She was indeed one of those who bore her honours meekly. I recall her vividly when she was well past youth, in the enjoyment of the substantial gains success had brought. In her childhood she had known pinching poverty, for her philosophic father could never exchange his lucubrations for bread and clothes, philosophising, however, none the less. But her success brought with it no flush, only an opportunity for her pleasant service. In these years my mood toward her had quite changed; at first I had thought of her as a competitor, perhaps as on my level. When I learned, however, that about that time she had been reading my History of German Literature with approval, I felt that I was greatly honoured, that a mind of high distinction had condescended to notice my pages. During the '80s when the "School of Philosophy" was holding its sessions in the rustic temple on the Lexington Road where her Orphic father was hierophant, it was rumoured that Louisa looked somewhat askance upon the sublimated discussions of the brotherhood that gathered. What was said was very wise, but far removed from what one finds in children's books, but Louisa was sometimes present, a dignified hostess to the strangers who came, taking her modest part among the women in the entertainment of the guests but never in the conclave as a participant. Alas! that she went so prematurely to her grave in "Sleepy Hollow"!
Hawthorne came into my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient wainscoting, the ample low-studded rooms, the quaint fireplace, and at the rear toward the west the windows with their small panes on some of which Hawthorne made inscriptions. "Every leaf and twig is outlined against the sky," or words to that effect, "scratched with my wife's diamond ring"; here the sunset pours in gorgeously but there is more of shadow than sunlight about the Old Manse, and that is befitting for a dwelling with associations somewhat sombre. In later years Hawthorne occupied a house on the Lexington Road, new and modern, writing there some famous books in an upper study said to be accessible only through a trap-door, but the Old Manse was the appropriate home for him. It was there that his young genius produced its earlier fruit and it deserves to be particularly cherished. As a little child I went once with my father and mother to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, at the time when the community was most interesting. The famous disciples of Fourier were then, I suppose, for the most part present, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, George Ripley, George William Curtis, Charles A. Dana and the rest, but I was too young to take note of them. I recall only George Ripley, the head of the enterprise, in a rough working-blouse who welcomed us at the gate. My father and he were old friends and as supper-time came and the community gathered singly and in groups in the dining-hall from the fields and groves outside, he said to my father: "Your seat at the table will be next to Hawthorne, but I shall not introduce you, Mr. Hawthorne prefers not to be introduced to people." It was a cropping out of the strange aloofness for which Hawthorne was marked. He could do his part in the day's work, be a man among men, dicker with the importers at the Salem Custom House and as Consul at Liverpool, rub effectively with the traders, but his choice was always for solitude, he liked to go for days without speaking to a human being and to live withdrawn from the contacts of the world, even from his neighbours and family. Probably it was because he was so thoroughly a recluse that I recall seeing Hawthorne only once, although he was in the village in whose streets I was constantly passing. Driving one day on the road near his home a companion exclaimed, "There goes Mr. Hawthorne on the sidewalk!" I put my head forward quickly to get a glimpse from the cover of the carriage of so famous a personage, and at the roadside was a fine, tall, athletic person with handsome features. My quick movement forward in the carriage he took for a bow and he returned it raising his hat with gentlemanly courtesy, it was all through a mistake that I got this bow from Hawthorne but all the same I treasure it. A sister-in-law of his, who was often an inmate of his home, told me that Hawthorne really believed in ghosts. It will be remembered that in the introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne speaks of the spectre of an ancient minister who haunted it, the rustling of his silken gown was sometimes heard in the hallways. My friend attributed this passage to something which happened during one of her visits. She sat one evening with her sister and Hawthorne in the low-studded living-room, and, as was often the case, in silence. She thought she heard in the entry the rustling of silk, it might have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk. At the moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was passing through the entry, but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable interval. "Why, I distinctly heard," said she, "the rustling of a silk gown in the entry!" The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an explanation, but all was dark and still, no draperies were stirring, no wind whistled, and they returned to their chairs, talking for a moment over the mysterious sound, then relapsing into their former quiet. Hawthorne meantime sat dreaming, apparently not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after—when my friend read the Mosses from an Old Manse, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found in the hands of an old man and he was sometimes annoyed because the old man retained it so long. The old man lived in a suburb and for some reason was equally interested with himself in that paper. This went on for weeks until one day Hawthorne, entering the room, found the paper as usual in the hands of this man. Hawthorne sat down and waited patiently as often before until the old man had finished. After a time the man rose, put on his hat and overcoat, and took his departure. As the door of the reading-room closed behind him Hawthorne took up the paper which lay in disorder as the man had left it, when, lo and behold, his eye fell in the first column on a notice of the old man's death. He was at the moment lying dead in his house in the suburbs and yet Hawthorne had beheld him but a moment before in his usual guise reading the paper in the Athenaeum! My friend said that Hawthorne told her the story quietly without attempt at explanation and she believed his thought was that he had actually seen a ghost. The readers of Hawthorne will recall passages which are consonant with the idea that Hawthorne believed in ghosts.
