Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself
having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the
gray front of the old parsonage terminating the vista of an avenue of
black-ash trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession
of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that
gateway toward the village burying-ground. The wheel track leading to
the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost
overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three
vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to pick up
along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep
between the door of the house and the public highway were a kind of
spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite the
aspect of belonging to the material world. Certainly, it had little in
common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the
road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the
domestic circle. From these quiet windows the figures of passing
travelers look too remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In
its near retirement and accessible seclusion, it was the very spot for
the residence of a clergyman--a man not estranged from human life, yet
enveloped, in the midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom
and brightness. It was worthy to have been one of the time-honored
parsonages of England, in which through many generations a succession
of holy occupants pass from youth to age, and bequeath each an
inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and hover over it as with
an atmosphere.
[Footnote 74: From the introductory chapter of "Mosses from an Old
Manse," published by Houghton, Mifflin Company. This house, built in
1765, is still standing in Concord. Emerson lived there while writing
his "Nature." Hawthorne made it his home soon after his marriage in
1842.]
Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A
priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect
how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant
alone--he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was left
vacant--had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the
better if not the greater number that gushed living from his lips. How
often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue, attuning
his meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and solemn
peals of the wind among the tops of the lofty trees! In that variety
of natural utterances he could find something accordant with every
passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The
boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as well as
with rustling leaves.
I took shame to myself for having been so long a writer of idle
stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend upon me with
the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light upon an
intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hoards of
long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses. Profound
treatises of morality, a layman's unprofessional and therefore
unprejudiced views of religion, histories (such as Bancroft might have
written had he taken up his abode here, as he once proposed) bright
with picture, gleaming over a depth of philosophic thought--these were
the works that might fitly have flowed from such a retirement. In the
humblest event, I resolved at least to achieve a novel that should
evolve some deep lesson, and should possess physical substance enough
to stand alone....
The study had three windows set with little old-fashioned panes of
glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked
or rather peeped between the willow branches down into the orchard,
with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing
northward, commanded a broader view of the river at a spot where its
hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was
at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the manse stood
watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between two
nations.[75] He saw the irregular array of his parishioners on the
farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British on
the hither bank; he awaited in an agony of suspense the rattle of the
musketry. It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the
battle smoke around this quiet house....
[Footnote 75: The bridge at Concord, where the battle of April, 1775,
was fought, stands only a short distance from the old manse.]
When summer was dead and buried, the Old Manse became as lonely as a
hermitage. Not that ever--in my time at least--it had been thronged
with company; but at no rare intervals we welcomed some friend out of
the dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with
him the transparent obscurity that was floating over us. In one
respect our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the
pilgrim traveled on his way to the Celestial City. The guests, each
and all, felt a slumbrous influence upon them; they fell asleep in
chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen
stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily
through the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable
compliment to my abode, nor to my own qualities as a host. I held it
as a proof that they left their cares behind them as they passed
between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our avenue, and that
the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet within and
all around us....
Hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted
upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism,
and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to
face. Young visionaries, to whom just so much of insight had been
imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them, came to seek the
clue that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment.
Gray-headed theorists, whose systems, at first air, had finally
imprisoned them in an iron framework, traveled painfully to his door,
not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own
thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought, or a thought that
they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem
hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain,
troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of a moral world
beheld its intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top, and
climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding
obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects
unseen before--mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among
the chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls
and the whole host of night birds, which flapped their dusky wings
against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of
angelic feather. Such delusions always hover nigh whenever a
beacon-fire of truth is kindled.
For myself, there had been epochs of my life when I too might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep
beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
philosopher. It was good nevertheless to meet him in the wood paths,
or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused
about his presence like the garment of a Shining One; and he so quiet,
so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alike as if
expecting to receive more than he could impart. And in truth, the
heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions which he
could not read.
But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more
or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which in the
brains of some people wrought a singular giddiness--new truth being as
heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country village infested
with such a variety of queer, strangely drest, oddly behaved mortals,
most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the
world's destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water. Such,
I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who crowd so closely
about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath, and thus
to become imbued with a false originality. This triteness of novelty
is enough to make any man of common sense blaspheme at all ideas of
less than a century's standing, and pray that the world may be
petrified and rendered immovable in precisely the worst moral and
physical state that it ever yet arrived at, rather than be benefited
by such schemes of such philosophers....
Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no measurement
of time; and in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life's ocean,
three years hasten away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy
sunshine chases the cloud shadows across the depths of a still valley.
Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the owner of the
old house was pining for his native air. Carpenters next appeared,
making a tremendous racket among the outbuildings, strewing the green
grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing the
whole antiquity of the place with their discordant renovations. Soon,
moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of woodbine which had
crept over a large portion of its southern face. All the aged mosses
were cleared unsparingly away, and there were horrible whispers about
brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint--a purpose as
little to my taste as might be that of rouging the venerable cheeks of
one's grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more
sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our
household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little
breakfast-room--delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one
of the many angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us--and passed
forth between the tall stone gate-posts, as uncertain as the wandering
Arabs where our tent might next be pitched. Providence took me by the
hand, and--an oddity of dispensation which, I trust, there is no
irreverence in smiling at--has led me, as the newspapers announce,
while I am writing from the Old Manse, into a custom-house.[76] As a
story-teller I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my
imaginary personages, but none like this.
[Footnote 76: A reference to his appointment to a position in the
Boston Custom-house.]