II

Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea

might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--

The Unpardonable Sin and the Deathless Man--The little red

house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery

of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen--Fishing for

poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the

ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--

Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes,

ambrosial breath--My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's

stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning

ladies and melancholy sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I

abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The

truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five

cats behind.

Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy and

lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He

had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends

had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a

believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter

shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant

"I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my

father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to live in, it

was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He stipulated that the

place should be somewhere along the New England sea-coast.

Had this wish of his been fulfilled it might have made great

differences. Hawthorne had always dwelt within sight and sound of the

Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the

Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his

complete well-being. At this juncture physical health had for the first

time become an object to him; he was run down by a year of suffering and

hard work, and needed nature's kindest offices. A suitable house of

his own by the sea-side would probably have brought him up to his best

physical condition to begin with, and kept him so; and it would so have

endeared itself to him that when, two or three years later, Pierce had

offered him a foreign appointment he might have been moved to decline

it, and have gone on writing American romances to the end--to the

advantage of American letters. Concord had its own attractions; but it

never held him as the sea would have done, nor nourished his health, nor

stimulated his genius. A house of his own beside the Atlantic might well

have added twenty years to his life.

But it was not upon the knees of the gods.

Bridge's zealous efforts failed to find a place available, and after an

uneasy interval, during which his friend wandered uncomfortably about

Boston and the neighborhood (incidentally noting down some side-scenes

afterwards to be incorporated in The Blithedale Romance), a cottage

in the Berkshire Hills was spoken of, and upon examination seemed

practicable. Lenox, at that time, was as little known as Mount Desert;

it was not until long afterwards that fashion found them out and made

them uninhabitable to any but fashionable folks. Moreover, my father had

seen something of Lenox a dozen years before.

A dozen years before he was not yet betrothed to Sophia Peabody; he

already loved her and she him; but her health seemed an insuperable

barrier between them. This and certain other matters were weighing

heavily upon his soul, and his future seemed dark and uncertain. He

thought of taking a voyage round the world; he thought of getting into

politics; he even thought--as young men full of life sometimes will--of

death. What he finally did, with native good sense, was to make a

two-months' trip in the mountainous region to the westward, to change

the scene and his state of mind, and to get what artists call a fresh

eye. He chose North Adams as his headquarters, and forayed thence in

various directions over a radius of twenty miles. He was then beginning

to revolve one of the two great romance themes that preoccupied his

whole after-life, neither of which was he destined to write. This was

the idea of the Unpardonable Sin; the other was the conception of the

Deathless Man. The only essay we have towards the embodiment of the

first vision is the short fragment published in Mosses from an Old

Manse, called "Ethan Brand." The other was attempted in various forms,

of which Septimius, Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and The Dolliver Romance,

all posthumously published, are the most important.

But Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and Lenox had been included among his

haunts during the break-away above mentioned, and he remembered that the

scenery was beautiful, the situation remote, and the air noble. Next to

the sea it seemed an ideal place to recuperate and write in. Thither,

at all events, he resolved to go, and early in the summer of 1850 we

arrived at the little red house above the shores of Stockbridge Bowl,

with bag and baggage. Little though the house was, the bag and baggage

were none too much to find easy accommodation in it.

A fair-sized city drawing-room of these sumptuous contemporary days

could stow away in a corner the entire structure which then became our

habitation, and retain space enough outside it for the exploitation of

social functions. Nevertheless, by the simple expedient of making the

interior divisions small enough, this liliputian edifice managed to

contain eight rooms on its two floors (including the kitchen). One of

the rooms was, in fact, the entrance-hall; you stepped into it across

the threshold of the outer door, and the staircase ascended from it. It

was used as an extension of the drawing-room, which opened out of it.

The drawing-room adjoined the dining-room, with windows facing the

west, with a view of the mountains across the lake, and the dining-room

communicated with the kitchen. One of the western-looking up-stairs

rooms served as my father's study; my sister Una had her chamber, I mine

(which was employed as the guest-chamber upon occasion), and our parents

the other. What more could be asked? for when Rose was born, her crib

stood beside her mother's bedstead.

When we were not asleep--that is, during twelve hours out of the

twenty-four--Una's existence and mine were passed mainly in the outer

sitting-room and in the dining-room. There was plenty to entertain us.

