April 26. I met Mr. Rockwood Hoar, who congratulated us upon our expected residence in England, which he said was "the only place fit to live in out of America."
April 29. A neighbor came yesterday with an English white rose, and set out the tree for me. He said it was for Rosebud. We are getting to look quite nice, but all will look black and bare to my husband, after being at the South. Baby is filled with joy to be out in such lovely weather, and makes no hesitation to take the heaviest tools, and dig and rake and hoe. She will not come in even to drink her milk. Some documents came this morning from the State Department, relating to the Consulate at Liverpool. The peach-trees are all in bloom, and the cherry-trees also. I looked about, as I sat down in our pine grove, and tried to bear my husband's absence but it is desolation without him. This is the sweetest place—I really cannot bear to leave it. My scholars drew flowers, this morning. Mr. Emerson and Ellery Charming passed along; and Mr. Emerson asked Julian to go with the children to Fairy Land [in Walden woods]. He went, in a state of ecstatic bliss. He brought me home, in a basket, cowslips, anemones, and violets.
In June the voyage to England, as Hawthorne was appointed Consul at Liverpool by President Pierce, was undertaken, and pleasantly accomplished.
Hawthorne's "English Note-Books," as well as the elaborated papers that make up "Our Old Home," disclose something of his daily life in England during his consulship; but it was in the rapid, familiar letters of my mother to her family that his life was most freely narrated. I have preserved these letters, and shall give extracts from them in the pages that follow, prefacing and interpolating a few girlish memories of my father and of the places in which I saw him, although they are trivial and meagre in incident. He died the day before my thirteenth birthday, and as my existence had begun at a time when his quiet life was invaded (if we may use that term in connection with a welcome guest) by fame, with its attendant activity in the outside world, my intercourse with him was both juvenile and brief. In England, he mingled more than ever before with the members of literary and fashionable society. I, who in 1853 was but two years old, had to be satisfied with a glance and a smile, which were so much less than he had been able to give to my brother and sister in their happier childhood days, for they had enjoyed hours of his companionship as a constant pastime. I was, moreover, much younger than the others, and was never allowed to grow, as I wished, out of the appellations of Rosebud, Baby, and Bab (as my father always called me), and all the infantine thought which those pet names imply. I longed myself to hear the splendidly grotesque fairy tales, sprung from his delicious jollity of imagination, which Una and Julian had reveled in when our father had been at leisure in Lenox and Concord; and the various frolics about which I received appetizing hints as I grew into girlhood made me seem to myself a stranger who had come too late. But a stranger at Hawthorne's side could be very happy, and, whatever my losses, I knew myself to be rich.
In the early years of our stay in England his personality was most radiant. His face was sunny, his aspect that of shining elegance. There was the perpetual gleam of a glad smile on his mouth and in his eyes. His eyes were either a light gray or a violet blue, according to his mood. His hair was brown and waved loosely (I take it very hard when people ask me if it was at all red!), and his complexion was as clear and luminous as his mother's, who was the most beautiful woman some people have ever seen. He was tall, and with as little superfluous flesh and as much sturdy vigor as a young athlete; for his mode of life was always athletic, simple, and abstemious. He leaned his head a little to one side, often, in a position indicating alert rest, such as we find in many Greek statues,—so different from the straight, dogged pose of a Roman emperor. He was very apt to make an assent with an upward movement of the head, a comfortable h'm-m, and a half-smile. Sympathetic he was, indeed, and warm with the fire that never goes out in great natures. He had much dignity; so much that persons in his own country sometimes thought him shy and reticent to the verge of morbidness. But it was merely the gentlemanliness of the man, who was jocund with no one but his intimate friends, and never fierce except with rascals, as I observed on one or two occasions. Those who thought him too silent were bores whom he desired not to attract. Those who thought him unphilosophical (and some philosophers thought that) were not artists, and could not analyze his work. Those who knew him for a man and a friend were manly and salubrious of soul themselves. They have given plenty of testimony as to the good-fellowship of a nature which could be so silent at will.
