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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hawthorne and His Circle, by Julian Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Hawthorne and His Circle
+
+Author: Julian Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6982]
+Posting Date: April 2, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE
+
+By Julian Hawthorne
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+
+[IMAGE: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My
+father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A
+revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows
+of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and
+mine
+
+I
+
+Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My
+mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of
+imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile
+indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on
+Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted
+mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr.
+Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the
+ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second
+floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my
+aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the
+age
+
+II
+
+Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have
+done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin
+and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our
+best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual
+hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the
+ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants
+and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My
+first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind
+of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and
+melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight of
+it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An eighteen-months'
+work--We leave five cats behind
+
+III
+
+Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's fingers--Our
+cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His vacuum--A
+reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The heralding
+of Kossuth--The decorated engine--The chief incident of the
+reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real
+life--Rough draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the
+Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden
+walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of
+"The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President--"The most homeless people
+in the world"
+
+IV
+
+A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His incorrigible
+modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel more like Emerson
+than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance
+like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are
+in the woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus
+individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of
+distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-culture--The great white
+fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's
+Attic salt--An unwritten romance--The consulship retires
+literature--Louisa's tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good
+men--Nearer than in the world--The return of the pilgrim
+
+V
+
+A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W.
+D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that
+beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The
+last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the
+spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The coquetry
+of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The thirsty island--Gloomy
+English comforts--Systematic geniality--A standing puzzle--The
+respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of
+sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm
+of insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle against
+dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An
+Englishman owns his country--A contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable
+gateway--Years of memorable trifles
+
+VI
+
+Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of
+equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged
+to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of
+destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the
+spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy
+peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and
+afternoon tea--An East--Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
+the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real
+breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold,
+gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red
+ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise
+
+VII
+
+Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--The average
+man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--Shielded by rose-leaves
+of culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice,
+complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or
+Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp,
+winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of
+individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff--dwelling--"The Campbells
+are Coming!"--Sortes Virgilianae--A division in the family--Precaution
+against famine--English praying and card-playing--Exercise for mind and
+body--Knight-errantry--Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and
+the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and
+Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly
+
+VIII
+
+Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--"Lovely,
+but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin
+redbreast--A sad and weary old man--"Most indelicate woman I've ever
+known"--Perfectly chaste--Something human stirred dimly--"She loves me;
+she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous
+and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit
+lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming woman
+of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The whooping-cough
+
+IX
+
+Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy--Deep and
+abiding love of England--"'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He took
+an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little quadruped--The
+human element in things sticks--The coasts of England--A string of
+sleepy donkeys--Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like
+an ogress---Hideous maternal parody---The adorable inverted
+bell-glass--Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of
+the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening security--An
+admonition not to climb too high--How vice may become virtue by
+repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black-Bottle Cardigan--Called to
+Lisbon
+
+
+X
+
+If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the delight of
+mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort--A modest, puny
+poise about her--Hidden thoughts derived from Mother Eve and Grecian
+Helen--The feminine council that ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds
+of fraternity, double-riveted and copper-fastened--Through the
+looking-glass--Men only of the manliest sort--The lady-paramount--Hands
+which were true works of art--Retained his dignity without putting it
+on--Sighed heavily over my efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin--"From dawn to
+eve I fell"--The multum-in-parvo machine--"Beauty and the Beast"--Frank
+Channing--"Blood-and water!"--A lapful of Irish stew
+
+XI
+
+Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that
+woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--"The worst book anybody
+ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of
+the feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A
+philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily
+and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the _os-rotundas_
+sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of it true;
+but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--Appropriated somebody
+else's adventure--Filtering remarks through the mind of a third
+person--A delightful Irishman--Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate
+opinion--The whole line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody
+would invent a new sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well
+dressed--Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the
+elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always
+rest on it
+
+XII
+
+Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl who giggled
+all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch terrier named Towsey--A
+sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--London as a physical entity--Ladies
+in low-necked dresses--An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the
+bowels of the earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and
+tragic situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great, wild,
+mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful--"Ma'am,
+you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave, gouge, and
+chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-grams--A graduate of
+Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable
+sisterhood"--"In truth I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide-awake
+of these things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at
+Folkestone for France
+
+XIII
+
+Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous woman
+with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused
+mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson
+comforters--Rivers of human gore--Curling mustachios and nothing
+to do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the
+MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her
+constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--Sitting
+up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion
+reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-anemones--If you were
+in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an
+Esquimau?
+
+
+XIV
+
+Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned
+out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's left
+of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long,
+long thoughts--Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A
+stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My
+father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as
+whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--"The brazen
+trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of feeling--Springs of
+creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the
+death-blow--The rest is silence
+
+XV
+
+The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered,
+wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est desipere
+in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine of some
+sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past,
+never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and
+strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing
+themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license
+under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was pelted--William
+Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly
+shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is
+like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--"Wer nie sein
+Brod mit thranen ass."
+
+XVI
+
+Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and
+morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable
+antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A pleasant
+sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated
+to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important
+communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit--Hauling in on
+my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made Titanic--"If I had a murder
+on my conscience"--None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts--A
+singularly beautiful young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No
+leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot
+six--Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her friends
+
+XVII
+
+Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--Wholly unlike
+anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--Back to the Gods and the
+Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I
+was in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most
+thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure
+in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and saturnine
+genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and fireworks--The
+Faun--Enjoying Rome--First impressions--Lalla's curses
+
+XVIII
+
+In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-shells--Broad,
+flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-pipes--Ghostly
+yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living
+one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to
+overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging this
+way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly
+voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A
+miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious touch--An
+indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was left--Providence takes
+very long views
+
+XIX
+
+Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The
+most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow
+brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam,
+Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New
+England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My
+father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre,
+Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)
+
+BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS
+
+HERMAN MELVILLE
+
+JAMES T. FIELDS
+
+THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)
+
+EDWIN P. WHIPPLE
+
+JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR
+
+RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES
+
+ROBERT BROWNING
+
+FRANCIS BANNOCH
+
+REV. WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855
+
+MARIA MITCHELL
+
+WILLIAM WETMORE STORY
+
+PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+THE MARBLE FAUN
+
+HIRAM POWERS
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+     Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good
+     fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to
+     me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make
+     difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal
+     narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine.
+
+The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our
+fellows. Those to whom good things come by way of inheritance, however,
+are often among the latest to comprehend their own advantage; they
+suppose it to be the common condition. And no doubt I had nearly arrived
+at man's estate before it occurred to me that the lines of few fishers
+of men were cast in places so pleasant as mine. I was the son of a
+man of high desert, who had such friends as he deserved; and these
+companions and admirers of his gave to me in the beginning of my days
+a kindly welcome and encouragement generated from their affection and
+reverence for him. Without doing a stroke of work for it, I found myself
+early in the enjoyment of a principality of good will and fellowship--a
+species of freemasonry, I might call it, though the secret was patent
+enough--for the rights in which, unaided, I might have contended my
+lifetime long in vain. Men and women whose names are consecrated apart
+in the dearest thoughts of thousands were familiars and playmates of my
+childhood; they supported my youth and bade my manhood godspeed. But
+to me, for a long while, the favor of these gracious giants of mind and
+character seemed agreeable indeed, but nothing out of the ordinary; my
+tacit presumption was that other children as well as I could if they
+would walk hand in hand with Emerson along the village street, seek in
+the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown
+clay of the "Greek Slave," or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman,
+which could sway assembled thousands, modulate itself to tell stories to
+the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her knees. Were human felicity so
+omnipresent as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be!
