occupancy; it was indeed of the humblest and plainest,--a low-eaved,
one-and-a-half-storied structure, with a lower wing at the side, dingy
red in color, with window-shutters of green. The interior was cosy and
more commodious than the exterior would indicate, and one could readily
conceive that the artistic taste and deft fingers of Mrs. Hawthorne
might create here the idyllic home her letters portray. We have been
indebted to the courtesy of Hawthorne's friend Tappan for glimpses of
the rooms which Mrs. Hawthorne had already made familiar to us: the tiny
reception-room, where she "sewed at her stand and read to the children
about Christ;" the drawing-room, where she disposed "the embroidered
furniture," and where, in the farther corner, stood "Apollo with his
head tied on;" the dining-room, where the "Pembroke table stood between
the windows;" the small boudoir, with its enchanting outlook; the
"golden chamber" where the baby Rose was born; the room of the "little
lady Una;" and the low, dingy apartment which was the study of the
master-genius. Of this room she says, "it can boast of nothing but his
presence in the morning and the picture out of the window in the
evening." His secretary was so placed that as he sat at his work he
could look out upon a landscape of forest and meadow, lake and mountain,
as beautiful as a poet's dream. It was the exquisite loveliness of this
scene--which Hawthorne thought surpassed all others in Berkshire--that
for a time reconciled him to the deficiencies of his situation here.
Monument Mountain, looming almost across the valley, is the most
prominent feature of this view, and it was from his study window that he
noted most of its varying aspects which are depicted in the
"Wonder-Book" and in his letters and journals. Its contour is to him
that of a "huge, headless sphinx," and when--as on the days we beheld it
from his window--it blazes from base to summit with the resplendent hues
of autumn, his fancy suggested that "the sphinx is wrapped in a rich
Persian shawl;" with the sunshine upon it, "it has the aspect of
burnished copper;" now it has "a fleece of sun-brightened mist," again
it seems "founded on a cloud;" on other days it is "enveloped as if in
the smoke of a great battle." Upon the pane through which he had looked
upon these changeful phases his hand inscribed, "Nathaniel Hawthorne,
February 9, 1851."
[Sidenote: Site of his Little Red House]
He could scarcely have found a lovelier location for his home. The
valley, which sometimes seemed to him "a vast basin filled with sunshine
as with wine," is enclosed by groups of mountains piled and terraced to
the horizon. As we behold them in the splendor of the October days,
great patches of sunshine and sable cloud-shadows flit along the glowing
slopes in the sport of the wind. On the one side, the ground sweeps
upward from the cottage site to the "Bald Summit" of the "Wonder-Book;"
on the other, a meadow--as long as the finger of the giant of "Three
Golden Apples"--slopes to the lake a furlong distant. That beautiful
water, sung by Sigourney, Sedgwick, and Fanny Kemble, stretches its bays
three miles among the hills to the southward and mirrors its own wooded
margins and the farther mountains. Beyond the lake, rising in mid-air
like a great gray wall, are the sheer precipices of Monument Mountain,
and in the hazy distance the loftier Taconics uprear their grand Dome in
the illimitable blue.
Of "La Maison Rouge" of Hawthorne's letters, the pilgrim of to-day finds
only the blackened and broken foundation walls: a devouring fire, from
which Tappan saved little of his furniture, has laid it low. These walls
(which remain only because relic-hunters cannot easily carry them away)
measurably indicate the form and dimensions of the cottage and its
general arrangement. Its site is close upon the highway, from which it
is partially screened by evergreen trees. The gate of the enclosure is
of course an unworthy successor to that upon which Fields found
Hawthorne swinging his children, but these near-by elms have shaded the
great romancer, the tallest of the evergreens is the tree his wife
thought "full of a thousand memories," and all about the spot cluster
reminders of the simple, healthful life Hawthorne led here. Here are
the garden ground he tilled and where he buried the pet rabbit "Bunny;"
the "patch," ploughed for him by Tappan, where he raised beans for
himself and corn for his hens (he had learned something of agriculture
at Brook Farm, albeit it was said there he could do nothing but feed the
hogs); the now great fruit-trees whose leaden labels little Julian
destroyed, as Tappan remembers; the place of the "scientific hennery,"
fitted up by the "Man of Genius and the Naval Officer,"--Hawthorne and
Horatio Bridge; the long declivity where the novelist as well as his
Eustace Bright used to coast "in the nectared air of winter" with the
children of the "Wonder-Book;" the leafy woods--his refuge from
visitors--where he walked with his children and where Bright nutted with
the little Pringles; the lake-shore where Hawthorne loitered or lay
extended in the shade during summer hours, "smoking cigars, reading
foolish novels, and thinking of nothing at all," while the children
played about him or covered his chin and breast with long grasses to
make him "look like the mighty Pan."