I had my rocking-horse, which I bestrode with perfect fearlessness; my

porcelain lion, which still survives unscathed after the cataclysms

of half a century; my toy sloop, made for me by Uncle Nat; and a

jack-knife, all but the edge and point, which had been removed out of

deference to my youth. Una had a doll, a miniature mahogany centre-table

and bureau, and other things in which I felt no interest. In common,

we possessed the box of wooden bricks, and the big portfolio containing

tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the

Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the

story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large

part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my

father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with

the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the

exception of our father and mother, that we had or desired.

But our father and mother were, of course, the main thing, after all.

She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing,

early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our

questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical;

and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and

"The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible

questions--I suppose with a view to asking me some." They superintended

our projections of creation on the black-board--a great, old-fashioned

black-board, the like of which I have not since beheld; they read to us

and told us stories. Many of these stories were of incidents of their

own child-life; and there was also the narrative of our mother's voyage

to Cuba and back, and residence there when she was about eighteen or

twenty--a fascinating chronicle. Meal-times were delectable festivals,

not only because the bread-and-milk, the boiled rice and tapioca

pudding, and eggs and fruit tasted so good, but by reason of the broad

outlook out of window over the field, the wood, the lake, and the

mountains; supper-time, with the declining sun pouring light into

the little room and making the landscape glorious, was especially

exhilarating. Ambrosial was the bread baked by Mrs. Peters, the taciturn

and serious religious person of color who attended to our cooking; the

prize morsels were the ends, golden brown in hue, crunching so crisply

between our teeth. I used to wonder how a being with hands so dark as

those of Mrs. Peters managed to turn out dough so immaculate. She would

plunge them right into the ivory-hued substance, yet it became only

whiter than before. But the life of life was, of course, out-doors.

There was a barn containing a hay-mow and a large hen-coop, soon

populous with hens and chickens, with an heroic snow-white rooster to

keep them in order. Hens are the most audacious and presuming of pets,

and they have strong individuality.

One of our brood was more intellectual and enterprising than the others;

she found a way of getting out of the coop, no matter how tightly it

was shut up; and she would jump in our laps as we sat eating a piece

of bread in the barn doorway and snatch it away from us; but I think we

sometimes sat there with the bread on purpose to have her do it. Once or

twice--until I was detected and stopped--I enjoyed the poignant delight

of fishing for hens out of the barn loft; my tackle consisted of a bent

pin at the end of a string tied to a stick. It was baited with a grain

of corn, or a bit of rag would do as well, for hens have no hereditary

suspicion of anglers, and are much more readily entrapped than fishes.

Pulling them up, squawking and fluttering, was thrilling, but, of

course, it was wrong, like other thrilling things, and had to be

foregone. A less unregenerate experiment was fastening two grains of

corn to the ends of a long bit of thread; two hens would seize each

a grain and begin swallowing thread until they interfered, with each

other, when a disgorgement would take place. It was an economical

sport--the one bit of thread and the two corn-grains would last all

day--and, in view of the joy afforded to the spectators, did not seem

too unkind. My father had mechanical talent, and with an old door-knob

and some strips of shingle he would make a figure of a man with a saw;

you fixed it to the edge of a table, set the door-knob swinging, and the

creature would saw with the most absurd diligence. From the same shingle

he would construct a pugilist, who, being set up where the wind played

upon him, would swing his arms interminably. It was yacht-building,

however, that afforded us most entertainment. A shingle was whittled to

a point at one end; a stick with a square paper slipped on it was stuck

up in the middle, and a rudder made fast to the stern; such a boat would

sail boldly out upon the vastness of the lake, till the eye could no

longer follow the diminishing white speck. These days beside the lake

were full of good things. The water was clear, with a white sand bottom;

we were given swimming-lessons in the hot summer weather; having waded

in up to our middles, we faced towards the shore, where sat our father

with a long fishing-pole, the end of which he kept within our reach,

and bade us lean forward on the water and kick up our feet. But, for my

part, I kept one foot on the bottom. It was not till years afterwards

that I mustered courage to take it off, and that was in a lake three

thousand miles from Stockbridge Bowl, with the towers of the castle of

Chillon reflected in its calm surface.