+
+In time, my misapprehension was corrected, rather, I think, through the
+application to it of cold logic than by any rude awakening. I learned
+of my riches not by losing them--the giants did not withdraw their
+graciousness--but by comparing the lot of others with my own. And yet,
+to tell the truth--perhaps I might better leave it untold; only in these
+chapters, especially, I will not begin with reserves--to say truth,
+then, my world, during my father's lifetime, and afterwards for I will
+not say how long, was divided into two natural parts, my father being
+one of them, and everybody else the other. Hence I was led to regard the
+parties of the latter part, rich or poor, giants or pygmies, as being,
+after all, of much the same stature and value. The brightness (in the
+boy's estimation) of the paternal figure rendered distinctions between
+other brightnesses unimportant. The upshot was, in short, that I
+inclined to the opinion that while compassion was unquestionably due to
+other children for not having a father like mine, yet in other respects
+my condition was not egregiously superior to theirs. They might not know
+the Brownings or the Julia Ward Howes; but then, very likely, the Smiths
+and the Joneses, whom they did know, were nearly as good.
+
+After fifty years, of course, such prepossessions yield to experience.
+My father was the best friend I ever had, and he will always stand in
+my estimation distinct from all other friends and persons; but I can now
+recognize that in addition to the immeasurable debt I owe him for being
+to me what he was in his own person, he bestowed upon me a privilege
+also immeasurable in the hospitality of these shining ones who were his
+intimates. Did the gift cost him nothing? Nothing, in one sense. But,
+again, what does it cost a man to walk upright and cleanly during
+the years of his pilgrimage: to deal justly with all, and charitably:
+diligently to cultivate and develop every natural endowment: always to
+seek truth, tell it, and vindicate it: to discharge to the utmost of his
+ability every duty that was intrusted to him: to rest content, in the
+line of his calling, with no work inferior to his best: to say no word
+and do no act which, were they known, might weaken the struggle against
+temptation of any fellow-creature? These qualities were the price at
+which Hawthorne bought his friends; and in receiving those friends from
+him, his children could not but feel that the bequest represented his
+unfaltering grasp upon whatever is pure, lofty, and generous in human
+life.
+
+Yes, whatever it may cost a man of genius to be all his life a good
+man, and to use and develop his genius to the noblest ends only, that my
+father's friends cost him, and in that amount am I his debtor; and the
+longer I myself live, and the more I see of other men, the higher and
+rarer do I esteem the obligation. Moreover, in speaking of his friends,
+I was thinking of those who personally knew him; but the world is full
+to-day of friends of his who never saw him, to whom his name is my best
+and surest introduction. Once, only three years since, in the remote
+heart of the Colorado mountains, I chanced to enter the hut of an aged
+miner; he sat in a corner of the little family room; on the wall near
+his hand was fixed a small bookshelf, filled with a dozen dog-eared
+volumes. The man had for years been paralyzed; he could do little more
+than to raise to that book-shelf his trembling hand, and take from it
+one or other of the volumes. When this helpless veteran learned my name,
+he uttered a strange cry, and his face worked with eager emotion; the
+wife of his broad-shouldered son brought me to him in his corner; his
+old eyes glowed as they perused me. I could not gather the meaning of
+his broken, trembling speech; the young woman interpreted for me. Was I
+related to the great Hawthorne? "Yes; I am his son." "His son!" Seldom
+have I met a gaze harder to sustain than that which the paralytic bent
+upon me. Would I might have worn, for the time being, the countenance of
+an archangel, so to fill out the lineaments, drawn during so many lonely
+years by his imagination and his reverence, of his ideal writer! "The
+son of Hawthorne!" He said no more, save by the strengthless pressure of
+his hands upon my own; the woman told me how all the books on the little
+shelf were my father's books, and for fifteen years the old man had read
+no others. Helpless tears of joy, of gratitude, of wonder ran down the
+furrows of his cheeks into his white beard. And how could I at whom he
+so gazed help being moved: on that desolate, unknown mountain-side, far
+from the world, the name which I had inherited was loved and honored!
+One does not get one's privileges for nothing. My father gave me power
+to make my way, and cast sunshine on the path; but he made the path
+arduous, too!
+
+Be that as it may, I now ask who will to look in my mirror, and see
+reflected there some of the figures and the scenes that have made my
+life worth living. As I peer into the dark abysm of things gone by, many
+places that seemed at first indistinct, grow clearer; but many more must
+remain impenetrable. Upon the whole, however, I am surprised to find how
+much is still discernible. Nearly a score of years ago I published,
+in the shape of a formal biography of Hawthorne and his wife, the
+consecutive facts of their lives, and numerous passages from their
+journals and correspondence. My aim is different now; I wish to indite
+an informal narrative from my own point of view, as child, youth, and
+man. There will be gaps in it--involuntary ones; and others occasioned
+by the obligation to retain those pictures only that seem likely to
+arouse a catholic interest. Yet there will be a certain intimacy in the
+story; and some matters which history would omit as trivial will be here
+adduced, for the sake of such color and character as they may contain.
+I shall not stalk on stilts, or mouth phrases, but converse comfortably
+and trustfully as between friends. If a writing of this kind be not
+flexible, unpretending, discursive, it has no right to be at all. Art is
+not in question, save the minor art that lives from line to line. Gossip
+about men, women, and things--it can amount to little more than that.
+
+In the earlier chapters the dramatis personae and the incidents must
+naturally group themselves about the figure of my father; for it was
+thus that I saw them. To his boy he was the fountain of love, honor, and
+energy; and to the boy he seemed the animating or organizing principle
+of other persons and events. With his death, in my eighteenth year, the
+world appeared disordered for a season; then, gradually, I learned to do
+my own orientation. I was destined to an experience superficially
+much more active and varied than his had been; and it was a world
+superficially very different from his in which I moved and dealt
+There must follow a corresponding modification in the character of the
+narrative; yet that, after all is superficial, too. For the memory of
+my father has always been with me, and has doubtless influenced me more
+than I am myself aware. And certainly but for him this book would never
+have been attempted.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+     Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's
+     decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The
+     Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My
+     grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to
+     calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall
+     Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The
+     haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The
+     upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The
+     flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the
+     quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa
+     and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt
+     Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book
+     of the age.
+
+My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned
+woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the aid
+of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on the
+walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach me all
+the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed according
+to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But
+as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters
+mathematical especially; so that I gave her inexhaustible patience many
+a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle
+of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta; though the battle itself,
+and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John,
+stood clearly pictured in my imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to
+my memory nothing arbitrary would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself
+constructing a narrative, whether it be true or fictitious, I am
+wedded to dates, and cannot be divorced from them. It must be set
+down precisely when the events took place, in what years the dramatis
+personae were born, and how old they were when each juncture of their
+fortunes came to pass. I can no more dispense with dates than I can talk
+without consonants; they carry form, order, and credibility. Or they
+are like the skeleton which gives recognizable shape to men and animals.
+Nothing mortal can get on without them..
+
+Whether this addiction be in the nature of a reaction from my childish
+perversity, giving my erudite and beloved aunt Lizzie (as I called her)
+her revenge so long after our lessons are over; or how else to explain
+it, I know not; but it leads me to affirm here that the nadir of my
+father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At that time
+his age was five-and-forty, and I was three.
+
+The causes of this financial depression were several. One morning he
+awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income
+of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served
+to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing
+stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed
+an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm should
+set in; but Nathaniel Hawthorne was devoid of that useful ability. Nor
+had he been able to spend less than he earned; so, suddenly, there he
+was on his beam-ends. Leisure to write, certainly, was now abundant
+enough; but he never was a rapid composer, and even had he been so, the
+market for the kind of things he wrote was, in the middle of the past
+century, in New England, neither large nor eager. The emoluments were
+meagre to match; twenty dollars for four pages of the Democratic Review
+was about the figure; and to produce a short tale or sketch of that
+length would take him a month at least. How were a husband and wife and
+their two children to live for a month on the mere expectation of
+twenty dollars from the Democratic Review--which was, into the bargain,
+terribly slow pay? Such was the problem which confronted the dark-haired
+and grave-visaged gentleman as he closed his desk in the Salem
+custom-house for the last time, and put on his hat to walk home.