Near by are other friends he has made known to us. Yonder copse shades a
narrow glen whose braes border a brooklet winding and chattering on its
way to the lake; this glen was a summer haunt of Hawthorne, where he
doubtless pondered much of his work. Here he brought his children
"to play with the brook" and helped them to build water-falls, or
reclined in the shade and told them stories as described in the
"Wonder-Book,"--for this is the "dell of Shadow-Brook," where the
children picnicked with Bright and where he told them the story of "The
Golden Touch" on such an afternoon as this, on which we behold the dell
thickly strewn with golden leaves, as if King Midas had newly emptied
his coffers there.
[Sidenote: Tanglewood and Wonder-Book Scenes]
Yonder mansion of Hawthorne's landlord, just beyond the highway, is
"Tanglewood,"--place of the Pringles' home and still the abode of
Tappan's daughters,--where Bright spent his vacations and where
Hawthorne makes him tell many of the "Tales." The view described on the
porch, where the "Gorgon's Head" was narrated, is the one Hawthorne saw
from his study window. Glimpses of various rooms of the mansion which
Tappan then inhabited and called "Highwood" are prefixed to the stories
told in them. Beyond "Tanglewood" steeply rises an eminence whose bare
acclivity Hawthorne often climbed with his family,--the "Bald Summit"
where the Pringles listened to the tale of "The Chimera." We ascend by
the novelist's accustomed way "through Luther Butler's orchard," and are
repaid by a view extending from the mountains of Vermont to the
Catskills and deserving the high praise Hawthorne bestowed. A golden
cloud floating close to Graylock's shaggy head reminds us of Hawthorne's
conceit that a mortal might step from the mountain to the cloud and thus
ascend heavenly heights. The farther ranges enclose a valley of
wave-like hills,--which look as if a tumultuous ocean had been
transfixed and solidified,--dotted with farmsteads and picturesque
villages whose white spires rise from embowering trees. At our feet the
"Bowl" ripples and scintillates, farther away the "Echo Lake" of
Christine Nilsson and many smaller lakelets "open their blue eyes to the
sun," while the placid stream, fringed by overhanging willows, circles
here and there through the valley like a shining ribbon. Here we may
realize the immensity of Hawthorne's giant in the "Three Golden Apples,"
who was so tall he "might have seated himself on Taconic and had
Monument Mountain for a footstool."
[Sidenote: Resorts and Reminiscences]
[Sidenote: Fanny Kemble]
Not far away, near another shore of the shimmering "Bowl," that
versatile genius "Carl Benson"--Charles Astor Bristed--dwelt for some
time in a quaint old farm-house which has since been destroyed by fire,
and here accomplished some of his literary work. Laurel Lake (the
Scott's Pond of Hawthorne's "Note-Books"), where Beecher "bought a
hundred acres to lie down upon,"--and called them Blossom Farm in the
"Star Papers" written there,--was another resort of Hawthorne. We find
it a pretty water, although its margins are mostly denuded of large
trees. A bright matron of the vicinage, who, when a child, thought the
author of the "Wonder-Book" the "greatest man in the world save only
Franklin Pierce," lived then by Hawthorne's road to Laurel Lake. Her
admiration for him (heightened by his intimacy with Pierce) led her to
daily watch the road by which he would come from Tanglewood, and when
she saw him approaching--which would be twice a week in good
weather--she would go into the yard and reverently gaze at him until his
swift gait had carried him out of sight. To her he was a tall, dark man
with a handsome clean-shaven face and lustrous eyes which saw nothing
but the ground directly before him, habitually dressed in black, with a
wide-brimmed soft hat. Usually his walk was solitary, but sometimes
Herman Melville, who was well known in the neighborhood, was his
companion, and one autumn he was twice or thrice accompanied by "a
light spare man,"--the poet Ellery Channing. Once Hawthorne strode past
toward the lake when Fanny Kemble, who lived near by, rode her black
steed by his side and "seemed to be doing all the talking"--she was
capable of that--and "was talking politics." Having secured a Democratic
auditor, she doubtless "improved the occasion" with her habitual
vivaciousness. A neighbor of Hawthorne's tells us this incident of the
following year, when the novelist's friend Pierce had been named for the
Presidency. One dark night this neighbor went on foot to a campaign
lecture at Lenox Furnace. At its close, he essayed to shorten the
homeward walk by a "short cut" across the fields, and, of course, lost
his way. Descrying a light, he directed his steps toward it, but found
himself involved in a labyrinth of obstacles, and had to make so many
detours that when he finally reached the house whence the light
proceeded, and when in response to his hail the door was opened by
Kemble herself, he was so distraught and amazed at being lost among his
own farms that he could hardly explain his plight; but she quickly
interrupted his incoherent account: "Yes, I see, poor benighted man!