No other author has affected me quite so profoundly as did Hawthorne. The period of my development from childhood through youth to maturity was coeval with the time of his literary activities. The first vivid impression I received from books came from his stories for children, Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and The Liberty Tree; when somewhat older I read The Rill from the Town Pump and Little Annie's Ramble, still later came the weird creations in which Hawthorne's expanding genius manifested itself, such as The Minister's Black Veil, Rappaccini's Daughter, and The Celestial Railroad. And not less in young manhood I was awed and absorbed in the great works of his maturity, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables, and the Marble Faun. Meat and drink as they were to me in my youth and first entrance into life, I naturally feel that the author of these books was in mind profoundly powerful. In point of genius among our Americans I should set no man before him. He was not a moral inspirer nor a leader, he gave to no one directly any spiritual uplift, nor did he help one directly to strength in fighting the battles of life. He was a peerless artist portraying marvellously the secret things of the human soul, his concrete pictures taken from the old Puritan society, from the New England of his day and from the passionate Italian life. He portrays but he draws no lesson any more than Shakespeare, his books are pictures of the souls of men, of the sweet and wholesome things and also the weakness, the sin and the morbid defect. These having been revealed the reader is left to his own inferences. It is fully made plain that he was a soft-hearted man, at any rate in his earlier time. The stories he wrote at the outset for children are often full of sweetness and sympathy. But as he went on with his work these qualities are less apparent, the spirit of the artist more and more prevailing, until he paints with relentless realism even what is hideous, not approving or condemning; it is part of life and must be set down. Many have thought it strange that Hawthorne apparently had no patriotism. In our Civil War he stood quite indifferent, a marked contrast with the men among whom he lived and who like him have literary eminence. These passages stand in his diary and letters. "February 14, 1862, Frank Pierce came here to-night…. He is bigoted as to the Union and sees nothing but ruin without it. Whereas I should not much regret an ultimate separation." "At present we have no country…. New England is really quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in. I have no kindred with or leaning toward the abolitionists." But his coolness to his country's welfare was of a piece with the general coolness toward well and ill in the affairs of the world. Humanity rolls before him as it did before Shakespeare, sometimes weak, sometimes heroic, depressed, exultant, suffering, happy. He did not concern himself to regulate its movement, to heighten its joy, or mitigate its sorrow. His work was to portray it as it moved, and in that conception of his mission he established his masterfulness as an artist, though it abates somewhat, does it not? from his wholeness as a man.
Some years ago in introducing Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson to an audience in St. Louis, I said that our great-grandfathers had stood together with the Minute Men of Concord at the North Bridge on the 19th of April, 1775. His ancestor as their minister inspiring them with the idea of freedom, my ancestor as an officer, who by word and deed kept the farmers firm before the British volleys. The old-time connection between the two families persisted. Ralph Waldo Emerson and my father were contemporaries coming through the Harvard gate into the small company of Unitarian ministers at about the same period and somewhat associated in their young manhood. Mrs. Emerson had been Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, baptised, into the old Pilgrim Parish by the father of my mother. Lydia Jackson and my mother had been girls together, and good friends. It was natural, therefore, that, with these antecedents when I as a young boy arrived in Concord, I should come into touch with the Emersons. They were indeed pleasant friends to me, both Mr. and Mrs. Emerson receiving with kindness the child whose parents they had known when children. The Emerson house on the Lexington Road is to-day a world-renowned shrine, sixty years ago it was the quiet home of a peaceful family, lovely as now through its natural beauty but not yet sought out by many pilgrims. The fame of Emerson, only recently established by his Nature and the earlier poems, was just beginning to spread into world-wide proportions.
I have before me his image, in his vigorous years, the sloping rather narrow shoulders, the slender frame erect and sinewy but never robust, and a keen, firm face. In his glance was complete kindliness and also profound penetration. His nose was markedly expressive, sharp, and well to the fore. In his lips there was geniality as well as firmness. His smooth hair concealed a head and brow not large but well rounded. His face was always without beard. Though slight, he was vigorous and the erect figure striding at a rapid pace could be encountered any day in all weathers, not only on the streets but in the fields and woods. Unlike his neighbour Hawthorne his instincts were always social. He mingled affably with low and high and I have never heard a more hearty tribute to him than came from an Irish washwoman, his neighbour, who only knew him as he chatted with her over the fence about the round of affairs that interested her. He always had a smile and a pleasant word for the school-children and at town-meeting bore his part among the farmers in discussing the affairs of the community. His voice in particular bespoke the man. It had a rich resonance and a subtle quality that gave to the most cursory listener an impression of culture. His speech was deliberate, sometimes hesitating, and his phrases often, even when he talked on simple themes, had especial point and appropriateness.