+
+Thanks, however, to some divine foresight on my mother's part, aided by
+a wonderful talent for practical economy, she had secretly contrived
+to save, out of her weekly stipends, small sums which in the aggregate
+bulked large enough to make an important difference in the situation. So
+when her husband disclosed his bad news, she opened her private drawer
+and disclosed her banknotes, with such a smile in her eyes as I can
+easily picture to myself. Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that
+the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a
+letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and
+affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in
+his mind; now was the time of times to shape it forth. Yonder upon the
+table by the window stood the old mahogany writing-desk so long unused;
+here were his flowered dressing-gown and slippers down-at-heel. He ought
+to be able to finish the story before the miraculous savings gave out;
+and then all he would have to do would be to write others. And, after
+all, to be rid of the surveyorship was a relief.
+
+But matters were not to be run off quite so easily as this. The Scarlet
+Letter, upon coming to close quarters with it, turned out to be not a
+story of such moderate caliber as Hawthorne had hitherto been used to
+write, but an affair likely to extend over two or three hundred pages,
+which, instead of a month or so, might not be completed in a year; yet
+it was too late to substitute something more manageable for it--in the
+first place, because nothing else happened to be at his disposal, and
+secondly, because The Scarlet Letter took such intimate hold upon
+the vitals of his heart and mind that he was by no means able to free
+himself from it until all had been fulfilled. Only men of creative
+genius know in what glorious and harrowing thraldom their creations hold
+them. Having once been fairly begun, The Scarlet Letter must inevitably
+finish itself for good or ill, come what might to the writer of it.
+
+[IMAGE: BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]
+
+This is a story of people and events, not a study in literary criticism;
+but the writing of The Scarlet Letter was an event of no trifling
+importance in the story of its author's life. To read the book is an
+experience which its readers cannot forget; what its writing must have
+been to a man organized as my father was is hardly to be conveyed in
+words. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--he must live through each
+one of them, feel their passion, remorse, hatred, terror, love; and he
+must enter into the soul of the mysterious nature of Pearl. Such things
+cannot with impunity be done by any one; the mere physical strain, all
+conditions being favorable, would be almost past bearing. But my father,
+though uniformly his bodily health was all his life sound, was never
+what I would call a robust man; he was exquisitely balanced. At the time
+he began his book he was jaded from years of office drudgery, and he was
+in some anxiety as to the issue of his predicament. The house in
+which he dwelt, small and ill-placed in a narrow side-street, with no
+possibility of shutting out the noise of traffic and of domestic alarms,
+could not but make the work tell more heavily upon him. But in addition
+to this there were fortuitous occasions of emotional stress, all of
+which I shall not mention; but among them were the distasteful turmoil
+aroused by his political mishap; and, far more poignant, the critical
+illness of his mother. Circumstances led to her being housed under his
+roof; there she lingered long at death's door, and there at last she
+died. He profoundly loved her; but deep-rooted, too, in both of them was
+that strange, New England shyness, masking in visible ice the underlying
+emotion. Not since his boyhood had their mutual affection found free,
+natural expression; and now, in this final hour, that bondage of habit
+caused the words of tenderness to stumble on their lips. The awful
+majesty of approaching death, prompting them to "catch up the whole
+of love and utter it" ere it be too late, wrought this involuntary
+self-repression into silent agony.
+
+She died; his own health was shaken to its foundations; his children
+fell ill, his wife underwent acute suffering; and through all this, and
+more, The Scarlet Letter must be written. No wonder that, when he came
+to read the story in manuscript to his wife, his voice faltered and
+broke; and she slipped to her knees and hid her face on her arms in the
+chair. "I had been suffering," he commentated, long afterwards, "from
+a great diversity and severity of emotion." Great works of art--things
+with the veritable spirit of enduring life in them--are destined to be
+born in sore travail and pain. Those who give them birth yield up their
+own life to them.
+
+It was at this period--say, about 1850--that my own personal
+recollections, in a shadowy and incoherent way, begin. The shadows are
+exclusively of time's making; they were not of the heart. All through
+the trials of my parents I retained a jocund equanimity (save for some
+trifling childish ailments) and esteemed this world a friendly and
+agreeable place. The Scarlet Letter dashed my spirits not a whit; I
+knew not of its existence, by personal evidence, till full a dozen years
+later; and even the death of my grandmother left me light of heart, for
+the passing of the spirit from the body can but awaken the transient
+curiosity of a child of four. For the rest, my physical environment, in
+itself amusing and interesting enough to me, had its chief importance
+from the material it afforded on which to construct the imaginary
+scenes and characters of my play. My sister Una and myself were forever
+enacting something or somebody not ourselves: childish egoism oddly
+decking itself in the non-ego. We believed in fairies, in magic, in
+angels, in transformations; Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm, The Black
+Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober history-books, and
+Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography. But I did occasionally take note
+of concrete appearances, too; and some of them I remember.
+
+The house--the third which we had inhabited since my father became
+surveyor--was on Mall Street, and was three stories in height, with a
+yard behind and at one end; this yard, which was of importance to my
+sister and myself, had access to the street by a swinging gate. There
+were three or four trees in it, and space for play. The house was but
+one room deep, and lying as it did about north and south, the rooms were
+open to both the morning and the afternoon sunshine. They opened one
+into the other in a series; and when my father was safe up-stairs in
+his study, my mother would open all the doors of the suite on the lower
+floor, and allow the children to career triumphantly to and fro. No
+noise that we could make ever troubled her nerves, unless it was the
+noise of conflict; the shriek of joy, however shrill, passed by her
+harmless; but the lowest mutter of wrath or discontent distressed her;
+for of such are the mothers of the kingdom of heaven! And so zealous was
+our regard for her just and gentle law that I really think we gave way
+as little as most children to the latter.
+
+Of course, whenever the weather permitted, we were out in the yard,
+or even promenaded for short distances up and down the street. And
+once--"How are you?" inquired a friend of the family, as he drove by
+in his wagon. "Oh, we've got the scarlet fever!" we proudly replied,
+stepping out gallantly along the sidewalk. For we were treated by a
+homoeopathic doctor of the old school, who was a high-dilutionist, and
+mortal ills could never get a firm grip on us. In winter we rejoiced in
+the snow; and my father's story of the Snow Image got most of its local
+color from our gambols in this fascinating substance, which he could
+observe from the window of his study.
+
+The study was on the third floor of the house, secluded from the turmoil
+of earth, so far as anything could be in a city street. No one
+was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are
+ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates
+fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a
+being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe
+to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write,
+luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both were
+equipped for business rather than for beauty; furniture and garments
+were simple in those Salem days. A homely old paper covered the walls, a
+brownish old carpet the floor. There was an old rocking-chair, its black
+paint much worn and defaced; another chair was drawn up to the table,
+which stood to the left of the eastern window; and on the table was a
+mahogany desk, concerning which I must enter into some particulars.
+It was then, and for years afterwards, an object of my most earnest
+scrutiny. Such desks are not made nowadays.
+
+When closed, it was an oblong mahogany box, two feet long by half that
+width, and perhaps nine inches high. It had brass corners, and a brass
+plate on the top, inscribed with the name, "N. Hawthorne." At one end
+was a drawer, with a brass handle playing on a hinge and fitting into
+a groove or socket when down; there was a corresponding handle at the
+other end, but that was for symmetry only; the one drawer went clear
+through the desk. I often mused over the ethics of this deception.
+
+Being opened, the desk presented a sloping surface two feet square,
+covered with black velvet, which had been cut here and there and pasted
+down again, and was stiffened with many ink-spatterings. This writing
+surface consisted of two lids, hinged at their junction in the centre;
+lifting them, you discovered two receptacles to hold writing-paper and
+other desk furniture. They were of about equal capacity; for although
+the upper half of the desk was the more capacious, you must not forget
+that two inches of it, at the bottom, was taken up by the long drawer
+already mentioned.
+
+But there was, also, a more interesting curtailment of this interior
+space. Along the very top of the desk, as it lay open, was a narrow
+channel, perhaps a couple of inches wide and deep, divided into three
+sections; two square ones, at the opposite ends, held the ink-bottle and
+the sand-bottle; the long central one was for quill pens. These, in
+the aggregate, appeared to the superficial eye to account for all that
+remained of the cubic contents of the structure; but the supreme mystery
+and charm of the affair was that they did not!
