Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors

by Theodore F. Wolfe

Last Resting-Place of the Illustrious Concord Company—Their Graves beneath the Piny Boughs.

DURING Hawthorne's habitation of the "Old Manse" and his first residence at the Wayside, his favorite walk was to the "Sleepy Hollow," a beautifully diversified precinct of hill and vale which lies a little way eastward from the village. His habitual resting-place here was a pine-shaded hill-top where he often met Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Hoar, Mrs. Ripley, or Margaret Fuller,—for all that sublimated company loved and frequented this spot. More often Hawthorne lounged and mused or chatted here alone with his lovely wife. Their letters and journals of this period make frequent mention of the walks to this place and of "our castle,"—a fanciful structure which, in their happy converse here under the pines, they planned to erect for their habitation on this hill-top. In their pleasant conceit, the terraced path which skirts the verge of the hollow and thence ascends the ridge was the grand "chariot-road" to their castle. This park has become a cemetery,—at its dedication Emerson made an oration and Frank B. Sanborn read a beautiful ode,—and on their beloved hill-top nearly all the transcendent company whom Hawthorne used to meet there, save Margaret Fuller who rests beneath the sea, lie at last in "the dreamless sleep that lulls the dead."

First came Thoreau, to lie among his kindred under the wild flowers and the fallen needles of his dear pines, in a grave marked now by a simple stone graven with his name and age. Next came Hawthorne: with his "half-told tale" and a wreath of apple-blossoms from the "Old Manse" resting on his coffin, and with Emerson, Longfellow, Fields, Ellery Channing, Agassiz, Hoar, Lowell, Whipple, Alcott, Holmes, and George Hilliard walking mournfully by his side, he was borne, through the flowering orchards and up the hill-side path,—which was to have been his "chariot-road,"—to a grave on the site of the "castle" of his fancy; where his dearest friend Franklin Pierce covered him with flowers and James Freeman Clarke committed his mortal part to the lap of earth. Alas, that the beloved cohabitant of his dream-castle must lie in death a thousand leagues away! in no dream of his would such a separation from her have seemed possible. She tried to mark his tomb by a leafy monument of hawthorn shrubbery, but the rigorous climate prevented; now a low marble, inscribed with the one word "Hawthorne," stands at either extremity of his grave, and a glossy growth of periwinkle covers the spot where sleeps the great master of American romance. Some smaller graves are beside his: in one lies a child of Julian Hawthorne; in another, Rose—the daughter of Hawthorne's age—laid the son which her husband, Parsons Lathrop, commemorates in the lines of "The Flown Soul." Next Mrs. Ripley and Elizabeth Hoar were borne to this "God's acre," and then Emerson—followed by a vast concourse and mourned by all the world—was brought to "give his body back to earth again," in this loved retreat, near Hawthorne and his own "forest-seer" Thoreau. A gigantic pine towers above him here, and a massive triangular boulder of untooled pink quartz—already marred by the vandalism of relic-seekers—is placed to mark the grave of the great "King of Thought." It bore no inscription or device of any sort until a few months ago, when a bronze plate inscribed with his name and years and the lines—

"The passive master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned"—

was set in the rough surface of the stone. By Emerson lie his wife, his mother, two children of his son and biographer Dr. Emerson, and his own little child,—the "wondrous, deep-eyed boy" whom Emerson mourned in his matchless "Threnody."

"O child of paradise, Boy who made dear his father's home, In whose deep eyes Men read the welfare of the times to come,— I am too much bereft."

Six years after Emerson, Bronson Alcott and his illustrious daughter Louisa were laid here, within a few yards of Hawthorne and the rest, on a spot selected by the "Beth" of the Alcott books who was herself the first to be interred in it. Now all the "Little Women" repose here with their parents and good "John Brooke,"—"Jo" being so placed as to suggest to her biographer that she is still to take care of parents and sisters "as she had done all her life."

The Grave of Emerson

No other spot of earth holds dust more precious than does this "hill-top hearsed with pines." We are pleased to find the native beauty of the place little disturbed,—the trees, the indigenous grasses, ferns, and flowers remaining for the most part as they were known and loved by those who sleep beneath them. The contour of the ground and the foliage which clusters upon the slopes measurably shut out the view of other portions of the enclosure from this secluded hill-top, and, as we sit by the graves under the moaning pines, we seem to be alone with these our dead. Through the boughs we have glimpses of the motionless deeps of a summer sky; the patches of sunshine which illumine the graves about us are broken by foliate shadows sometimes as still as if painted upon the turf. No discordant sound from the haunts of men disturbs our meditations; the silence is unbroken save by the frequent sighs of the mourning pines.