"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
"The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
"On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We see to-day a votive stone,
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
"Spirit that made these heroes dare
To die, or leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and Thee."
Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from
the little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a
broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and
under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of
that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which Hawthorne
thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in the river
he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the farther bank,
half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that supported it. In an old
house upon the main road, nearly opposite the entrance to this grassy
way, I knew a hale old woman who well remembered the gay advance of the
flashing soldiers, the terrible ring and crack of fire-arms, and the
panic-stricken retreat of the regulars, blackened and bloody. But the
placid river has long since overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle,
the retreat, are swallowed up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers
of more than seventy years have obliterated every trace of the road
with thick grass, which seeks to bury the graves, as earth buried the
victims. Let the sweet ministry of summer avail. Let its mild iteration
even sap the monument and conceal its stones as it hides the abutment in
foliage; for, still on the sunny slopes, white with the May blossoming
of apple-orchards, and in the broad fields, golden to the marge of
the river, and tilled in security and peace, survives the imperishable
remembrance of that day and its results.
The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low
hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town;
one separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which crowns
it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide horizon,
like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of Concord. At
night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the plain, as from a
ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by those who think
no scenery grand but that of mountains or the sea-coast. But the wide
solitude of that region is not so accounted by those who live there. To
them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson shows, by saying in the essay
upon "Nature", "My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and
on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of
our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the
village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages
and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and
moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate
and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our
hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and
forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal-revel, the proudest, most
heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste ever
decked and enjoyed, establishes itself upon the instant". And again, as
indicating where the true charm of scenery lies: "In every landscape the
point to astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and
that is seen from the first hillock, as well as from the top of the
Alleghanies. The stars stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common,
with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or
on the marble deserts of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the
spiritual excitement of Beauty, which crops up everywhere in nature,
like gold in a rich region; but the quality of the imagery indicates the
character of the scenery in which the essay was written.
Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its
neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast,
with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes of
city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine country
freshness and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not touched by
city elegance, neither is it infected by city meretriciousness; it is
sweet, wholesome country. By climbing one of the hills, your eye sweeps
a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon graceful Wachuset, or,
farther and mistier, Moriadnoc, the lofty outpost of New Hampshire
hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean, the prairie, the desert,
are not tame, although of monotonous surface. The gentle undulations
which mark certain scenes--a rippling landscape, in which all sense of
space, of breadth, and of height is lost--that is tame. It may be made
beautiful by exquisite cultivation, as it often is in England and on
parts of the Hudson shores, but it is, at best, rather pleasing than
inspiring. For a permanent view the eye craves large and simple forms,
as the body requires plain food for its best nourishment.
The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In
its centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden
church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon
the square. The Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old
Courthouse, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were
held for humane as well as merely political objects. One summer day I
especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its forum, for Emerson
and William Henry Channing spoke. In the speech of both burned the
sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in Channing
heat.
From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One
leads by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse and
the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third is
the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third divides,
and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and loftily
arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each with its
garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston road, also
dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route to the
metropolis and the Lexington turnpike.
The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not
be mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say,
unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a
thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows upon
the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and the
road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant, or
hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or
philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who
cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to rustle,
surf-like, against his chamber window.
The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year
1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant of
repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal denizen
of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this house.
Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded the city
square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish to be a
nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them along his
lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With the liberal
hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget the spacious
cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he built the only good
cellar that had then been built in Concord".
Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable neighbor
of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly upon the
edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of comeliness, he was
forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a decent dependence of
the mansion house. The estate, upon passing into Mr. Emerson's hands,
comprised the house, barn, and two acres of land. He has enlarged house
and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine. Our author is no farmer,
except as every country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the
rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing to the calm Concord
beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional
beans and pease--or some friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and
an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, and
produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm
from every slur of inadequate practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded
his originally bare land with trees, and counts near a hundred apple and
pear trees in his orchard. The whole estate is quite level, inclining
only towards the little brook, and is well watered and convenient.
The Orphic Alcott--or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him--well known
in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with his own
hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the lawn, if I may
so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house. Unhappily, this
edifice promises no longer duration, not being "technically based and
pointed". This is not a strange, although a disagreeable fact, to Mr.
Emerson, who has been always the most faithful and appreciative of the
lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural that the Orphic Alcott should build
graceful summer-houses. There are even people who declare that he has
covered the pleasant but somewhat misty lawns of ethical speculation
with a thousand such edifices, which need only to be a little more
"technically based and pointed" to be quite perfect. At present they
whisper, the wind blows clean through them, and no figures of flesh and
blood are ever seen there, but only pallid phantoms with large, calm
eyes, eating uncooked grain, out of baskets, and discoursing in a
sublime shibboleth of which mortals have no key. But how could Plato
Skimpole, who goes down to Hingham on the sea, in a New England January,
clad only in a suit of linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses?
Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon entering
the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books like the
den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the ornamental retreat
of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain shelves, not
in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a few choice
engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of Michael
Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave serenity
to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what is
written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's published
writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this room, as much
as they date from any place or moment. The villagers, indeed, fancy
their philosophical contemporary affected by the novelist James's
constancy of composition. They relate, with wide eyes, that he has
a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly records the ends of
thoughts, bits of observation and experience, and facts of all kinds--a
kind of intellectual and scientific ragbag, into which all shreds and
remnants of conversations and reminiscences of wayside reveries are
incontinently thrust. This work goes on, they aver, day and night, and
when he travels the rag-bag travels too, and grows more plethoric
with each mile of the journey. And a story, which will one day be a
tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one night, before his
wife had become completely accustomed to his habits, she awoke suddenly,
and hearing him groping about the room, inquired anxiously,
"My dear, are you unwell?"
"No, my love, only an idea."
The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a
poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply sunk
in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an intrepid
philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the philosopher's
stone, and sing of the springs of poetry.
The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground to
suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot; nor has
Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of the woods
and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian arrowhead upon
the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure towards the facts of
nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If every quiet country town
in New England had a son who, with a lore like Selborne's and an eye
like Buffon's, had watched and studied its landscape and history, and
then published the result, as Thoreau has done, in a book as redolent of
genuine and perceptive sympathy with nature as a clover-field of honey,
New England would seem as poetic and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives
in the berry pastures upon a bank over Walden Pond, and in a little
house of his own building. One pleasant summer afternoon a small party
of us helped him raise it--a bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook
Farm. Elsewhere in the village he turns up arrowheads abundantly,
and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau initiated him into the mystery of
finding them. But neither the Indians nor nature nor Thoreau can invest
the quiet residence of our author with the dignity or even the suspicion
of a legend. History stops short in that direction with Charles
Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828.
There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff
overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other
sides the level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad,
half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river good
farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by
the desire of conversing with the man whose written or spoken eloquence
has so profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion
of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy
nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by the wayside, ready
to entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of
speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar
reader of our author will not be surprised to find the "walking
eye-ball" simply sheltered, and the "endless experimenter with no past
at my back" housed without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the
Spartan severity of this intellect, and have noticed that the realm of
this imagination is rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more Greek than
Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the little gate, and
hear the breezy welcome of the pines and the no less cordial salutation
of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about, he has come
to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious Concord reaches
are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is architect of the
summer-house, you may imagine what is to be expected in the mansion
itself. It is always morning within those doors. If you have nothing
to say, if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom or colony of
thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, you had better pass
by upon the other side. For it is the peculiarity of Emerson's mind to
be always on the alert. He eats no lotus, but for-ever quaffs the waters
which engender immortal thirst.
If the memorabilia of his house could find their proper Xenophon, the
want of antecedent arrowheads upon the premises would not prove very
disastrous to the interest of the history. The fame of the philosopher
attracts admiring friends and enthusiasts from every quarter, and
the scholarly grace and urbane hospitality of the gentleman send them
charmed away. Friendly foes, who altogether differ from Emerson, come to
break a lance with him upon the level pastures of Concord, with all the
cheerful and appreciative zeal of those who longed
"To drink delight of battle with their peers
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."
It is not hazardous to say that the greatest questions of our day and
of all days have been nowhere more amply discussed, with more poetic
insight or profound conviction, than in the comely, square white house
upon the edge of the Lexington turnpike. There have even been attempts
at something more formal and club-like than the chance conversations of
occasional guests, one of which will certainly be nowhere recorded but
upon these pages.
It was in the year 1845 that a circle of persons of various ages, and
differing very much in everything but sympathy, found themselves in
Concord. Towards the end of the autumn Mr. Emerson suggested that they
should meet every Monday evening through the winter in his library.
"Monsieur Aubepine", "Miles Coverdale", and other phantoms, since
generally known as Nathaniel Hawthorne, who then occupied the Old Manse;
the inflexible Henry Thoreau, a scholastic and pastoral Orson, then
living among the blackberry pastures of Walden Pond; Plato Skimpole,
then sublimely meditating impossible summer-houses in a little house
upon the Boston road; the enthusiastic agriculturist and Brook-Farmer
already mentioned, then an inmate of Mr. Emerson's house, who added
the genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural
gentleman; a sturdy farmer neighbor, who had bravely fought his weary
way through inherited embarrassments to the small success of a New
England husbandman, and whose faithful wife had seven times merited well
of her country; two city youths, ready for the fragments from the feast
of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed this club. Ellery
Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to the New York
_Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of this world
was to be transmitted through his eminently practical genius, as the
club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings from all other
spheres.