+
+No; there was an esoteric secret still in reserve; and for years it
+remained a secret to me. The bottle-sockets and pen-tray did not reach
+down to the level of the long drawer by nearly an inch. Measurement
+would prove that; but you would have said that the interval must be
+solid wood; for nothing but a smooth panel met the eye when you pulled
+aside the sheets of writing-paper in their receptacle to investigate.
+But the lesson of this world, and of the desk as a part of it, is that
+appearances are not to be trusted. The guile of those old desk-makers
+passes belief.
+
+I will expose it. In the pen-tray lay a sort of brass nail, as long as
+your little finger, and blunt at the end. Now take the sand-bottle from
+its hole. In one corner of the bottom thereof you will see a minute
+aperture, just big enough to admit the seemingly useless brass nail.
+Stick it in and press hard. With an abrupt noise that makes you jump, if
+you are four or five years old, that smooth, unsuspected strip of
+panel starts violently forward (propelled by a released spring) and
+reveals--what? Nothing less than the fronts of two minute drawers. They
+fit in underneath the pen-tray, and might remain undiscovered for a
+hundred years unless you had the superhuman wit to divine the purpose of
+the brass nail. The drawers contain diamonds, probably, or some closely
+folded document making you the heir to a vast estate. As a matter of
+fact, I don't know what they contained; the surprise of the drawers
+themselves was enough for me. I need not add that I did not guess the
+riddle myself; but nothing that I can call to mind impressed me more
+than when, one day, my father solved it for me with his little brass
+wand. At intervals, afterwards, I was allowed to work the miracle
+myself, always with the same thrill of mysterious delight. The desk was
+human to me; it was alive.
+
+There were little square covers for the ink and sand-bottles; and on
+the under sides of these were painted a pair of faces; very ruddy in the
+cheeks they were, with staring eyes and smiling mouths; and one of them
+wore a pair of black side-whiskers. They were done by my father, with
+oil--colors filched from my mother's paint-box. They seemed to me
+portraits of the people who lived in the desk; evidently they enjoyed
+their existence hugely. And when I considered that the desk was also
+somehow instrumental in the production of stories--such as the Snow
+Image--of a delectable and magical character, the importance to my mind
+of the whole contrivance may be conceived. When I grew beyond child's
+estate, I learned that it had also assisted at the composition of The
+Scarlet Letter. If ever there were a haunted writing-desk, this should
+have been it; but the ghosts have long since carried it away, whither I
+know not.
+
+On the table were two ornaments; one, the finely moulded figure of
+an Egyptian in bronze, the wide Egyptian head-dress falling on the
+shoulders, the arms lying rigidly at the sides, with fists clinched.
+Generations of handling had made it almost black, but the amiable
+expression of the little countenance--the figure was about seven inches
+tall--greatly endeared it to me. Its feet were pressed close together
+on a small round stand; but one day somebody set it down on a hot stove,
+where it remained without flinching till the feet were melted off. After
+some years my mother had an ebony stump affixed to it, preserving the
+proportions of the figure and setting it once more erect. He was of
+greater endurance and of finer physical if not of moral development than
+the Tin Soldier of Hans Christian Andersen. The other ornament, less
+than half the Egyptian's size, and also made of bronze, was a warrior in
+mediaeval armor, whose head lifted off, showing a sharp-pointed rod
+the sheath of which was the body. Its use was to pick the wicks of the
+oil-lamps of that epoch, and its name was Mr. Pickwick. When afterwards
+I became acquainted with the world's Mr. Pickwick, I supposed his
+creator had adopted the name from our bronze warrior; but the world's
+Pickwick was made of stuff more enduring than bronze; he remains, but
+our little warrior has vanished.
+
+I come now to the human occupant of this chamber of marvels. I see a
+tall, strong man, whose wide-domed head was covered with wavy black
+hair, bushing out at the sides. It thinned somewhat over the lofty crown
+and brow; the forehead was hollowed at the temple and rounded out above,
+after the Moorish style of architecture. Under heavy, dark eyebrows were
+eyes deep-set and full of light, marvellous in range of expression,
+with black eyelashes. All seemed well with me when I met their look. The
+straight, rather salient nose had a perceptible cleft at the tip, which,
+I was told, was a sign of good lineage; muddy-mettled rascals lacked it;
+so that I was much distressed by the smooth, plebeian bluntness, at that
+time, of my own little snub. The mouth, then unshaded by a mustache,
+had a slight upward turn at the corners, indicative of vitality and
+good-humor; the chin rounded out sharply convex from the lip. The round,
+strong column of the neck well supported the head; my mother compared it
+with that of the Apollo Belvedere, a bust of which stood in the corner
+of our sitting-room. The head was deep--a great distance between the
+base of the ear and the wing of the nostril--and was well filled out
+behind. Above the blue of the shaven beard the complexion showed clear
+white and red, announcing a strong heart and good digestion. My father
+shaved himself daily; I was not permitted to see the operation, but
+I knew he lathered, and wondered why. He was naturally athletic;
+broad-shouldered and deep in the chest, lean about the loins, weighing
+never over one hundred and eighty pounds; his height was five feet ten
+and three-quarter inches; his legs and feet were slender and graceful,
+his gait long and springy, and he could stand and leap as high as his
+shoulder. In the house he wore slippers, which seemed always old and
+down-at-heel.
+
+In the house, also, he wore a writing-gown, made for him some years
+before by my mother; it reached nearly to his heels, and had been a
+gorgeous affair, though now much defaced. The groundwork was purple,
+covered all over with conventional palm-leaf in old-gold color; the
+lining was red. This lining, under the left-hand skirt of the gown, was
+blackened with ink over a space as large as your hand; for the author
+was in the habit of wiping his pen thereon; but my mother finally
+parried this attack by sewing in the centre of the place a penwiper in
+the shape of a butterfly.
+
+While story-writing, the door of the study was locked against all the
+world; but after noon he became approachable, except during The Scarlet
+Letter period, when he wrote till evening. He did not mind my seeing him
+write letters; he would sit with his right shoulder and head inclined
+towards the desk; the quill squeaked softly over the smooth paper, with
+frequent quick dips into the ink-bottle; a few words would be written
+swiftly; then a pause, with suspended pen, while the next sentence was
+forming in the writer's mind. When he miswrote, instead of crossing out
+the word, he would smear it out with his finger, and rewrite over
+the smear; so that his page had a mottled appearance. The writing was
+accompanied by intermittent nods of the head, as one would say, "Sic
+cogito!" So far as he is concerned, the shadows close in on me here.
+
+But I have said that the house was of three stories, and I have
+accounted for two of them only. The second was occupied by my
+grandmother Hawthorne and her two daughters, Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe
+(the latter appellation being an infantile version of her name invented
+by my father, who was her junior, and used by us to distinguish between
+her and that other Elizabeth who was Aunt Lizzie Peabody). Of my
+grandmother Hawthorne I have no personal recollection at all; she was
+a Manning, a beautiful old lady, whom her son resembled. She had been
+a recluse from society for forty years; it was held to be good form, in
+that age and place, to observe such Hindoo rites after the death of a
+husband; hers had died in his thirty-fourth year in Surinam. But she
+had also insensibly fallen into the habit of isolating herself in some
+degree from her own family; they were all of them addicted to solitude
+of the body, though kindly enough disposed in the abstract. When we
+went to live in the Mall Street house, the old lady and her daughters
+uprooted themselves from their home of many years in Herbert Street and
+dwelt with us; and that quaint crystallization of their habits was in a
+measure broken up. But the dowager Mrs. Hawthorne, it soon appeared, had
+come there to die; she was more than seventy years old. My aunt Louisa I
+seem dimly to recall as a tall, fragile, pale, amiable figure, not very
+effective. My aunt Ebe I afterwards came to know well, and shall defer
+mention of her. So I was encompassed by kindly petticoats, and was very
+happy, but might have been better for a stout playmate of my own sex.
+I had a hobby-horse, which I rode constantly to fairy-land in quest of
+treasure to bestow upon my friends. I swung with Una on the gate, and
+looked out upon the wonder of the passing world. The tragedy of my
+grandmother's death, which, as I have said, interrupted the birth of
+The Scarlet Letter, passed me by unknowing, or rather without leaving a
+trace upon my memory. On the other hand, I can reconstitute vividly two
+absurd incidents, destitute of historical value. After my grandmother
+Hawthorne's death I fell ill; but the night before the disease declared
+itself, I was standing in a chair at the nursery window, looking out at
+the street-lamp on the corner, and my aunt Lizzie Peabody, who had just
+come on from Boston, was standing behind me, lest I should fall off.