We also made limited use of a leaky old punt, which one day capsized and

emptied its whole crew into the water, luckily close to shore. We fished

for gold carp for hours together, and during our two summers we caught a

couple of them; there were thousands of them swimming about; but a bent

pin with the bait washed off is not a good lure. In winter, the lake had

five feet of ice on it, which lasted far into the spring, and once or

twice we got aboard this great raft and tracked across it, with as much

awe and enthusiasm as ever Kane had felt in his arctic explorations. In

all, we became intimate friends with the lake idea, new to us then, but

never to grow stale; and our good fortune favored us during after-life

with many lovely lakes and ponds, including such gems as Rydal, Walden,

and Geneva.

Water, in another enchanting guise, dashed and gurgled for us in the

brook that penetrated like a happy dream the slumber of the forest that

bordered on the lake. The wooded declivity through which it went was

just enough to keep it ever vocal and animated. Gazing down upon it, it

was clear brown, with glancing gleams of interior green, and sparkles

diamond white; tiny fishes switched themselves against the current with

quivering tails; the shaggy margins were flecked with sunshine, and

beautiful with columbines, violets, arbutus, and houstonias. Fragments

of rock and large pebbles interrupted its flow and deepened its mellow

song; above it brooded the twilight of the tall pines and walnuts,

responding to its merriment with solemn murmurings. What playfellow is

more inexhaustible than such a brook, so full of life, of motion, of

sound and color, of variety and constancy. A child welcomes it as an

answer to its own soul, with its mystery and transparency, its bounded

lawlessness, its love of earth and its echoes of the sky. In winter our

brook had a new charm: it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with

snow; its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns,

as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairy-land, and carried treasures

of the elves and gnomes. Zero, with his utmost rigors, could not still

its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. Indeed,

the frosty god conspired with it for our delight; building crystal

bridges, with tracery of lace delicater than Valenciennes, and spangled

string-pieces, and fretted vaultings, whimsical sierras, stalactite and

stalagmite. An icicle is one of those careless toys of nature which

the decorative art of man imitates in vain. They are among the myriad

decorations of children's palaces.

To Tanglewood, as we called it, at all seasons of the year, came

Hawthorne and his wife and children. In spring there was the issuing

forth of the new life from beneath the winter coverlid; the first

discovery of sociable houstonias, and the exquisite tints and fragrance

of the mayflower on its dark, bearded stalk. When June became perfect,

and afterwards till nuts were ripe, my father loved to lie at full

length upon the mossy and leaf-strewn floor, looking up at the green

roof, the lofty whispering-gallery of vaulted boughs, with its azure

lattices and descending sunlight-shafts; wrapped in imaginings some of

which were afterwards to delight the world; but many more of them, no

doubt, were fated to join the glorious company of untold tales. Beside

him sat our mother, on a throne which we had fashioned for her from the

upright stump of a tree; round about them played the little girl and

boy. They brought all the treasures which this wonderfully affluent

world afforded: flowers in all seasons; strawberries, small but of

potent flavor, which the little boy would gather with earnest diligence,

and fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his

small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and

feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and

in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose

prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently

plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also

fond of playing the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would say,

and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would

hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the

topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was

a big cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled

with these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and

cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone.

The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was

thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an

upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them

for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by scores;

but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped against

my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of them stung

Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence. Her lip at

once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the conclusion, by some

tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence was at least half to

blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully avoided it. I likewise

avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of giving a hitch to their

after-parts as they walk along always struck me as being obviously

diabolical.

When the snows came, two and three feet deep, we got out the family

sled from its summer lodging in the barn and went forth, muffled in

interminable knit tippets and other woollen armor, to coast down the

long slope. Our father sat in front with the reins in his hands and his

feet thrust out to steer, and away we went clinging fast behind him.

Sometimes we swept triumphantly to the bottom; at other times we

would collide with some hidden obstacle, and describe each a separate

trajectory into the snow-banks. We made enormous snow-balls by beginning

with a small one and rolling it over and over in the soft snow till

it waxed too vast for our strength; two or three of these piled one on

another would be sculptured by the author of The Scarlet Letter into a

snow-man, who would stand stanch for weeks. Snow-storms in Lenox began

early and lasted till far into April. The little red house had all it

could do, sometimes, to lift its upper windows above them. In the front

yard there was a symmetrical balsam fir-tree, tapering like a Chinese

pagoda. One winter morning we found upon one of its lower boughs a

little brown sparrow frozen stiff. We put it in a card-board coffin, and

dug out a grave for it beneath the fir, with a shingle head-stone. The

funeral ceremonies had for the two mourners a solemnity such as is not

always felt at such functions in later life.

