Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors

by Theodore F. Wolfe

Hawthorne's Rambles

The investing mountains give to the place the "snug and insular" air which Hawthorne observed; from many points it seems completely severed from the rest of the world. On some dark days sombre banks of cloud settle along the ridges and apparently so strengthen and heighten the beleaguering walls that we recall Hawthorne's fancy that egress is impossible save by "climbing above the clouds." However, the railways tunnel the base of one mountain and curve around the flanks of others, while

"Old roads winding, as old roads will,"

find easy grades about and over the ramparts, so that the bustling "Tunnel-city" is by no means isolated from the outside world.

The rambles among and beyond these investing mountains, by which Hawthorne made himself and "Eustace Bright" of "Wonder-Book" and "Tanglewood Tales" familiar with "rough, rugged, broken, headlong" Berkshire, were usually solitary. The before-mentioned admirer of the "Gentle Boy" sometimes offered to guide the novelist to places of interest in the vicinage, but he usually preferred to be alone with nature and his own reveries. Once when the lad proposed to pilot him to the peak of Graylock, Hawthorne replied he "did not care to soar so high; the Bellows-Pipe was sightly enough for him." He visited the latter point many times; it is a long walk from the village, and once he returned so late that the hotel was closed for the night and our lad pommelled the door for him until the landlord descended, in wrath and confidentially scant attire, to admit the novelist.

One starless night we were guided to the kiln of "Bertram the lime-burner" which Hawthorne visited with Mr. Leach,—one of several kilns high up on the steep slope without the town, where the marble of the mountain is converted into snow-white lime. The graphic imagery of the tale may all be realized here upon the spot where it is laid. Amid the darkness, the iron door which encloses the glowing limestone apparently opens into the mountain-side, and seems a veritable entrance to the infernal regions whose lurid flames escape by every crevice. The dark and silent figure, revealed to us by the weird light, sitting and musing before the kiln, is surely "Ethan Brand"Ethan Brand on his solitary vigil, intent on perilous thoughts as he looks into the flame, or mutely listening to the fiend he has evoked from the fire to tell him of the Unpardonable Sin; or it is the same Brand returned to the foot of Graylock after eighteen years of weary searching abroad, to find the Sin in his own heart and to burn that heart into snowy whiteness and purity in the kiln he had watched so long. As we ponder the scene we would scarce be surprised to witness the approach of the village rabble led by Joe, the old Jew exhibiting his "peep-show" at the foot of the kiln, and the self-pursuing cur violently chasing his own shortened tail, or to hear the demoniac laughter of Brand which scattered the terror-stricken rabble in the surrounding darkness. Certain it is that, thirteen years before he wrote the tale, Hawthorne saw here, at a kiln on the foot-hill of Graylock, his "Bertram," and heard the legend of a demented creature who threw himself into the midst of the circle of fire. The name "Ethan Brand" was that of an old resident of Hawthorne's Salem.

The summit of Graylock,Graylock whose rugged beauty has been sung by Holmes, Thoreau, Bryant, and Fanny Kemble, had for Hawthorne a sort of fascination. From the streets of the village, from all the ways by which he sauntered through the country-side, his eyes were continually turning to that lofty height, observant of its ever-changing aspects. His diary of the time abounds with records of its phases, presented in varying conditions of cloud and sunshine and from different places of prospect, and of the fanciful impressions suggested to his subtile thought by each fresh and unfamiliar appearance. A walk repeatedly enjoyed by him is along a primitive road on the mountain-side to the southern end of The Notch,—"where it slopes upward to the skies,"—whence he could see most of the enchanting valley of Berkshire—with its lakes, embowered villages, and billowy expanses of upland and mead—extending between mountain-borders to the great Dome which looms across it sixty miles away. In the distance he could see the crags of Bryant's Monument Mountain—the "headless sphinx" of his own "Wonder-Book"—rising above the gleaming lake whose margin was to be his later home.

Our route to the peak of Graylock is that taken by Hawthorne and Thoreau through the savage cleft of The Notch. We follow up a dashing mountain-stream past a charming cascade beneath darkening hemlocks, then along a rough road by the houses whose inhabitants Hawthorne thought "ought to be temperance people" from the quality of the water they gave him to drink. In the remoter parts of the glen a stranger-pedestrian is still a wonder, and will be regarded as curiously as was the romancer. From the extremity of The Notch, Graylock rises steeply, his sides clothed with forests, through which we climb to the summit and our reward. From the site of Thoreau's bivouac, where Fanny Kemble once declaimed Romeo and Juliet to a picnic party, we behold a scene of unrivalled vastness and beauty,—on every side peak soaring beyond peak until the shadowy outlines blend with the distant sky. The view ranges from Grand Monadnock and the misty Adirondacks to the Catskills, the Dome of Mount Washington, and the far-away hills of Connecticut, while at our feet smiles the bright valley, as beautiful as that in which Rasselas dwelt.

Natural Bridge

A mile from the town we find one of the most picturesque spectacles in New England, the Natural Bridge, to which Hawthorne came again and again during his sojourn in this region. Amid a grove of pines apparently rooted in the solid rock, a tributary of the Hoosac has, during measureless eons of time, worn in the white marble a chasm sixty feet deep and fifteen feet wide, spanned at one point by a beautifully arched mass which forms a bridge high above the stream which frets along the rock-strewn floor of the canyon. Within the ravine the brook falls in a rainbow-crowned cascade, and below this is a placid pool with margins of polished marble, where Hawthorne once meditated a bath, but, alarmed by the approach of visitors, he hastily resumed his habiliments, "not caring to be to them the most curious part of the spectacle."