+Now, I was normally the most sweet-tempered little urchin imaginable;
+yet suddenly, without the faintest warning or provocation, I turned
+round and dealt my loving aunt a fierce kick in the stomach. It deprived
+her of breath for a space; but her saintly nature is illustrated by the
+fact that the very first use she made of her recovered faculties was
+to gasp out, "Sophie, the child must be ill!" Fortunately for my
+reputation, the illness was not long in arriving. The other episode must
+have happened at about the same period, and is likewise concerned with
+Aunt Lizzie. We had a cat, and the cat had had kittens a day or two
+before. Aunt Lizzie came into the nursery, where Una and I were building
+houses of blocks, and sat down in the big easy-chair. The cat was in
+the room, and she immediately came up to my aunt and began to mew and to
+pluck at her dress with her claws. Such attentions were rare on pussy's
+part, and my aunt noticed them with pleasure, and caressed the animal,
+which still continued to devote its entire attention to her. But there
+was something odd in the sound of her mewing and in the intent regard of
+her yellow eyes. "Can anything be the matter with pussy?" speculated
+my aunt. At that moment my father entered the room, and my aunt rose to
+greet him. Then the massacre was revealed, for she had been sitting upon
+the kittens. Their poor mother pounced upon them with a yowl, but it
+was too late. My dear aunt was rather a heavy woman, and she had been
+sitting there fifteen minutes. We all stood appalled in the presence of
+the great mystery.
+
+
+One day a big man, with a brown beard and shining brown eyes, who
+bubbled over with enthusiasm and fun, made his appearance and talked
+volubly about something, and went away again, and my father and mother
+smiled at each other. The Scarlet Letter had been written, and James
+T. Fields had read it, and declared it the greatest book of the age. So
+that was the last of Salem.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+     Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea
+     might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--
+     The Unpardonable Sin and the Deathless Man--The little red
+     house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery
+     of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen--Fishing for
+     poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the
+     ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--
+     Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes,
+     ambrosial breath--My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's
+     stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning
+     ladies and melancholy sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I
+     abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The
+     truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five
+     cats behind.
+
+Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy and
+lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He
+had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends
+had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a
+believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter
+shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant
+"I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my
+father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to live in, it
+was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He stipulated that the
+place should be somewhere along the New England sea-coast.
+
+Had this wish of his been fulfilled it might have made great
+differences. Hawthorne had always dwelt within sight and sound of the
+Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the
+Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his
+complete well-being. At this juncture physical health had for the first
+time become an object to him; he was run down by a year of suffering and
+hard work, and needed nature's kindest offices. A suitable house of
+his own by the sea-side would probably have brought him up to his best
+physical condition to begin with, and kept him so; and it would so have
+endeared itself to him that when, two or three years later, Pierce had
+offered him a foreign appointment he might have been moved to decline
+it, and have gone on writing American romances to the end--to the
+advantage of American letters. Concord had its own attractions; but it
+never held him as the sea would have done, nor nourished his health, nor
+stimulated his genius. A house of his own beside the Atlantic might well
+have added twenty years to his life.
+
+But it was not upon the knees of the gods.
+
+Bridge's zealous efforts failed to find a place available, and after an
+uneasy interval, during which his friend wandered uncomfortably about
+Boston and the neighborhood (incidentally noting down some side-scenes
+afterwards to be incorporated in The Blithedale Romance), a cottage
+in the Berkshire Hills was spoken of, and upon examination seemed
+practicable. Lenox, at that time, was as little known as Mount Desert;
+it was not until long afterwards that fashion found them out and made
+them uninhabitable to any but fashionable folks. Moreover, my father had
+seen something of Lenox a dozen years before.
+
+A dozen years before he was not yet betrothed to Sophia Peabody; he
+already loved her and she him; but her health seemed an insuperable
+barrier between them. This and certain other matters were weighing
+heavily upon his soul, and his future seemed dark and uncertain. He
+thought of taking a voyage round the world; he thought of getting into
+politics; he even thought--as young men full of life sometimes will--of
+death. What he finally did, with native good sense, was to make a
+two-months' trip in the mountainous region to the westward, to change
+the scene and his state of mind, and to get what artists call a fresh
+eye. He chose North Adams as his headquarters, and forayed thence in
+various directions over a radius of twenty miles. He was then beginning
+to revolve one of the two great romance themes that preoccupied his
+whole after-life, neither of which was he destined to write. This was
+the idea of the Unpardonable Sin; the other was the conception of the
+Deathless Man. The only essay we have towards the embodiment of the
+first vision is the short fragment published in Mosses from an Old
+Manse, called "Ethan Brand." The other was attempted in various forms,
+of which Septimius, Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and The Dolliver Romance,
+all posthumously published, are the most important.
+
+But Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and Lenox had been included among his
+haunts during the break-away above mentioned, and he remembered that the
+scenery was beautiful, the situation remote, and the air noble. Next to
+the sea it seemed an ideal place to recuperate and write in. Thither,
+at all events, he resolved to go, and early in the summer of 1850 we
+arrived at the little red house above the shores of Stockbridge Bowl,
+with bag and baggage. Little though the house was, the bag and baggage
+were none too much to find easy accommodation in it.
+
+A fair-sized city drawing-room of these sumptuous contemporary days
+could stow away in a corner the entire structure which then became our
+habitation, and retain space enough outside it for the exploitation of
+social functions. Nevertheless, by the simple expedient of making the
+interior divisions small enough, this liliputian edifice managed to
+contain eight rooms on its two floors (including the kitchen). One of
+the rooms was, in fact, the entrance-hall; you stepped into it across
+the threshold of the outer door, and the staircase ascended from it. It
+was used as an extension of the drawing-room, which opened out of it.
+The drawing-room adjoined the dining-room, with windows facing the
+west, with a view of the mountains across the lake, and the dining-room
+communicated with the kitchen. One of the western-looking up-stairs
+rooms served as my father's study; my sister Una had her chamber, I mine
+(which was employed as the guest-chamber upon occasion), and our parents
+the other. What more could be asked? for when Rose was born, her crib
+stood beside her mother's bedstead.
+
+When we were not asleep--that is, during twelve hours out of the
+twenty-four--Una's existence and mine were passed mainly in the outer
+sitting-room and in the dining-room. There was plenty to entertain us.
+I had my rocking-horse, which I bestrode with perfect fearlessness; my
+porcelain lion, which still survives unscathed after the cataclysms
+of half a century; my toy sloop, made for me by Uncle Nat; and a
+jack-knife, all but the edge and point, which had been removed out of
+deference to my youth. Una had a doll, a miniature mahogany centre-table
+and bureau, and other things in which I felt no interest. In common,
+we possessed the box of wooden bricks, and the big portfolio containing
+tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the
+Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the
+story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large
+part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my
+father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with
+the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the
+exception of our father and mother, that we had or desired.
+
+But our father and mother were, of course, the main thing, after all.
+She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing,
+early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our
+questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical;
+and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and
+"The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible
+questions--I suppose with a view to asking me some." They superintended
+our projections of creation on the black-board--a great, old-fashioned
+black-board, the like of which I have not since beheld; they read to us
+and told us stories. Many of these stories were of incidents of their
+own child-life; and there was also the narrative of our mother's voyage
+to Cuba and back, and residence there when she was about eighteen or
+twenty--a fascinating chronicle. Meal-times were delectable festivals,
+not only because the bread-and-milk, the boiled rice and tapioca
+pudding, and eggs and fruit tasted so good, but by reason of the broad
+outlook out of window over the field, the wood, the lake, and the
+mountains; supper-time, with the declining sun pouring light into
+the little room and making the landscape glorious, was especially
+exhilarating. Ambrosial was the bread baked by Mrs. Peters, the taciturn
+and serious religious person of color who attended to our cooking; the
+prize morsels were the ends, golden brown in hue, crunching so crisply
+between our teeth. I used to wonder how a being with hands so dark as
+those of Mrs. Peters managed to turn out dough so immaculate. She would
+plunge them right into the ivory-hued substance, yet it became only
+whiter than before. But the life of life was, of course, out-doors.