He was usually reserved, but he was ready for action all the time. His full, smooth lips, sensitive as a child's, would tell a student of facial lines how vivid was his life, though absolutely under his cool command. He was a delightful companion even when little was said, because his eyes spoke with a sort of apprehension of your thought, so that you felt that your expression of face was a clear record for him, and that words would have been a sort of anticlimax. His companionship was exquisitely restful, since it was instinctively sympathetic. He did not need to exert himself to know you deeply, and he saw all the good in you there was to know; and the weakness and the wrong of any heart he weighed as nicely in the balance of tender mercy as we could do in pity for ourselves. I always felt a great awe of him, a tremendous sense of his power. His large eyes, liquid with blue and white light and deep with dark shadows, told me even when I was very young that he was in some respects different from other people. He could be most tender in outward action, but he never threw such action away. He knew swine under the cleverest disguise. I speak of outward acts of tenderness. As for his spirit, it was always arousing mine, or any one's, and acting towards one's spiritual being invisibly and silently, but with gentle earnestness. He evinced by it either a sternly sweet dignity of tolerance, or an approbation generous as a broad meadow, or a sadly glanced, adverse comment that lashed one's inner consciousness with remorse. He was meditative, as all those are who care that the world is full of sorrow and sin, but cheerful, as those are who have the character and genius to see the finite beauty and perfection in the world, which are sent to the true-hearted as indications of heaven. He could be full of cheer, and at the same time never lose the solemnity of a perception of the Infinite,—that familiar fact which we, so many of us, have ceased to fear, but which the greatest men so remember and reverence. He never became wholly merged in fun, however gay the games in which he joined with us children; just as a man of refinement who has been in war never quite throws aside the dignity of the sorrow which he has seen. He might seem, at a superficial glance, to be the merriest of us all, but on second thoughts he was not. Of course, there were times when it was very evident to me that my father was as comfortable and happy as he cared to be. When he stood upon the hearth-rug, before the snapping, blushing English fire (always poked into a blaze towards evening, as he was about to enter the parlor),—when he stood there with his hands clasped behind him, swaying from side to side in a way peculiar to him, and which recalled the many sea-swayed ancestors of his who had kept their feet on rolling decks, then he was a picture of benevolent pleasure. Perhaps, for this moment, the soldier from the battlefields of the soul ceased to remember scenes of cruelty and agony. He swayed from side to side, and raised himself on his toes, and creaked his slippered heels jocosely, and smiled upon me, and lost himself in agreeable musings. He was very courteous, entirely sincere, and quiet with fixed principles as a great machine with consistent movement. He treated children handsomely; harshness was not in him to be subdued, and scorn of anything that was honestly developing would have seemed to him blasphemy. He stooped to my intelligence, and rejoiced it. We were usually a silent couple when off for a walk together, or when we met by chance in the household. I suppose that we were seeing which could outdo the other at "holding the tongue." But still, our intercourse, as I remarked before, might be complete. I knew him very well indeed,—' his power, his supremacy of honesty, his wealth of refinement. And he, I was fully aware, could see through me as easily as if I were a soul in one of his own books.
Even as a child, knowing that he could not think me a remunerative companion, I realized how remarkable it was that in all his being there was not an atom of the poison of contempt. If he did not love stupidity, he forgave it. If he was strong with analysis and the rejection of all sham and wrong, his hand was ready to grasp s any hand, because it was a human creature's, whose destiny was a part of every destiny—even Christ's. This sympathy, which caused the choice he had made of his character-studies, and brought many confessions to his judgment from bewildered men and women, was with him so entire that it showed itself in the little things of existence, as a whole garden-path is noble with the nature of the rose that stands blooming there.
His aspect avoided, as did that of his art, which exactly reproduced his character, anything like self-conscious picturesqueness. It is pleasant to have the object of our regard unconscious of himself. He had a way of ignoring, while observing automatically, all accessories, which reminded us that his soul was ever awake, and waiting to be made free of earthly things and common ideas.
During our European life he frequently wore a soft brown felt hat and a brown talma of finest broadcloth, whose Greek-like folds and double-decked effect were artistic, but did not tempt him to pose or remember his material self. He was as forgetful of his appearance as an Irishman of the true quality, who may have heard something about his coat or his hair, but has let slip from his mind what it was, and cares not, so long as the song of his comrades is tender and the laughter generous. In some such downright way, I was convinced, my father regarded the beauty and stateliness which were his, and for which he had been praised all through his existence. He forgot himself in high aims, which are greater than things seen, no matter how fine soever.
We made a very happy family group as we gladly followed and looked upon him when he took ship to start for the Liverpool Consulate; and of this journey and the new experiences which ensued my mother writes to Dr. Peabody as follows:—