you've been to a Democratic meeting; no wonder you are bewildered! Now
I'll lend you a good Whig lantern that will light you safe home." We
find Mrs. Kemble-Butler's "Perch"--as she named her home here--a little
enlarged, but not otherwise changed since the time of her occupancy. She
was a general favorite, and her dark steed, which had cost her the
proceeds of a volume of her poems, used to stop before every house in
the vicinage. She often came, habited in a sort of bloomer costume which
shocked some of her friends, to fish in the "Bowl" at the time Hawthorne
dwelt by its shore.
The death of Louis Kossuth, some time ago, reminded her former neighbors
here that she led the dance with him at a ball in Lenox, when the exiled
patriot was a guest of the Sedgwicks.
[Sidenote: Monument Mountain]
Our approach to Monument Mountain is along one of those sequestered
by-ways which Hawthorne loved, with "an unseen torrent roaring at an
unseen depth" near by. A rift in the morning mists which enshroud the
valley displays the mountain summit bathed in sunshine. We ascend by
Bryant's "path which conducts up the narrow battlement to the north,"
the same along which Hawthorne and his friends--Holmes, James T. Fields,
Sedgwick, and the rest--were piloted by the historian Headley on a
summer's day more than forty years ago. Standing upon the beetling
verge, which is scarred and splintered by thunderbolts and overhangs a
precipice of five hundred feet or more, we look abroad upon a landscape
of wondrous expanse and beauty. Here we may realize all the prospect
Bryant portrayed as he stood upon this spot:
"A beautiful river
Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads;
On either side
The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond,
Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise
The mighty columns with which earth props heaven."
In the middle distance, across the Bowl, which gleams a veritable
"mountain mirror," we see the site of the home whence Hawthorne so often
looked upon these cliffs. Yonder detached pinnacle, rising from the base
of the precipice beneath us, is the "Pulpit Rock" which Catherine
Sedgwick christened when Hawthorne's party picnicked here; from the crag
projecting from the verge Fanny Kemble declaimed Bryant's poem, and
Herman Melville, bestriding the same rock for a bowsprit, "pulled and
hauled imaginary ropes" for the amusement of the company. Among these
splintered masses the company lunched that day and drank quantities of
Heidsieck to the health of the "dear old poet of Monument Mountain." On
the east, almost within sight from this eminence, is the spot where he
was born, near the birthplaces of Warner and the gifted Mrs. Howe.
[Sidenote: Hawthorne at Stockbridge]
Another day we follow the same brilliant party of Hawthorne's friends
through the Stockbridge Ice Glen,--a narrow gorge which cleaves a rugged
mountain from base to summit, its riven sides being apparently held
asunder by immense rocky masses hurled upon each other in wild
confusion. Beneath are weird grottos and great recesses which the sun
never penetrates, and within these we make our way--clambering and
sliding over huge boulders--through the heart of the mountain. One of
Hawthorne's company here testifies that in all the extemporaneous
jollity of the scramble through the glen the usually silent novelist was
foremost, and, being sometimes in the dark, dared use his
tongue,--"calling out lustily and pretending that certain destruction
threatened us all. I never saw him in better spirits than throughout
this day."