+There was a barn containing a hay-mow and a large hen-coop, soon
+populous with hens and chickens, with an heroic snow-white rooster to
+keep them in order. Hens are the most audacious and presuming of pets,
+and they have strong individuality.
+
+One of our brood was more intellectual and enterprising than the others;
+she found a way of getting out of the coop, no matter how tightly it
+was shut up; and she would jump in our laps as we sat eating a piece
+of bread in the barn doorway and snatch it away from us; but I think we
+sometimes sat there with the bread on purpose to have her do it. Once or
+twice--until I was detected and stopped--I enjoyed the poignant delight
+of fishing for hens out of the barn loft; my tackle consisted of a bent
+pin at the end of a string tied to a stick. It was baited with a grain
+of corn, or a bit of rag would do as well, for hens have no hereditary
+suspicion of anglers, and are much more readily entrapped than fishes.
+Pulling them up, squawking and fluttering, was thrilling, but, of
+course, it was wrong, like other thrilling things, and had to be
+foregone. A less unregenerate experiment was fastening two grains of
+corn to the ends of a long bit of thread; two hens would seize each
+a grain and begin swallowing thread until they interfered, with each
+other, when a disgorgement would take place. It was an economical
+sport--the one bit of thread and the two corn-grains would last all
+day--and, in view of the joy afforded to the spectators, did not seem
+too unkind. My father had mechanical talent, and with an old door-knob
+and some strips of shingle he would make a figure of a man with a saw;
+you fixed it to the edge of a table, set the door-knob swinging, and the
+creature would saw with the most absurd diligence. From the same shingle
+he would construct a pugilist, who, being set up where the wind played
+upon him, would swing his arms interminably. It was yacht-building,
+however, that afforded us most entertainment. A shingle was whittled to
+a point at one end; a stick with a square paper slipped on it was stuck
+up in the middle, and a rudder made fast to the stern; such a boat would
+sail boldly out upon the vastness of the lake, till the eye could no
+longer follow the diminishing white speck. These days beside the lake
+were full of good things. The water was clear, with a white sand bottom;
+we were given swimming-lessons in the hot summer weather; having waded
+in up to our middles, we faced towards the shore, where sat our father
+with a long fishing-pole, the end of which he kept within our reach,
+and bade us lean forward on the water and kick up our feet. But, for my
+part, I kept one foot on the bottom. It was not till years afterwards
+that I mustered courage to take it off, and that was in a lake three
+thousand miles from Stockbridge Bowl, with the towers of the castle of
+Chillon reflected in its calm surface.
+
+We also made limited use of a leaky old punt, which one day capsized and
+emptied its whole crew into the water, luckily close to shore. We fished
+for gold carp for hours together, and during our two summers we caught a
+couple of them; there were thousands of them swimming about; but a bent
+pin with the bait washed off is not a good lure. In winter, the lake had
+five feet of ice on it, which lasted far into the spring, and once or
+twice we got aboard this great raft and tracked across it, with as much
+awe and enthusiasm as ever Kane had felt in his arctic explorations. In
+all, we became intimate friends with the lake idea, new to us then, but
+never to grow stale; and our good fortune favored us during after-life
+with many lovely lakes and ponds, including such gems as Rydal, Walden,
+and Geneva.
+
+Water, in another enchanting guise, dashed and gurgled for us in the
+brook that penetrated like a happy dream the slumber of the forest that
+bordered on the lake. The wooded declivity through which it went was
+just enough to keep it ever vocal and animated. Gazing down upon it, it
+was clear brown, with glancing gleams of interior green, and sparkles
+diamond white; tiny fishes switched themselves against the current with
+quivering tails; the shaggy margins were flecked with sunshine, and
+beautiful with columbines, violets, arbutus, and houstonias. Fragments
+of rock and large pebbles interrupted its flow and deepened its mellow
+song; above it brooded the twilight of the tall pines and walnuts,
+responding to its merriment with solemn murmurings. What playfellow is
+more inexhaustible than such a brook, so full of life, of motion, of
+sound and color, of variety and constancy. A child welcomes it as an
+answer to its own soul, with its mystery and transparency, its bounded
+lawlessness, its love of earth and its echoes of the sky. In winter our
+brook had a new charm: it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with
+snow; its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns,
+as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairy-land, and carried treasures
+of the elves and gnomes. Zero, with his utmost rigors, could not still
+its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. Indeed,
+the frosty god conspired with it for our delight; building crystal
+bridges, with tracery of lace delicater than Valenciennes, and spangled
+string-pieces, and fretted vaultings, whimsical sierras, stalactite and
+stalagmite. An icicle is one of those careless toys of nature which
+the decorative art of man imitates in vain. They are among the myriad
+decorations of children's palaces.
+
+To Tanglewood, as we called it, at all seasons of the year, came
+Hawthorne and his wife and children. In spring there was the issuing
+forth of the new life from beneath the winter coverlid; the first
+discovery of sociable houstonias, and the exquisite tints and fragrance
+of the mayflower on its dark, bearded stalk. When June became perfect,
+and afterwards till nuts were ripe, my father loved to lie at full
+length upon the mossy and leaf-strewn floor, looking up at the green
+roof, the lofty whispering-gallery of vaulted boughs, with its azure
+lattices and descending sunlight-shafts; wrapped in imaginings some of
+which were afterwards to delight the world; but many more of them, no
+doubt, were fated to join the glorious company of untold tales. Beside
+him sat our mother, on a throne which we had fashioned for her from the
+upright stump of a tree; round about them played the little girl and
+boy. They brought all the treasures which this wonderfully affluent
+world afforded: flowers in all seasons; strawberries, small but of
+potent flavor, which the little boy would gather with earnest diligence,
+and fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his
+small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and
+feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and
+in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose
+prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently
+plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also
+fond of playing the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would say,
+and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would
+hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the
+topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was
+a big cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled
+with these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and
+cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone.
+
+The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was
+thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an
+upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them
+for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by scores;
+but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped against
+my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of them stung
+Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence. Her lip at
+once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the conclusion, by some
+tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence was at least half to
+blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully avoided it. I likewise
+avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of giving a hitch to their
+after-parts as they walk along always struck me as being obviously
+diabolical.
+
+When the snows came, two and three feet deep, we got out the family
+sled from its summer lodging in the barn and went forth, muffled in
+interminable knit tippets and other woollen armor, to coast down the
+long slope. Our father sat in front with the reins in his hands and his
+feet thrust out to steer, and away we went clinging fast behind him.
+Sometimes we swept triumphantly to the bottom; at other times we
+would collide with some hidden obstacle, and describe each a separate
+trajectory into the snow-banks. We made enormous snow-balls by beginning
+with a small one and rolling it over and over in the soft snow till
+it waxed too vast for our strength; two or three of these piled one on
+another would be sculptured by the author of The Scarlet Letter into a
+snow-man, who would stand stanch for weeks. Snow-storms in Lenox began
+early and lasted till far into April. The little red house had all it
+could do, sometimes, to lift its upper windows above them. In the front
+yard there was a symmetrical balsam fir-tree, tapering like a Chinese
+pagoda. One winter morning we found upon one of its lower boughs a
+little brown sparrow frozen stiff. We put it in a card-board coffin, and
+dug out a grave for it beneath the fir, with a shingle head-stone. The
+funeral ceremonies had for the two mourners a solemnity such as is not
+always felt at such functions in later life.