Of the regular daily routine was the journey to Luther Butler's, quarter

of a mile up the road, for milk and butter. I generally accompanied

my father, and saw placid Luther's cows, placid as himself, with their

broad, wet noses, amiable dark eyes, questionable horns, and ambrosial

breath. Mr. Tappan, our landlord, had horses, and once he mounted me on

the bare back of one of the largest of these quadrupeds, which, to the

stupefaction of everybody, instantly set off at full gallop. Down

the road we thundered, the rider, with his legs sticking out at right

angles, screaming with joy, for this transcended any rocking-horse

experiences. A hundred yards away there was a bend in the road. Just at

that point there was a manure-pile, which had long bided its time. I had

hold of a strand of the horse's mane; but when he swerved at the bend I

had to let go, and after a short flight in air, the manure-pile received

me in its soft embrace. Looking up the road, I saw Mr. Tappan, with

dilated eyes and a countenance expressing keen emotion, coming towards

me at a wonderful pace, and my father and mother following him at a

short distance. I did not myself mind the smell of manure, and the

others were glad to put up with it in consideration of my having escaped

broken bones.

We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from

Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with,

him, and Mr. G. P. R. James, a novelist of the Walter Scott school, had

another, and I was permitted to bestride both of them; they were safe

enough, but they would turn back their heads and lay their cold noses on

my leg; I preferred the now-forbidden horse. But Melville himself made

up for everything by the tremendous stories he used to tell about the

South Sea Islands and the whale fishery. Normally he was not a man of

noticeable appearance; but when the narrative inspiration was on him, he

looked like all the things he was describing--savages, sea-captains, the

lovely Fayaway in her canoe, or the terrible Moby Dick himself. There

was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever

came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures,

of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been

unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to

loosen its grip by studying German metaphysics, but in vain. He was

restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect

that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were

incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the

midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world;

and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre,

nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He

conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep

affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he

was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which had

never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in

his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many

secrets untold in his own career. But there were few honester or more

lovable men than Herman Melville.

[IMAGE: HERMAN MELVILLE]

James (no relation of our distinguished contemporary) was a commonplace,

meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation;

but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact

of his being associated with a furious thunder-storm. My father and I

were alone in the house at the time; my mother had gone to West Newton

on a three weeks' visit. In the midst of the thunder and lightning, the

downpour and the hurricane, the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds,

our door burst open, and behold! of all persons in the world to be

heralded by such circumstances, G. P. R. James! Not he only, but close

upon his heels his entire family, numerous, orthodox, admirable, and

infinitely undesirable to two secluded gentlemen without a wife

and mother to help them out. But it was a choice between murder and

hospitality, and come in they must. Never before or after did our

liliputian drawing-room harbor so large an assemblage. They dripped on

the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation

between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly

pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were

on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie

or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the G. P. R.

Jameses passed off together.

There were many other visitors, not only old friends, but persons

attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book "along whose

burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web

our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who had

become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters

in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men;

melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only,

but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them

all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would not have a

drunken man politer than I," he once answered me, when I asked him why

he had returned the salutation of a toper. What counsel he gave to

those who came to him as to a father confessor of course I know not; but

later, when I used to sit in his office in the Liverpool consulate,

I sometimes heard him speak plain truths to the waifs and strays who

drifted in there; and truth more plain, yet bestowed with more humanity

and brotherly purpose, I have never heard since. It made them tremble,

but it did them good. Such things made him suffer, but he never

flinched from the occasion by a hair's-breadth. He must have loved his

fellow-creatures.

Somebody gave me a rabbit, which I named Hind-legs. I was deeply

interested in him for a while, especially when I learned that he could

not drink water; but he lasted only two weeks, and I am under the

impression that I killed him. Not that I loved him less; but children

are prone to experiment with this singular thing called life when it

is in their power. They do not believe that death can be other than

a transient phenomenon; the lifeless body may puzzle, but it does not

convince them. I was certainly not a cruel urchin, and I can recall

none but cordial sentiments towards Hindlegs on my part. I remember no

details of the murder, if murder were done; but I do remember feeling

no surprise when, one morning, Hindlegs was found dead. After so many

years, I will not bring against the owner of Hindlegs a verdict of

positive guilt; but I suspect him. Hindlegs, at all events, achieved

an immortality which can belong to few of his brethren; for my father,

after pooh-poohing the imbecile little bundle of fur for a day or two,

conceived an involuntary affection for him, and reported his character

and habits in his journal in a manner which is likely to keep his memory

alive long after the hand that (perhaps) slew him is dust.