I went, the first Monday evening, very much as Ixion may have gone
to his banquet. The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a
constrained but very amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a
tacit inquiry, seeming to ask, "Who will now proceed to say the
finest thing that has ever been said?" It was quite involuntary and
unavoidable, for the members lacked that fluent social genius without
which a club is impossible. It was a congress of oracles on the one
hand, and of curious listeners upon the other. I vaguely remember that
the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn "saying",
to which, after due pause, the honorable member for blackberry pastures
responded by some keen and graphic observation; while the Olympian host,
anxious that so much good material should be spun into something, beamed
smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the conversation became more
and more staccato. Miles Coverdale, a statue of night and silence, sat,
a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing imperturbably upon
the group; and as he sat in the shadow, his dark hair and eyes and suit
of sables made him, in that society, the black thread of mystery
which he weaves into his stories, while the shifting presence of the
Brook-Farmer played like heat-lightning around the room.
I recall little else but a grave eating of russet apples by the erect
philosophers, and a solemn disappearance into night. The club struggled
through three Monday evenings. Plato was perpetually putting apples of
gold in pictures of silver; for such was the rich ore of his thoughts,
coined by the deep melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the
secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while
Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought
to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear
sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed
saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much else goes to
practical food--how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. The
club struggled on valiantly, discoursing celestially, eating apples,
and disappearing in the dark, until the third evening it vanished
altogether. But I have since known clubs of fifty times its number,
whose collective genius was not more than that of either one of the
Dii Majores of our Concord coterie. The fault was its too great
concentration. It was not relaxation, as a club should be, but tension.
Society is a play, a game, a tournament; not a battle. It is the easy
grace of undress; not an intellectual full-dress parade.
I have already hinted this unbending intellectual alacrity of our
author. His sport is serious--his humor is earnest. He stands like a
sentinel. His look and manner and habit of thought cry "Who goes there?"
and if he does not hear the countersign, he brings the intruder to
a halt. It is for this surprising fidelity and integrity that his
influence has been so deep and sure and permanent upon the intellectual
life of the young men of New England; and of old England, too, where, in
Manchester, there were regular weekly meetings at which his works were
read. What he said long ago in his preface to the American edition of
Carlyle's _Miscellanies_, that they were papers which had spoken to the
young men of the time "with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep",
is strikingly true of his own writings. His first slim, anonymous
duodecimo, _Nature_, was as fair and fascinating to the royal young
minds who met it in the course of their reading, as Egeria to Numa
wandering in the grove. The essays, orations, and poems followed,
developing and elaborating the same spiritual and heroic philosophy,
applying it to life, history, and literature, with a vigor and richness
so supreme that not only do many account him our truest philosopher, but
others acknowledge him as our most characteristic poet.
It would be a curious inquiry how much and what kind of influence the
placid scenery of Concord has exercised upon his mind. "I chide society,
I embrace solitude," he says; "and yet I am not so ungrateful as not
to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time
they pass my gate." It is not difficult to understand his fondness for
the spot. He has been always familiar with it, always more or less a
resident of the village. Born in Boston upon the spot where the Chauncey
Place Church now stands, part of his youth was passed in the Old Manse,
which was built by his grandfather and in which his father was born; and
there he wrote _Nature_. From the magnificent admiration of ancestral
England he was glad to return two years since to quiet Concord and to
acres which will not yield a single arrowhead. The Swiss sigh for their
mountains; but the Nubians, also, pine for their desert plains. Those
who are born by the sea long annually to return and to rest their eyes
upon its living horizon. Is it because the earliest impressions, made
when the mind is most plastic, are most durable? or because youth is
that golden age bounding the confines of memory and floating forever--an
alluring mirage as we recede farther from it?
The imagination of the man who roams the solitary pastures of Concord,
or floats, dreaming, down its river, will easily see its landscape upon
Emerson's pages. "That country is fairest," he says, "which is inhabited
by the noblest minds". And although that idler upon the river may have
leaned over the Mediterranean from Genoese and Neapolitan villas, or
have glanced down the steep green valley of Sicilian Enna, seeking
"herself the fairest flower", or walked the shores where Cleopatra and
Helen walked, yet the charm of a landscape which is felt rather than
seen will be imperishable. "Travelling is a fool's paradise," says
Emerson. But he passed its gates to learn that lesson. His writings,
however, have no imported air. If there be something Oriental in his
philosophy and tropical in his imagination, they have yet the strong
flavor of his mother earth--the underived sweetness of the open Concord
sky, and the spacious breadth of the Concord horizon.