We must now return to the village, for there are two more houses to be seen, both on the Lexington Road. The first is the Alcott house, now restored to something like its original condition and preserved as a memorial to the author of “Little Women.” A. Bronson Alcott came to live in Concord in 1840, having visited there for the first time five years earlier. Emerson at once hailed him as “the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of his time.” He marveled at the “steadiness of his vision” before which “we little men creep about ashamed.” The “Sage of Concord” was too modest and time failed to justify his enthusiasm for the new neighbor. He came to admit that Alcott, though a man of lofty spirit, could not be trusted as to matters of fact; that he did not have the power to write or otherwise communicate his thoughts; and that he was like a gold-ore, sometimes found in California, “in which the gold is in combination with such other elements that no chemistry is able to separate it without great loss.”
Alcott was a “handy man” with tools, could construct fanciful summer-houses or transform a melodeon into a bookcase, as a piece of his handiwork in the “restored” house will testify. But in intellectual matters he fired his bullets of wisdom so far over the heads of his fellow men that they never came down, and therefore penetrated nobody’s brain.
This lack of practical wisdom came near bringing disaster to the family. But his daughter came to the rescue with “Little Women,” a book that has had an astonishing success from the first. Originally published in 1868, it has had a circulation estimated at one million copies and is still in demand.
In the winter of 1862-63, Louisa M. Alcott marched off to war, carrying several volumes of Dickens along with her lint and bandages, determined that she would not only bind up the soldiers’ wounds, but also relieve the tedium of their hospital life during the long days of convalescence. When she was ready to start, Alcott said he was sending “his only son.” Girl visitors to the old “Orchard house” take great delight in the haunts of Meg, Amy, Beth, and Joe, and particularly in Amy’s bedroom, where the young artist’s drawings on the doors and window-frames are still preserved.
Just beyond the Alcott house is a pine grove on the side of a hill and then the “Wayside,” Hawthorne’s home for the last twelve years of his life. When Hawthorne left the Old Manse, he went to Salem, then to Lenox, and for a short time to West Newton. In the summer of 1852, he returned to Concord, having purchased the “Wayside” from Alcott.
While living in Lenox he had written “The Wonder-Book,” which so fascinated the children, including their elders as well, that his first task upon settling in the new home was to prepare, in response to many urgent demands, a second series of the same kind to be known as “The Tanglewood Tales.”
| THE WAYSIDE |
In the following spring the family sailed for Liverpool, where Hawthorne was to be the American Consul, and from this journey he did not return until 1860, seven years later. He was then at the height of his fame as the author of “The Scarlet Letter,” “The House of the Seven Gables,” and “The Marble Faun.” As soon as his family was settled in the Wayside, he began extensive alterations, the most remarkable of which is the tower, which not only spoiled the architecture of the building, but failed, partially at least, to serve its primary purpose as a study. It was a room about twenty feet square, reached by a narrow stairway where the author could shut himself in against all intrusion. A small stove made the air stifling in winter, and the sun’s rays upon the roof made it unbearable in summer. Nevertheless, Hawthorne managed to make some use of it and here he wrote “Our Old Home.” I fancy he must have composed most of it while walking back and forth in the seclusion of the pine grove which he had purchased with the house. And here in this pleasant grove we must leave him for the present, while we go back to Boston and thence to Salem, to search out a few more old houses, which would fall into decay and finally disappear without notice, like hundreds of others of the same kind, but for the one simple fact that the touch of Hawthorne’s presence, more than half a century ago, conferred upon these dingy old buildings a dignity and interest that draw to them annually a host of visitors from all parts of the United States.