From the glen we trace Hawthorne to the staid old house of Burr's
boyhood, where lived and wrote Jonathan Edwards, and the statelier
dwelling whence Catherine Sedgwick gave her tales to the world. Near by
we find the grave where she lies amid the scenes of her own "Hope
Leslie," and not far from the sojourn of her gifted niece whose
translation of Sand's "Fadette" has been so well received.
Overlooking the village is the summer residence of Field of the
"Evangelist,"--author of the delightful books of travel.
Farther away is a little farm-house, with a "huge, corpulent, old Harry
VIII. of a chimney," to which Hawthorne was a frequent visitor,--the
"Arrow-Head" of Herman Melville. "Godfrey Graylock" says the friendship
between Hawthorne and Melville originated in their taking refuge
together, during an electric shower, in a narrow cleft of Monument
Mountain. They had been coy of each other on account of Melville's
review of the "Scarlet Letter" in Duyckinck's _Literary World_, but
during some hours of enforced intercourse and propinquity in very
contracted quarters they discovered in each other a correlation of
thought and feeling which made them fast friends for life. Thereafter
Melville was often at the little red house, where the children knew him
as "Mr. Omoo," and less often Hawthorne came to chat with the racy
romancer and philosopher by the great chimney. Once he was accompanied
by little Una--"Onion" he sometimes called her--and remained a whole
week. This visit--certainly unique in the life of the shy Hawthorne--was
the topic when, not so long agone, we last looked upon the living face
of Melville in his city home. March weather prevented walks abroad, so
the pair spent most of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics in
the barn,--Hawthorne usually lounging upon a carpenter's bench. When he
was leaving, he jocosely declared he would write a report of their
psychological discussions for publication in a volume to be called "A
Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn," the title being a travesty upon that of
Thoreau's then recent book, "A Week on Concord River," etc.
[Sidenote: Melville's Arrow-Head]
Sitting upon the north piazza, of "Piazza Tales," at Arrow-Head, where
Hawthorne and his friend lingered in summer days, we look away to
Graylock and enjoy "the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza"
which Melville so whimsically describes. At Arrow-Head, too, we find the
astonishing chimney which suggested the essay, still occupying the
centre of the house and "leaving only the odd holes and corners" to
Melville's nieces, who now inhabit the place in summer; the study where
Hawthorne and Melville discussed the plot of the "White Whale" and other
tales; the great fireplace, with its inscriptions from "I and my
Chimney;" the window-view of Melville's "October Mountain,"--beloved of
Longfellow,--whose autumn glories inspired that superb word-picture and
metaphysical sketch.
On a near knoll, commanding a view of the circle of mountains and the
winding river, stands the sometime summer residence of Holmes among his
ancestral acres, where Hawthorne and Fields came to visit him. His
"den," in which he did much literary work, overlooks the beautiful
meadows, and is now expanded into a large library, while the trees he
planted are grown to be the crowning beauty of the place, which the
owner calls Holmesdale. It was the hereditary home of the Wendells.
[Sidenote: Pittsfield]
Beyond, at the edge of the town of Pittsfield, is the mansion where
Longfellow found his wife and his famous "Old Clock on the Stairs." At
the Athenaeum in the town some thousands of Holmes's books will soon be
placed, and here is preserved the secretary from Hawthorne's study in
the little red house,--a time-worn mahogany combination of desk,
drawers, and shelves, at which he wrote "The House of the Seven Gables,"
"The Wonder-Book," "The Snow Image," and part of "The Blithedale
Romance." Pittsfield was long the home of "Godfrey Graylock;" here the
gifted Rose Terry Cooke passed her closing years of life with her
husband, and not far away Josh Billings, "the Yankee Solomon," was born
and reared as Henry Savage Shaw. One day we trace from Pittsfield the
footsteps of Hawthorne and Melville across the Taconics to the whilom
home of "Mother Ann" and to the higher Hancock peaks.
Hawthorne's daily walk to the post-office was past the later residence
of Charlotte Cushman, and by the church where the older Channing
delivered his last discourse and where twenty years ago Parkhurst was
preacher. In the church-tower Fanny Kemble's clock still tells the hours
above the lovely spot where she desired to be buried.
