Ellery Channing—Margaret Fuller—The Alcotts—Professor Harris—Summer School of Philosophy—Where Little Women was written and Robert Hagburn lived—Where Cyril Norton was slain.
A PLAIN little cottage by the road, not far from Emerson's home, was for some time the abode of the companion of many of his rambles through the countryside,—the poet Ellery Channing. It was to this simple dwelling, as the author of "Little Women" once told the writer, that Channing brought his young wife—sister of Margaret Fuller—before the Alcotts had come to live in their hill-side home under the wooded ridge, and it was here he commenced the sequestered life so suited to his nature and tastes.
Some of his descriptive poems of Concord landscapes were written in this little cottage. The scenes of one of his earlier winters in the neighborhood—when he chopped wood in a rude clearing—are portrayed in the exquisite lines of his "Woodman." In those days he thought his poems "too sacred to be sold for money," and they were kept for his circle of friends. Of the poet's modest home Miss Fuller—that "dazzling woman with the flame in her heart"—was a frequent inmate; it was from Concord that she went to live in the family of Horace Greeley in New York. At the time of her visits at Channing's cottage Thoreau was sojourning with Emerson, and we may be sure that the quartette of starry souls, thus juxtaposé, held much soulful and edifying converse. But those of us who deplore our lack of the supreme transcendental spirit which we ascribe to the Concord circle may find consolation in reflecting that some of this gifted company had also earthly tastes, and found even discourse concerning the "over-soul" sometimes tiresome. The "strained pitch of intellectual intensity" was, upon occasion, gladly relaxed; thus we discover the exalted Channing sometime profanely inviting Hawthorne—"the gentlest man that kindly Nature ever drew"—to visit him in Concord, alluring the novelist with prospects of strong-waters, pipes and tobacco without end, and urging, as the utmost inducement, "Emerson is gone and there is nobody here to bore you."
A few furlongs farther eastward, under the high-soaring elms of the Lexington road, we come to the "Orchard House" of Bronson Alcott, "the grandfather of the 'Little Women.'" The tasteful dwelling stands several rods back from the street, nestling cosily at the foot of a pine-crowned slope, and having a wide, sunny outlook in front. Embowered in orchards and vines, and shaded by the overreaching arms of giant elms, it seems a most delightful home for culture and contemplative study. The cottage itself is a low, wide, gabled, picturesquely irregular edifice, which our Pythagorean mystic evolved from a forlorn, box-like farm-house which he found here when he purchased the place. The rustic fence he set along the highway is replaced by an ambitious modern structure. On this hill-side Alcott, the "most transcendent of the transcendentalists," lived for nearly thirty years,—but not all of that time in this house,—coming here first after the failure of his "Fruitlands" community in 1845, and finally twelve years later. Prior to this he had been assisted by Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody in his renowned Boston Temple School, which was a failure in a financial sense only, since it furnished a theme for Miss Peabody's "Record of a School," and Louisa Alcott's girlish recollections of it provided her a model for the delightful "Plumfield" of her books.
Alcott's treatise on "Early Education," his "Gospels" and "Orphic Sayings," had been published, and his "very best contribution to literature"—his daughter Louisa—was also extant before he came to this home, but it was here that his maturer works and most of his charming essays and "Conversations" were produced.
In this house were held the early sessions of the Summer School of Philosophy, of which Alcott was the leading spirit; here his daughter, the "Beth" of "Jo's" books, died. The interior of the "Orchard House" is roomy and quaint and abounds in surprising nooks and cosy recesses. In the corner-room Louisa wrote "Little Women" and other delicious books; in the room behind it, May, "our Madonna,"—who died Madame Nieriker,—had her studio and practised the art which made her famous before her untimely end. In the great attic under the sloping roof the "Little Women" acted the "comic tragedies" written by "Jo" and "Meg" (some of them now published in a volume with a "Foreword" by "Meg") until the increasing audiences of Concord children caused the removal of the mimic stage to the big barn on the hill-side.
Hawthorne makes this house the abode of Robert Hagburn in "Septimius Felton." Along the brow of the tree-clad ridge which overlooks the place, and to which Bronson Alcott resorted for the morning and evening view, the patriots hastened to intercept the retreat of the British troops, "blackened and bloody." In the depression of the ridge just back of the house we find the spot where "Septimius Felton" shot the young officer, Cyril Norton, and buried him under the trees. On the grave here "Septimius" sat with Rose Garfield and the half-crazed Sibyl Dacy; here grew the crimson flower which he distilled in his "elixir of immortality," and here Sibyl came to die after her draught of the compound.
After the removal of the Alcotts to the Thoreau house in the village, "Apple Slump"—as Louisa sometimes called this orchard home—became the property and residence of that disciple of Hegel, Professor Harris,—once principal of the Summer School of Philosophy, and now the head of the National Bureau of Education at Washington,—who sometimes comes here in summer.
The "Hillside Chapel," erected by Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, of New York, for the sessions of the Summer Philosophers, is placed among the trees of the orchard adjoining Alcott's old home. It is a plain little structure of wood, tasteful in design, with pointed gables and vine-draped porch and windows. Its embowered walls, unpainted and unplastered, seem "scarcely large enough to contain the wisdom of the world," but they have held assemblages of such lights as Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Bartol, McCosh, Holland, Porter, Lathrop, Stedman, Wilder, Hedge, Dr. Jones, Elizabeth Peabody, Ward Howe, Ednah Cheney, and other like seekers and promoters of fundamental truth.