A few days after this "take-leave call" we find Hawthorne at Pittsfield,
where his Berkshire saunterings (and ours) fitly began. We follow him
northward along a curving valley hemmed by mountains that slope upward
to the azure; on the right rise the rugged Hoosacs in
"Wave-like walls that block the sky
With tints of gold and mists of blue;"
on the left loom the darkly-wooded domes of the Taconics above the
bright upland pastures, while before us grand old "Graylock" uprears his
head "shaggy with primeval forest,"--his gigantic shape forming the
culmination of the superb landscape. Hawthorne's superlative pleasure of
beholding this grandeur and beauty from the driver's seat of a stage and
being regaled at the same time by the converse of the driver is
denied to us, but we enjoy quite as much as did Hawthorne the
little "love-pats" and passages of a newly-wedded pair of our
fellow-passengers. The stage has disappeared, the driver and the
high-stepping steeds which served him "in wheel and in whoa" have given
place to the engineer and the locomotive; the changes of the
half-century since Hawthorne journeyed here have well-nigh overturned
the world; only the eternal beauty of these hills and the bewraying
demeanor of the newly-married remain evermore unchanged.
[Sidenote: Hawthorne at North Adams]
[Sidenote: Characters of his Fiction]