"Forever—never!
Never—forever!"'
"But he does not see the particular clock of the poem, which stood upon another staircase, in another quaint old mansion,—although the verse belongs truly to all old clocks in all old country-seats, just as the 'Village Blacksmith' and his smithy are not alone the stalwart man and dingy shop under the 'spreading chestnut-tree' which the Professor daily passes on his way to his college duties, but belong wherever a smithy stands. Through the meadows in front flows the placid Charles."
So calmly flows the poet's life. The old house has other charms for him now besides those with which his fancy invested it when he first set foot within its walls, for here have come to him the joys and sorrows of his maturer life, and here, "when the evening lamps are lighted," come to him the memories of the loved and lost, who but wait for him in the better land. Here, too, cluster the memories of those noble achievements in his glorious career which have made him now and for all times the people's poet. Others, as the years go by, will woo us with their lays, but none so winningly and tenderly as this our greatest master. There was but one David in Israel, and when he passed away no other filled his place.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
There came to the old town of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts, in the early part of the seventeenth century, an English family named Hawthorne—Puritans, like all the other inhabitants of that growing town. They proved their fidelity to Puritan principles by entering readily into all the superstitions of the day, and became noted for the zeal with which they persecuted the Quakers and hung the witches. The head of the family was a sea captain, and for many generations the men of the family followed the same avocation, "a gray-haired shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire."