Hawthorne and His Circle

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he tracks, which seemed to slide miraculously away from beneath them. The conductor collected the tickets-a mysterious rite. The gradually whitening landscape fled past, becoming ever more level as we proceeded; by-and-by there was a welcome unpacking of the luncheon-basket, and all the while there were the endless questions to be asked and faithfully answered. It was already dark by the time we were bundled out at the grimy shed which was called the depot, at West Newton, where we were met by the Horace Manns, and somehow the transit to the latter's hous

hdrew them with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a blister as big as the tip itself. We had no glorious out-door playground in West Newton; it was a matter of back yards and sullen streets. The snow kept piling up, week after week; but there was no opportunity to put it to its proper use of coasting. The only redeeming fe

om headaches and dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long, and very thick; it hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face was a long square, with a mouth and chin large and immitigably firm. His eyes were reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He always wore a long-skirted black coat. His aspect was a little intimidating to small people; but there were lovely qualities in his nature, his character was touchingly noble and generous, and the world knows the worth of his intellect. He was anxious, exacting, and dogmatic, and was not always able to concede that persons who differed from him in opinion could be morally normal. This was especially noticeable when the topic of abolition happened to come up for discussion; Horace Mann was ready to out-Garrison Garrison; he thought Uncle Tom's Cabin a somewhat milk-and-water tract. He was convinced that Tophet was the future home of all slave-holders, and really too good for them, and he practically worshipped the negro. Had he occupied a seat in Congress at that juncture, it is likely that the civil war might have been started a decade sooner than it was. My father and mother were much more moderate in their view of the situation, and my mother used to say that if slavery was really so evil and demoralizing a thing as the abolitionists asserted, it was singular that they should canonize all the subjects of the institution. But, as a rule, all controversy with the indignant zeal of our relative

n and description, and she made an impression in contemporary letters. We might smile now-and, in truth, we sometimes did then-over some of her pages; but much of her work would still be called good, if resuscitated from the dusty book-shelves of the past. I remember one passage in her English Letters which was often quoted in our family circle as a typical illustration of the intensity of the period: "The first tears," wrote Grace, "that I had shed since leaving my dear native land fell fast into the red heart of an English rose!" Nothing could be better than that; but the volume was full of similar felicities. You were swimming in radiant tides of enthusiastic appreciation, quotations from the poets and poetical rhapsodies; incidents of travel, humorous, pathetic, and graphic; swirling eddies of word-painting, of moral a

. After one or two false alarms it came in sight round the curve, the smokestack of the engine swathed in voluminous folds of Old Glory. The smoke-stacks of those days were not like our scientific present-day ones; they were huge, inverted cones, affording ample surface for decoration. The train did not stop at our station; but Kossuth no doubt looked out of the window as he flew past and bowed his acknowledgments of our cheers. He was to return to us the next day, and, meanwhile, the town-hall, or the church, or whatever building it was that was to be the scene of his West Newton triumph was put in order for his reception. The person who writes these words, whose ears had eagerly devoured the story of the Hungarian revolt, wished to give the august visitor some personal assurance of his distinguished consideration, and it was finally agreed by his indulgent parents that he should print upon a card the legend, "GOD BLESS YOU, KOSSUTH," and be afforded an opportunity personally to present it to the guest of the nation. Many cards had been used and cast aside before the scribe, his fingers tremulous with emotion, had produced something which the Hungarian might be reasonably expected to find legible. Then, supported by his father and mother, and with his uncles, aunts, and cousins doubtless not far off, he proceeded proudly but falteringly to the scene of the presentation. He dimly recalls a large interior space, profusely decorated with stars and stripes, and also the colors of Hungary. At the head of the room was a great placard with "WELCOME, KOSSUTH" inscribed upon it. There was a great throng and press of men and women, a subdued, omnipresent roar of ta

e some thirty years later, and found the general topographical features substantially as described in the book. In 1852 it was ten years since Hawthorne had lived there, and though he might have renewed his acquaintance with it while the writing was going on, there is no record of his having done so; and considering the unfavorable weather, and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which writers seek is enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical effect of a landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it

He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling into decay, he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered. The word ragamuffin," he adds, with characteristic determination to be exact, "does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind of dignity in his groggy and red-nosed destitution."

value that would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations; page after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have taught himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series of his longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say at a first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the work of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in solitude either out-of-doors or, if that were im

JAMES T

s, of about equal length, and many passages in the two are identical. There is a short sketch on somewhat different lines, called (by the editor) The Bloody Footstep; and there is still another, and a much more elaborate attempt to embody the idea in the volume which I have

osperity of the tale depended directly upon the solution of this problem. Constantly, therefore, in the midst of the composition, he would break off and enter upon a wrestling-match with the difficulty. These wrestling-matches are of an absorbing significance; they reveal to us the very inmost movements of the author's mind. He tries, and tries again, to get at the idea that continues to elude him; he forms innumerable hypotheses; he sets forth on the widest excursions; he gets out of patience with himself and with his Pensioner, and often damns the lat

e Scarlet Letter is a mere plain story of love and jealousy; there is no serious attempt to hide the identity of Roger Chillingworth or the guilt of the minister. The only surprise in The House of the Seven Gables consists in the revelation of the fact that Maule reappears after several generations in the person of his modern descendant. The structure of The Blit

already stated, is not designed to include-except in

y the urgent invitations of his old friends there, and Mr. Emerson, who was a practical man as well as a philosopher, substantiated his arguments by throwing into the scale a concrete dwelling. It was an edifice which not even the most imaginative and optimistic of house-agents would have found it easy to picture as a sumptuous country-seat; it was just four wooden walls and a roof, and they had been standing for a hundred years at least. The occupants of this house had seen the British march past from Boston on the 19th of April, 1775, and a few hours later they had seen them return along the same dusty highway at a greatly accelerated pace and under annoying circumstances. There was a legend that a man had once lived there who had announced that death was not an

ad at once proceeded to wreak upon it his unique architectural talent. At any rate, either he himself or somebody in his behalf had set up a small gable in the midst of the front, thrown out a double bow-window, and added a room on the west side. This interrupted the deadly, four-square uniformity, and suggested further improvements. Mr. Alcott certainly built the s

Showing Nathaniel Haw

little travelled that it might almost as well not have been there. One might, also, plant a high hedge in place of the fence and make shift to hide behind it. One could enlarge the house as need demanded; an affluent vegetable garden could be laid out in the meadow, and fruit and ornamental trees could be added to the slopes of the hill-side. The village was removed to a distance of a trifle over a mile, so that the roar of its traffic would not invade this retreat; and Mr. Emerson sat radiating peace and wisdom between the village and "The Wayside"; while Mr.

he argument of exclusion; no other place so desirable and at the same time so easy of attainment happened to present itself. It did not lie within s

was too modest a critic of his own abilities to think that his work would ever bring him money enough for foreign travel, and, therefore, in accepting Concord as his home, he believed that he was fixing the boundaries of his future earthly experience. It was not his ideal; no ima