Some of the cleverest men and women of New England became members of this community, the rules of which obliged the men to wear plaid blouses and rough straw hats, and the women to content themselves with plain calico gowns.
This company of serious-minded men and women, who tried to solve a great problem by leading the lives of Acadian shepherds, at length dispersed, each one going back into the world and working on as bravely as if the experiment had been a great success. The record of the life and experiences of Brook Farm are shadowed forth in The Blithedale Romance, although it is not by any means a literal narrative of its existence.
THE OLD MANSE.
Hawthorne's early married life was spent at Concord, near Boston, in a quaint old dwelling called the Manse, and as all his work partakes of the personal flavor of his own life, so his existence here is recorded in a delightful series of essays called Mosses from an Old Manse. Here we have a description of the old house itself and of the author's family life, of the kitchen-garden and apple orchards, of the meadows and woods, and of his friendship with that lover of nature, Henry Thoreau, whose writings form a valuable contribution to American literature. The Mosses from an Old Manse must ever be famous as the history of the quiet hours of the greatest American man of letters. They are full of Hawthorne's own personality, and reveal more than any other of his books, the depth and purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.
In 1853 Hawthorne was appointed American Consul at Liverpool by his old friend and school-mate Franklin Pierce, then President of the United States. He remained abroad seven years, spending the last four on the continent. The results of this experience are found in the celebrated Marble Faun, published in Europe under the title Transformation. It was written in Rome, and it is interesting to know that the story was partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa near Florence which he occupied with his family. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower, "haunted," as Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of Florence." He also states in the same letter that he meant to put the old castle bodily in a romance that was then in his head, and he carried out this threat by making the villa the old family castle of Donatello.
After Hawthorne returned to America he began two other novels, one founded upon the old legend of the elixir of life. This story was probably suggested to him by Thoreau, who spoke of the house in which Hawthorne lived at Concord, after leaving the old Manse, as having been the abode, a century or two before, of a man who believed that he should never die. This subject was a charming one for Hawthorne's peculiar genius, but the story, with another—the Dolliver Romance—was never completed, the death of Hawthorne in 1864 leaving the work unfinished.