XXIV.

NATHANIEL AND SOPHIA HAWTHORNE.

ON a day in Concord I saw the two men whom Michael Angelo might have chosen as emblems of Morning and Twilight, to be carved over the gates of the New World. Emerson emerged from his modern home, and the shade of well-trimmed evergreens in front, with "shining morning face," his eye beaming with its newest vision of the golden year. Hawthorne, at the other extreme of the village, came softly out of his earlier home, the Old Manse-the grey-gabled mansion, where dwelt in the past men and women who have gained new lease of existence through his genius-and stepped along the avenue of ancient ash-trees, which made a fit frame around him. superb man he was! His erect, full, and shapely figure might have belonged to an athlete, were it not for the grace and reserve which rendered the strength of frame. unobtrusive. The massive forehead and brow, with dark locks on either side, the strong nose and mouth, with another soul beneath them, might be the physiognomy of a military man or political leader-some man impelled by powerful public passions; but with this man there came through the large soft eyes a gentle glow which suffused the face and spiritualised the form. No wonder such fascination held his college fellows to him! Longfellow used to talk in poetry when his early days at Bowdoin with Hawthorne were the theme; and the memory of President Pierce has lost some stains through his lifelong devotion to his early friend.

How the personages who had long before preceded him in that first home of his manhood had become his familiar friends and visitors-preferred to others separated from him by reason of their flesh and blood-no reader of Mosses from an Old Manse" need be told. As he came down the avenue, unconscious of any curious or admiring eye resting on him, every step seemed a leap, as if his shadowy familiars were whispering happy secrets. What was this genius loci thinking of as he walked there? It may have been about that time he mentioned the Old Manse to a friend, and wrote: "The trees of the avenuehow many leaves have fallen since I last saw them!" It was always on the fallen leaf that Hawthorne found the sentence for his romance, but to what a beautiful new life did it germinate there!

It is an almost solemn reflection that in that same Old Manse, and in the same room, were written Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Goodman Brown."

On the twenty-eighth birthday of the American Republic was born also this last wizard of Salem; and the spirit of the day, as well as of the place, was potent in him. Much of the romance of early American history gathers about Salem. It is a charming old town, with broad streets overarched by the foliage of aged elms, and with memorable houses preserved amid the mansions of its cultured citizens. Its oldest families are sprung from men who began life as seafarers and became merchants. I know not whether it be because Beauty insists on rising from even such distant waves, but the Salem people and their homes always appeared to me to possess a peculiar charm. Here young Nathaniel could read on Gallows Hill, where the witches were hung, the tragical story of that era, to the time when the people arose and broke open the prison doors of those victims, and entered the door of the judge, whom they forced to kneel and ask pardon of outraged humanity. On the neighbouring sea-beach he was wont to wander in the twilight and see-sombre Astarte shall

we say?-rising from the waves, where his fathers had commanded ships of war or merchandise. From these years grew many of those mystical "Twice-Told Tales" in which all the moonlight and starlight of New England history is garnered. When they were first read, some thought even the author's name a myth. "Nathaniel" had been suggested by the Puritan's fondness for scriptural names, and "Hawthorne" had an obvious significance; and, indeed, the letter w, which the author inserted in the old Wiltshire name, may have represented some conscious spiritualisation of his family tree. His ancestor who planted the American branch of Hathornes persecuted Quakers, the next persecuted witches. The best compensation for their lives was when they were turned into gloomily picturesque figures by the art of their descendant, and the blood shed by their thorns tinted the blossoms of Hawthorne.

Carlyle used to say a good word for his pet "survival," Calvin, even in the Servetus affair. Think of the amount of sincerity and force of purpose required to make a man burn his fellowman to ashes! Whereon one's comment might be But what Medusa must that creed be which, three centuries after Calvin's death, can chain the heart of a giant nursed at that stony breast! The infernal sincerity and force of those Puritan soldiers, William Hathorne and his son John, transmitted their spell also to Hawthorne, but not to bind his heart. "I know not," he wrote, "whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by themas I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race for some time back would argue to exist may now and henceforth be removed." The last shadow of Calvinism lay in the persistence of this

notion of a transmitted curse, which, however refined, held the American Merlin in a prison of air. The transmutation of subjective into objective facts was a more terrible tendency in Hawthorne than in Swedenborg; for Hawthorne did not project his fancies into conventionalised, but into natural forms. He still uses the fossil word "sin." The punishers of guilt on his stage are palpable, like the Furies of Æschylus, which were so fatal to sensitive women in Athens; and neither Eschylus nor any other writer has described the fatal spiritual phenomena with greater intensity of realisation and more subtle art.

"The Celestial Railway" was the first piece by Hawthorne that penetrated our Southern region. It was copied in the newspapers of that region, and much enjoyed as a satire upon the rationalistic tendencies of the North. When I became old enough to appreciate the humour of that allegory, and the "serene strength which Emerson found in it, I was also able to recognise. its reactionary spirit. And years later, recognising Hawthorne as the one American whose genius was comparable with that of Emerson for power, it was my conviction that the piece I have mentioned, and the greater part of the "Mosses from an Old Manse," belong to the earlier and unsunned time of his life. "My son," said Goethe's mother, "whenever he had a grief put it into a poem, and so got rid of it." A dismal day cast its last shadows on those "Mosses," and a careful eye may find them sheathing here and there roses of the fairer morning that had come upon his life.

In his earliest tales, written in Salem, there is revealed, along with the ever-appealing intellect, a sensitive and loving nature, thirsting for affection, faint with growing despair of finding a nature responsive to his deep heart. In 1836 Margaret Fuller wrote to a friend: "I took a two or three year old Token,' and chanced on a story called 'The Gentle Boy,' which I remembered to

have heard was written by somebody in Salem. It is marked by so much grace and delicacy of feeling that I am very desirous to know the author, whom I take to be a lady."

Meantime in that same old town, though unknown as the maiden of his fable that stood near slumbering David Swan, was dwelling near Hawthorne the heart that held his sunbeam. A kind and intelligent physician dwelt in Salem, with his three lovely daughters, dowered only with riches of mind and heart. Of these sisters Peabody, all lived to do honour to the womanhood of America. Mary, as Mrs. Horace Mann, was able to assist her eminent husband in his educational work East and West, recorded but too modestly in her beautiful memoir of that noble man. Elizabeth, by an unwearied zeal in the pursuit of every high ideal, became a kind of saintly abbess at Concord, of whom I heard Emerson say that her recollections and correspondence would comprise the spiritual history of her time. Sophia, as the wife of Hawthorne, aided in the realisation of ideals as beautiful as any she dreamed while a favourite pupil in the studio of Allston.

It was with a certain despair that Hawthorne made his first pilgrimage to the Brook Farm community,—the wild plunge of a starved heart to find some other world. He found his millennium in a heart. He was a stranger in the land of promise, but found his ideal community, which consisted of two, whose model halls were in the most ancient and solitary mansion of Concord village. There was indeed one other member of the Old Manse community, Poverty; but never was poor relation treated more good-humouredly.

No other Yes, Happiness. To read Hawthorne's "Notes" of these years starts to the eyes tears that flash prismatic hues. He is still "the obscurest man of letters in America;" he is poor and without prospect of becoming otherwise; and he feels himself supremely blessed. His honeymoon never waned. He compares himself to Adam