[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Habit of Meditation]
These various excursions compass the range of Hawthorne's rambles in
this region: he was never ten miles away from the little red house
during his residence here. Obviously he preferred short and solitary
strolls which allowed undisturbed meditation upon the work in hand. The
quantity and finish of the writing done here indicate that much thought
was expended upon it outside his study. We may be sure that upon "The
House of the Seven Gables" were bestowed, besides the five months of
daily sessions at his desk, other months of study and thought as he
strolled the country roads and loitered by the lake-side or in the dell
of "Blossom-Brook." He avowed himself a shameless idler in warm weather,
declaring he was "good for nothing in a literary way until after the
autumnal frosts" brightened his imagination as they did the foliage
about him here; yet the meditations of one summer in Berkshire produced
his masterpiece, and the next summer accomplished "The Wonder-Book,"
quickly followed by "The Snow Image" and "Blithedale." During this
summer also he had a voluminous correspondence with the many "Pyncheon
jackasses" who thought themselves aggrieved by his use of their name in
"The House of the Seven Gables."
[Sidenote: Life in the Little Red House]
Of the simple home-life at the little red house, Hawthorne's diaries and
letters, as well as some of the books written here, afford pleasing
glimpses. The "Violet" and "Peony" of the "Snow Image" story are the
novelist's own little Una and Julian, and the tale was suggested by some
occurrence in their play; the incidents related of Eustace Bright and
the young Pringles, which are prefixed to the "Wonder-Book" stories, are
merely experiences of Hawthorne and his children, and during the
composition of these tales he delighted these children--as one of them
remembers--by reading to them each evening the work of the day. A
grim-visaged negress named Peters, who was the servant here in the
little red house, is said to have suggested the character of Aunt Keziah
in "Septimius Felton."
Hawthorne's chickens receive notice as members of the family in his
diary,--thus: "Seven chickens hatched, J. T. Headley called--eight
chickens;" "ascended a mountain with my wife, eight more chickens
hatched." In a letter to Horatio Bridge, "Our children grow apace and so
do our chickens;" "we are so intimate with every individual chicken that
it seems like cannibalism to think of eating one of them." Hawthorne's
daily walk with pail in hand to Luther Butler's, the next farm-house, he
speaks of as his "milky way." Butler lives now two miles distant. The
novelist thus announces to his friend Bridge the birth of the present
gifted poetess, Mrs. Lathrop, the daughter of his age: "Mrs. Hawthorne
has published a little work which still lies in sheets, but makes some
noise in the world; it is a healthy miss with no present pretensions to
beauty." Five cats were cherished by the novelist and his children; a
snowy morning after Hawthorne's removal, three of the cats came to a
neighboring house, where their descendants are still petted and
cherished.
A few visitors came to the little red house--Kemble, James, Lowell,
Holmes, E. P. Whipple, and the others already mentioned--in whose
presence the "statue of night and silence" was wont to relax, but for
the most part his life was that of a recluse. Here, as elsewhere, his
thoughts dwelt apart in "a twilight region" where the company of his
kind was usually a perturbing intrusion. For companionship, his family,
the lake, the woods, his own thoughts, sufficed; he seldom sought any
other, and therefore was unpopular in the neighborhood. It is hardly to
be supposed that the creator of Zenobia, Hester Prynne, and the
Pyncheons would greatly enjoy the society of his rural neighbors, but
they were not therefore the less displeased by his habitually going out
of his way--sometimes across the fields--to avoid meeting them. Some of
them had a notion that he was the author of "a poem, or an arithmetic,
or some other kind of a book,"--as he makes "Primrose Pringle" to say of
him in the tale,--but to most he was incomprehensible, perhaps a little
uncanny, and the great genius of romance is yet mentioned here as "a
queer sort o' man that lived in Tappan's red house."
[Sidenote: Reasons for leaving Berkshire]
His son records that after Hawthorne had freed himself from Salem "he
soon wearied of any particular locality;" after a time he tired even of
beautiful Berkshire. Its obtrusive scenery "with the same strong
impressions repeated day after day" became irksome; then he grew tired
of the mountains and "would joyfully see them laid flat." He writes to
Fields, "I am sick of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another
winter here." Doubtless the region which we behold in the glamour of the
early autumn seemed very different to Hawthorne in the season when he
had daily "to trudge two miles to the post-office through snow or slush
knee-deep." Ellery Channing--who had knowledge of the winter here--in
his letters to Hawthorne calls Berkshire "that satanic institution of
Spitzbergen," "that ice-plant of the Sedgwicks."