In 1852 he bought of Bronson Alcott in Concord a house since known as the "Wayside." This was to be Hawthorne's American home during his remaining years. Here he had a tower room so constructed as to be well-nigh inaccessible to visitors, and he also had a romantic study bower built in the pine trees on a hill back of his house.
[Illustration: HAWTHORNE'S PINE STUDY, CONCORD]
His college friend, Pierce, was inaugurated President of the United States in 1853, and he appointed Hawthorne consul at Liverpool. This consulship then netted the holder between $5000 and $7000 a year. After nearly four years' service in this position, he resigned and traveled in Europe with his family. They lived in Rome sufficiently long for him to absorb the local color for his romance of The Marble Faun. He remained abroad for seven years. The record of his travels and impressions may be found in his English Note-Books and in his French and Italian Note-Books. Our Old Home, a volume based on his English Note-Books, is a more finished account of his thoughts and experiences in England.
In 1860 he returned quietly to his Concord home. His health was failing, but he promised to write for the Atlantic Monthly another romance, called The Dolliver Romance. This, however, was never finished, and The Marble Faun remains the last of his great romances. His health continued to fail, and in May, 1864, Pierce, thinking that a trip might prove beneficial, started with him on a journey to the White Mountains. Hawthorne retired for the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning Pierce found that Hawthorne's wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been gratified. He had passed away before the completion of his fifty-ninth year. He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord. His classmate, Longfellow, wrote:—
"There in seclusion and remote from men,
The wizard hand lies cold."
"TWICE TOLD TALES" AND "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE."—Many do not realize that these two volumes contain eighty-two tales or sketches and that they represent the most of Hawthorne's surviving literary work for the first forty-five years of his life. The title for Twice-Told Tales (1837) was probably suggested by the line from Shakespeare's King John: "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale." The second volume, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), took its name from Hawthorne's first Concord home. His last collection is called The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1851). Each one of these volumes contains some of his short-story masterpieces, although, taken as a whole, the collection in Mosses from an Old Manse shows the greatest power and artistic finish.
The so-called tales in these volumes are of several different types. (1) There is the story which presents chiefly allegorical or symbolic truth, such as Rappacini's Daughter, The Great Stone Face, The Birthmark, The Artist of the Beautiful, and The Snow Image. The last story, one of the greatest of this class, relates how two children make a companion out of a snow image, how Jack Frost and the pure west wind endow this image with life and give them a little "snow sister." She grows more vigorous with every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children. Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring something of Eden back to our everyday lives. This story, like so many of the others, was written with a moral purpose. There are to-day people who measure their acquaintances by their estimates of this allegorical story.
(2) Another type of Hawthorne's stories illustrates the history of New England. Such are The Gentle Boy, The Maypole of Merry Mount, Endicotts Red Cross, and Lady Eleanore's Mantle. We may even include in this list Young Goodman Brown, in one sense an unreal and fantastic tale, but in another, historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of witches in a forest. If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker persecution of New England, let us open The Twice-Told Tales and read the story of The Gentle Boy, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree. Let us enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and invokes woe upon the Puritans.
(3) We shall occasionally find in these volumes what eighteenth-century readers of the Spectator would have called a "paper," that is, a delightful bit of mixed description and narration, "a narrative essay" or "a sketch," as some prefer to call it. In this class we may include The Old Manse, The Old Apple-Dealer, Sights from a Steeple, A Rill from the Town Pump, and the masterly Introduction to The Scarlet Letter.
The Old Manse, the first paper in Mosses from an Old Manse, is excellent. Hawthorne succeeds in taking his readers with him up the Assabeth River, in a boat made by Thoreau. We agree with Hawthorne that a lovelier river "never flowed on earth,—nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination." When we return with him at the end of that day's excursion, we are almost tempted to say that we can never again be enslaved as before. We feel that we can say with him:—