VII
LITERARY LANDMARKS OF NEW ENGLAND

The quest for literary landmarks is always a fascinating pursuit, particularly to the amateur photographer who likes to take pictures that mean something. I have always found a certain exhilaration in seeing for myself and reproducing photographically the places made memorable by some favorite author. To look into the ground glass of my camera and see the reflected image of some lovely scene that has been an inspiration to poet or novelist, is like suddenly coming into possession of a prize that had ever before been thought unattainable. It brings the author of a by-gone generation into one’s own time. It deepens the previous enjoyment—makes it more real. When I stand before the house in which some great author has lived, I seem to see more than a mere dwelling. The great man himself comes out to meet me, invites me in, shows me his study, presents me to his wife and children, walks with me in his garden, tells me how the surroundings of his home have influenced his literary work, and finally sends me away with a peculiar sense of intimacy. I go home, reach out my hand for a certain neglected book on my shelves, and lo! it opens as with a hidden spring, a new light glows upon its pages, and I find myself absorbed in conversation with a friend.

I
CONCORD

For this kind of hunting I know of no better place in America than New England, and no better town in which to begin than the sleepy old village of Concord, twenty miles northwest of Boston. On the occasion of a recent visit, we walked out Monument Street and made our first stop at a point in the road immediately opposite the “Old Manse.” A party of school-children were just entering. Had we been looking at the grove on the hillside, at the opposite end of the town, where Hawthorne used to walk to and fro, composing the “Tanglewood Tales,” we might have supposed they had come to catch a few echoes of the famous story-teller’s voice, and I should have made a photograph with the children in it. But here they did not seem so appropriate, and we waited until they had gone. When all was quiet again, it did not require a very vigorous imagination to look down the vista of black-ash trees seen between the “two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone,” and fancy a man and woman walking arm in arm down the avenue toward the weather-stained old parsonage, its dark sides scarcely visible beneath the shadows of the overarching trees. The man is of medium height, broad-shouldered, and walks with a vigorous stride, suggesting the bodily activity of a young athlete. His hair is dark, framing with wavy curves a forehead both high and broad. Heavy eyebrows overhang a pair of dark blue eyes, that seem to flash with wondrous expressiveness, as he bends slightly to speak to the little woman at his side. His voice is low and deep, and she responds to what he is saying with an upward glance of her soft gray eyes and a happy smile that clearly suggest the sunshine which she is destined to throw into his life.

Thus Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody, his bride, on a day in July, 1842, passed into the gloomy old house where they were to begin their honeymoon. I say “begin” because it was not like the ordinary honeymoon that ends abruptly on the day the husband first proposes to go alone on a fishing excursion. Nor was it like that of a certain “colored lady” whom I once knew. On the day following the wedding she left William to attend to his usual duties in the stable and the garden while she started on a two weeks’ “honeymoon” trip to her old Virginia home, explaining afterward that she “couldn’t afford to take dat fool niggah along, noway.”

THE OLD MANSE

The Hawthorne honeymoon was one of that rare kind which begins with the wedding bells and has no ending. They were married lovers all their days. Hawthorne had seen enough of solitariness in his bachelorhood to appreciate the rare companionship of his gifted wife, and he wanted nothing more. The dingy old parsonage was a Paradise to them and the new Adam and Eve invited no intrusions into their Eden. Some of their friends came occasionally, it is true, but Hawthorne records that during the next winter the snow in the old avenue was marked by no footsteps save his own for weeks at a time. And his loving wife, though she had come from the midst of a large circle of friends, found only happiness in sharing this solitude.

During the three years in which Hawthorne lived in this “Old Manse,” he seldom walked through the village, was known to but few of his neighbors, never went to the town-meeting, and not often to church, though he lived in a house that had been built by a minister and occupied by ministers so long that “it was awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there.”

Let us peep through the windows of the parlor at the end of the dark avenue and indulge in another flight of fancy. It is an unusual day at the Manse, for two visitors have called to greet the new occupant. The elder of the two, a man in his fortieth year, is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lives in the other end of the town in a large, comfortable, and cheery house, which we expect to see a little later. He knows the Old Manse well. His grandfather built it shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution and witnessed the battle of Concord from a window in the second story. This good man, who was the Revolutionary parson of the village, died in 1776 at the early age of thirty-three, and a few years later his widow married the Reverend Ezra Ripley, who maintained, for more than sixty years, the reputation of the Manse as a producer of sermons, being succeeded by his son, Samuel, also a minister. In October, 1834, Emerson came there with his mother and remained a year, during which he wrote his first, and one of his greatest essays, “Nature.”