In default of dogs and Hindlegs, we had abundant cats. My father was

always fond of these mysterious deities of ancient Egypt, and they were

never turned away from our doors; but how so many of them happened

to find us out in this remote region I cannot explain. It seems as if

goodwill towards cats spontaneously generated them. They appeared, one

after another, to the number of five; but when the time came for us to

leave the red house forever, the cats would not and could not be packed

up, and they were left behind. In my mind's eye I still see them,

squatting abreast, silhouetted against the sky, on the brow of the hill

as we drove down the road; for they had scampered after our carry-all

when we drove away. Cats teach Americans what they are slow to

learn--the sanctity and permanence of home.

But Lenox could not be a home for us. It was, indeed, a paradise for

the children; but the children's father was never well there. He had a

succession of colds--as those affections are called; it was ascribed to

the variations of temperature during the summers; but the temperature

would not have troubled him had he not been hard hit before he went

to Berkshire. He got out of patience with the climate, and was wont

to anathematize it with humorous extravagance, as his way was: "It is

horrible. One knows not for ten minutes together whether he is too cool

or too warm. I detest it! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul. Here,

where I had hoped for perfect health, I have for the first time been

made sensible that I cannot with impunity encounter nature in all her

moods." It was the summers that disagreed with him. "Upon the whole,"

he said, "I think that the best time for living in the country is the

winter." It was during the winter that he did most of his writing. The

House of the Seven Gables was written between September of 1850 and

January or February of 1851.

But composition took more out of him than formerly. He admitted to his

sister Louisa that he was "a little worn down with constant work," and

added that he could not afford any idle time now, being evidently of the

opinion that his popularity would be short-lived, and that it behooved

him, therefore, to make the most of it. But "the pen is so constantly

in my fingers that I abominate the sight of it!" he exclaimed. This was

after he had transgressed his custom of never writing in the hot months.

He began in June and finished in forty days the whole volume of The

Wonder-Book. He also read the tales to his domestic audience as fast as

they were written, and benefited, perhaps, by the expert criticism of

the small people. Many passages in the intercalated chapters, describing

the adventures of Eustace Bright and the Tangle-wood children, are based

on facts well known to his own two youngsters. And when Eustace tells

his hearers that if the dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder

were simply to put some sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them

and Tangle-wood itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up

the chimney--even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at

the same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of

Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus early

did he begin to grasp the philosophy of the truth of fiction.

The House of the Seven Gables and The Wonder-Book were a fair

eighteen-months' work, and in addition to them Hawthorne had, before

leaving Lenox, planned out the story of The Blithedale Romance; so

that after we got to West Newton--our half-way station on the road to

Concord--he was prepared to sit down and write it. Long before we left

Concord for England he had published Tangle-wood Tales, not to mention

the biography of Franklin Pierce. Una and her brother knew nothing about

the romances; they knew and approved the fairy tales; but their feeling

about all their father's writings was, that he was being wasted in his

study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any

books, whether his own or other authors', that could for a moment bear

comparison with his actual companionship. What he set down upon the page

was but a less free and rich version of the things that came from his

living mouth in our heedless playtimes. "If only papa wouldn't write,

how nice it would be!" And, indeed, a book is but a poor substitute for

the mind and heart of a man, and it exists only as one of the numberless

sorry makeshifts to which time constrains us, while we are waiting for

eternity and full communion.

It was a dreary day in the beginning of the second winter that we set

out on our eastward journey; but Hawthorne's face was brighter than the

weather warranted, for it was turned once more towards the sea. We were

destined, ere we turned back, to go much farther towards the rising

sun than any of us then suspected. We took with us one who had not been

present at our coming--a little auburn-haired baby, born in May. Which

are the happiest years of a man's life? Those in which he is too much

occupied with present felicity to look either forward or backward--to

hope or to remember. There are no such years; but such moments there may

be, and perhaps there were as many such moments awaiting Hawthorne as

had already passed.

His greatest work was done before he left his native land, and within

a year or two of his death he wrote to Richard Stoddard: "I have been a

happy man, and yet I cannot remember any moment of such happy conspiring

circumstances that I would have rung a joy-bell at it."