As a child I recall him among groups of children in his garden a little aloof but beaming with a happy smile. At a later time, when I was in college, we used sometimes to walk the twenty miles from Cambridge to Concord and the student group always found in him a hospitable entertainer. By that time he had reached the height of his fame. Those of us who sought him had been readers of Nature or the poems, of Representative Men, and of English Traits. For my own part while I did not always understand his thought, much of it was entering into my very fibre. In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life. We approached him with some awe, "If he asks me where I live," said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, "I shall tell him I can be found at No. So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual entity, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth." But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane. There was a hearty "Good-morning," significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-butter atmosphere very pleasant to us after a long and dusty tramp. On one occasion Emerson withdrew into the background, we thought too much, while he gave the front place in the library, after he had superintended royally the satisfaction of our bodily needs, to his neighbour Bronson Alcott. Mr. Alcott white-haired and oracular, talked to us about Shakespeare. There was probably a secondary sense in every line of Shakespeare which would become apparent to all such as attained the necessary fineness of soul. Perhaps we should find in this the gospel of a new Covenant in which Shakespeare would be the great teacher and leader. Mysteries were gathering about him, who was he? Who really wrote his plays and poems? The adumbrations of a new supernatural figure were looming in the conception of the world. Mr. Alcott mused through the afternoon in characteristic fashion and Emerson sat with us, silently absorbing the mystic speculation.
But Mr. Emerson was not always silent. A good friend of his who was akin to me and over partial, invited him to her house with a little circle of neighbours and lo, I was to furnish the entertainment! I had written a college poem and with some sinking of heart I learned that I was to read it to this company of which Emerson was to be a member. I faced the music and for half an hour rolled off my stanzas. At the close, my kinswoman arranged that I should talk with Emerson in a corner by ourselves and for another half-hour he talked to me. I am bound to say that he said little about my poem, but devoted himself almost entirely to an enthusiastic outpouring over Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, an advance copy of which had just been sent him. A stronger commendation of a piece of literary work than he gave it would be hard to conceive. He had been moved by it to the depths and his forecast for its author was a fame of the brightest. It was then I first heard of Walt Whitman. Soon after the world heard much of him and it still hears much of him. Emerson did not confine the expression of his admiration of Walt Whitman to me, as the world knows; he expressed it with an equal outspokenness to the poet, who curiously enough thought it proper to print it in gilt letters on the cover of his book, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." To do that was certainly a violation of literary comity, but who shall give laws to rough-riding genius! It is a penalty of eminence to be made sponsor unwittingly before the public for men and things when reticence would seem better. At any rate it brought Whitman well into notice and I have never heard, rough diamond though he undoubtedly was, that Walt Whitman's withers were wrung by this breach of confidence.
There is a little nook by Gore Hall in Cambridge with which I have a queer medley of associations. One night I was tossed in a blanket there during my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club. Precisely there I met Emerson rather memorably on the Commemoration Day in 1865 when he said to me, glancing at my soldier's uniform, in very simple words but with an intonation that betrayed deep feeling, "This day belongs to you." Immediately after, hard by I shook hands with Meade, the towering stately victor of Gettysburg in the full uniform of a corps commander, in contrast indeed to the slight, plainly-dressed philosopher. And only the other day I helped my little granddaughter to feed the grey squirrels in the same green nook from which the rollicking boys, the sage, and the warrior have so long since vanished.
I have heard it remarked by a man of much literary discrimination that Emerson's poetic gift was pre-eminent and that he should have made verse and not prose his principal medium for expression. As it is his poems are few, his habitual medium being prose. The critic attributed this to a distrust which Emerson felt of his power of dealing with poetic form, the harmonious arrangement of lines. He felt that Emerson was right in his judgment of himself, that there was a defect here, and that it was well for him to choose as he did. All this I hesitate to accept. As regards form, while the verse of Emerson certainly is sometimes rough, few things in poetry are more exquisite than many verses which all will recall. What stanzas ever flowed more sweetly than these written for the dedication of the Concord monument? "By the rude bridge that arched the flood," or the little poem on the snow-storm, "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky arrives the snow." The Boston Hymn, too, though in parts informal to the point of carelessness, has passages of the finest music,
"The rocky nook with hill-tops three,
Looked eastward from the farms
And twice each day the flowing sea
Took Boston in its arms."