+
+Of the regular daily routine was the journey to Luther Butler's, quarter
+of a mile up the road, for milk and butter. I generally accompanied
+my father, and saw placid Luther's cows, placid as himself, with their
+broad, wet noses, amiable dark eyes, questionable horns, and ambrosial
+breath. Mr. Tappan, our landlord, had horses, and once he mounted me on
+the bare back of one of the largest of these quadrupeds, which, to the
+stupefaction of everybody, instantly set off at full gallop. Down
+the road we thundered, the rider, with his legs sticking out at right
+angles, screaming with joy, for this transcended any rocking-horse
+experiences. A hundred yards away there was a bend in the road. Just at
+that point there was a manure-pile, which had long bided its time. I had
+hold of a strand of the horse's mane; but when he swerved at the bend I
+had to let go, and after a short flight in air, the manure-pile received
+me in its soft embrace. Looking up the road, I saw Mr. Tappan, with
+dilated eyes and a countenance expressing keen emotion, coming towards
+me at a wonderful pace, and my father and mother following him at a
+short distance. I did not myself mind the smell of manure, and the
+others were glad to put up with it in consideration of my having escaped
+broken bones.
+
+We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from
+Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with,
+him, and Mr. G. P. R. James, a novelist of the Walter Scott school, had
+another, and I was permitted to bestride both of them; they were safe
+enough, but they would turn back their heads and lay their cold noses on
+my leg; I preferred the now-forbidden horse. But Melville himself made
+up for everything by the tremendous stories he used to tell about the
+South Sea Islands and the whale fishery. Normally he was not a man of
+noticeable appearance; but when the narrative inspiration was on him, he
+looked like all the things he was describing--savages, sea-captains, the
+lovely Fayaway in her canoe, or the terrible Moby Dick himself. There
+was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever
+came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures,
+of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been
+unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to
+loosen its grip by studying German metaphysics, but in vain. He was
+restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect
+that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were
+incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the
+midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world;
+and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre,
+nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He
+conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep
+affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he
+was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which had
+never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in
+his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many
+secrets untold in his own career. But there were few honester or more
+lovable men than Herman Melville.
+
+[IMAGE: HERMAN MELVILLE]
+
+James (no relation of our distinguished contemporary) was a commonplace,
+meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation;
+but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact
+of his being associated with a furious thunder-storm. My father and I
+were alone in the house at the time; my mother had gone to West Newton
+on a three weeks' visit. In the midst of the thunder and lightning, the
+downpour and the hurricane, the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds,
+our door burst open, and behold! of all persons in the world to be
+heralded by such circumstances, G. P. R. James! Not he only, but close
+upon his heels his entire family, numerous, orthodox, admirable, and
+infinitely undesirable to two secluded gentlemen without a wife
+and mother to help them out. But it was a choice between murder and
+hospitality, and come in they must. Never before or after did our
+liliputian drawing-room harbor so large an assemblage. They dripped on
+the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation
+between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly
+pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were
+on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie
+or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the G. P. R.
+Jameses passed off together.
+
+There were many other visitors, not only old friends, but persons
+attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book "along whose
+burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web
+our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who had
+become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters
+in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men;
+melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only,
+but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them
+all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would not have a
+drunken man politer than I," he once answered me, when I asked him why
+he had returned the salutation of a toper. What counsel he gave to
+those who came to him as to a father confessor of course I know not; but
+later, when I used to sit in his office in the Liverpool consulate,
+I sometimes heard him speak plain truths to the waifs and strays who
+drifted in there; and truth more plain, yet bestowed with more humanity
+and brotherly purpose, I have never heard since. It made them tremble,
+but it did them good. Such things made him suffer, but he never
+flinched from the occasion by a hair's-breadth. He must have loved his
+fellow-creatures.
+
+Somebody gave me a rabbit, which I named Hind-legs. I was deeply
+interested in him for a while, especially when I learned that he could
+not drink water; but he lasted only two weeks, and I am under the
+impression that I killed him. Not that I loved him less; but children
+are prone to experiment with this singular thing called life when it
+is in their power. They do not believe that death can be other than
+a transient phenomenon; the lifeless body may puzzle, but it does not
+convince them. I was certainly not a cruel urchin, and I can recall
+none but cordial sentiments towards Hindlegs on my part. I remember no
+details of the murder, if murder were done; but I do remember feeling
+no surprise when, one morning, Hindlegs was found dead. After so many
+years, I will not bring against the owner of Hindlegs a verdict of
+positive guilt; but I suspect him. Hindlegs, at all events, achieved
+an immortality which can belong to few of his brethren; for my father,
+after pooh-poohing the imbecile little bundle of fur for a day or two,
+conceived an involuntary affection for him, and reported his character
+and habits in his journal in a manner which is likely to keep his memory
+alive long after the hand that (perhaps) slew him is dust.
+
+In default of dogs and Hindlegs, we had abundant cats. My father was
+always fond of these mysterious deities of ancient Egypt, and they were
+never turned away from our doors; but how so many of them happened
+to find us out in this remote region I cannot explain. It seems as if
+goodwill towards cats spontaneously generated them. They appeared, one
+after another, to the number of five; but when the time came for us to
+leave the red house forever, the cats would not and could not be packed
+up, and they were left behind. In my mind's eye I still see them,
+squatting abreast, silhouetted against the sky, on the brow of the hill
+as we drove down the road; for they had scampered after our carry-all
+when we drove away. Cats teach Americans what they are slow to
+learn--the sanctity and permanence of home.
+
+But Lenox could not be a home for us. It was, indeed, a paradise for
+the children; but the children's father was never well there. He had a
+succession of colds--as those affections are called; it was ascribed to
+the variations of temperature during the summers; but the temperature
+would not have troubled him had he not been hard hit before he went
+to Berkshire. He got out of patience with the climate, and was wont
+to anathematize it with humorous extravagance, as his way was: "It is
+horrible. One knows not for ten minutes together whether he is too cool
+or too warm. I detest it! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul. Here,
+where I had hoped for perfect health, I have for the first time been
+made sensible that I cannot with impunity encounter nature in all her
+moods." It was the summers that disagreed with him. "Upon the whole,"
+he said, "I think that the best time for living in the country is the
+winter." It was during the winter that he did most of his writing. The
+House of the Seven Gables was written between September of 1850 and
+January or February of 1851.
+
+But composition took more out of him than formerly. He admitted to his
+sister Louisa that he was "a little worn down with constant work," and
+added that he could not afford any idle time now, being evidently of the
+opinion that his popularity would be short-lived, and that it behooved
+him, therefore, to make the most of it. But "the pen is so constantly
+in my fingers that I abominate the sight of it!" he exclaimed. This was
+after he had transgressed his custom of never writing in the hot months.
+He began in June and finished in forty days the whole volume of The
+Wonder-Book. He also read the tales to his domestic audience as fast as
+they were written, and benefited, perhaps, by the expert criticism of
+the small people. Many passages in the intercalated chapters, describing
+the adventures of Eustace Bright and the Tangle-wood children, are based
+on facts well known to his own two youngsters. And when Eustace tells
+his hearers that if the dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder
+were simply to put some sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them
+and Tangle-wood itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up
+the chimney--even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at
+the same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of
+Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus early
+did he begin to grasp the philosophy of the truth of fiction.
+
+The House of the Seven Gables and The Wonder-Book were a fair
+eighteen-months' work, and in addition to them Hawthorne had, before
+leaving Lenox, planned out the story of The Blithedale Romance; so
+that after we got to West Newton--our half-way station on the road to
+Concord--he was prepared to sit down and write it. Long before we left
+Concord for England he had published Tangle-wood Tales, not to mention
+the biography of Franklin Pierce. Una and her brother knew nothing about
+the romances; they knew and approved the fairy tales; but their feeling
+about all their father's writings was, that he was being wasted in his
+study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any
+books, whether his own or other authors', that could for a moment bear
+comparison with his actual companionship. What he set down upon the page
+was but a less free and rich version of the things that came from his
+living mouth in our heedless playtimes. "If only papa wouldn't write,
+how nice it would be!" And, indeed, a book is but a poor substitute for
+the mind and heart of a man, and it exists only as one of the numberless
+sorry makeshifts to which time constrains us, while we are waiting for
+eternity and full communion.
+
+It was a dreary day in the beginning of the second winter that we set
+out on our eastward journey; but Hawthorne's face was brighter than the
+weather warranted, for it was turned once more towards the sea. We were
+destined, ere we turned back, to go much farther towards the rising
+sun than any of us then suspected. We took with us one who had not been
+present at our coming--a little auburn-haired baby, born in May. Which
+are the happiest years of a man's life? Those in which he is too much
+occupied with present felicity to look either forward or backward--to
+hope or to remember. There are no such years; but such moments there may
+be, and perhaps there were as many such moments awaiting Hawthorne as
+had already passed.
+
+His greatest work was done before he left his native land, and within
+a year or two of his death he wrote to Richard Stoddard: "I have been a
+happy man, and yet I cannot remember any moment of such happy conspiring
+circumstances that I would have rung a joy-bell at it."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+     Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's
+     fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle
+     Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's
+     first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--
+     The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook
+     Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of
+     composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's
+     method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a
+     roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of
+     "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President"--The most
+     homeless people in the world."
+
+The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with
+impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in
+which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in
+Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were
+all plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went
+tolerably fast--from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were chariots
+of delight to the children, who were especially happy in occupying the
+last car of the train, from the rear windows of which they could look
+down upon the 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 house, which we were to occupy for the winter, was made.
+The scene was gloomy and unpleasant; the change from the mountains
+of the west depressing; and, for my part, I cannot remember anything
+agreeable in this raw little suburb. American life half a century ago
+had a great deal of rawness about it, and its external aspect was ugly
+beyond present belief. We may be a less virtuous nation now than we were
+then, but we are indescribably more good to look at. And the West Newton
+of to-day, as compared with that of 1851, will serve for an illustration
+of this truth.
+
+Horace Mann's house was a small frame dwelling, painted white, with
+green blinds, and furnished with a furnace stiflingly hot. One of
+the first things the baby did was to crawl under the sofa in the
+sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or register,
+or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She withdrew 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 feature of the physical situation
+that I recall is the momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots.
+They were very uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron
+from over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made
+all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is bigger
+than most men.
+
+But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward
+succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the
+first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here.
+Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose
+name is honorably identified with the development in this country of
+common-school education. They had three children, of about our age,
+all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the
+State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well
+merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly, and
+was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George Combe, the
+phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he was himself
+so ardent a believer in the new science that when his younger son,
+Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very early age he
+declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that he was not
+worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo strange
+transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute abundantly
+his father's too hasty conclusion in his case. He became eminent as an
+entomologist; George followed the example of his father on educational
+lines. Horace, who died comparatively early, was an enthusiastic
+naturalist, who received the unstinted praise and confidence of the
+great Agassiz. My uncle Horace, as I remember him, was a very tall
+man, of somewhat meagre build, a chronic sufferer from 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 was avoided; in his eyes any approach to a philosophical
+attitude on the burning question was a crime. Nor were his convictions
+less pronounced on the subject of total abstinence from liquor and
+tobacco. Now, my father smoked an occasional cigar, and it once came
+about that he was led to mention the fact in Horace Mann's hearing. The
+reformer's bristles were set in a moment. "Do I understand you to say,
+Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use tobacco?" "Yes, I smoke a cigar
+once in a while," replied my father, comfortably. Horace Mann could not
+keep his seat; he started up and paced the room menacingly. He had a
+high admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him
+as a man, and this infidelity to the true faith seemed to him the more
+appalling. But he would be true to his colors at all costs, and after
+a few moments he planted himself, tall and tragic, before his
+interlocutor, and spoke, in a husky voice, to this effect: "Then, Mr.
+Hawthorne, it is my duty to tell you that I no longer have the same
+respect for you that I have had." Then he turned and strode from the
+room, leaving the excommunicated one to his reflections. Faithful are
+the wounds of a friend, and my father was as much touched as he was
+amused by this example of my uncle's candor. Of course, there was a
+great vacuum in the place where my uncle's sense of humor might have
+been; but there are a time and place for such men as he, and more than
+once the men without sense of humor have moved the world.
+
+In addition to the Manns, there were visitors--the succession of whom,
+indeed, was henceforth to continue till the end of my father's earthly
+pilgrimage. Among the earliest to arrive was Grace Greenwood, wading
+energetically to our door through the December snow. She was one of the
+first, if not the first, of the tribe of women correspondents; she had
+lately returned, I think, from England, and the volume of her letters
+from that strange country was in everybody's hands. She was then a young
+woman, large and handsome, with dark hair and complexion, and large,
+expressive eyes, harmonious, aquiline features, and a picturesque
+appearance. She wore her hair in abundant curls; she exhaled an
+atmosphere of romance, of graceful and ardent emotions, and of almost
+overpowering sentiment. In fact, she had a genuine gift for expression
+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 and ethical and
+historical reflection; withal, an immense, amiable, innocent, sprawling
+temperament. And as was her book, so was Grace herself; indeed, if any
+one could outdo the book in personal conversation, Grace was that happy
+individual. What she accomplished when she embarked, full-sailed, upon
+the topic of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may
+be pictured to themselves by persons endowed with the rudiments of
+imagination; I must not attempt to adorn this sober page with an
+attempted reproduction of the scene. Mortal language reeled and cracked
+under the strain of giving form to her admiration; but it was so honest
+and well meant that it could not but give pleasure even in the midst of
+bewilderment. My father bowed his head with a painful smile; but I dare
+say it did him good when the ordeal was over.
+
+At this time the reverberations of the European revolutionary year,
+1848, were still breaking upon our shores. President Polk had given
+mortal offence to Austria by sending over a special commissioner to
+determine whether the seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as
+a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann,
+had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The baron
+remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and soared in
+the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of State perhaps
+aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the struggling
+revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out for the
+United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since the visit
+of Lafayette had any foreigner been received here with such testimonials
+of public enthusiasm, or listened to by such applausive audiences:
+certainly none had ever been sent home again with less wool to show for
+so much cry. In 1851, the name of Kossuth was the most popular in the
+country, and when it was learned that he had accepted an invitation to
+speak in our little West Newton, we felt as if we were almost embarked
+upon a campaign--upon an altruistic campaign of emancipation against the
+Hapsburg oppressor. The excitement was not confined to persons of mature
+age and understanding; it raged among the smaller fry, and every boy
+was a champion of Kossuth. The train conveying the hero from New York
+to Boston (whence he was to return to West Newton after the reception
+there) was timed to pass through our midst at three o 'clock in the
+afternoon, and our entire population was at the track-side to see it go
+by. 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 talk, and a
+setting of the tide towards the place where the patriot stood to receive
+our personal greetings. The scribe whom I have mentioned, being as
+yet brief of stature, was unable to see anything except coat-tails
+and petticoats, until of a sudden there was a breaking away of these
+obstacles and he found himself in close proximity to a gentleman
+of medium height, strongly built, with a mop of dark hair framing a
+handsome, pale, smiling face, the lower parts of which were concealed
+by a thick brown beard. It was Kossuth, and there was that in his
+countenance and expression which satisfied all the dreams of his
+admirer. He was chatting and shaking hands with the elder persons; and
+in a minute we were moving on again, and the printed card, for which
+the whole function had been created, had not been presented. At the
+last moment, in an agony of apprehension, the boy pulled at his mother's
+skirt and whispered piteously, "But my card!" She heard and remembered;
+but need was for haste; we had already passed the vantage-point. She
+snatched it from the tightly gripping fingers of the bearer, handed
+it to Kossuth, and at the same moment, with a gesture, directed his
+attention to her small companion. The Hungarian read the inscription
+at a glance, looked me in the eyes with a quick smile of comprehension,
+and, stepping towards me, laid his hand upon my head. It was a great
+moment for me; but as I went away I suddenly dissolved in tears, whether
+from the reaction of emotion, or because I had not myself succeeded in
+delivering my gift, I cannot now determine. But Kossuth thereby became,
+and for years he continued to be, the most superb figure in my political
+horizon.
+
+All this while The Blithedale Romance was being written. Inasmuch as it
+was finished on the last day of April, 1852, it could not have occupied
+the writer more than five months in the composition. Winter was his best
+time for literary work, and there was winter enough that year in West
+Newton. In the middle of April came the heaviest snowstorm of the
+season. Brook Farm (modified in certain respects to suit the conditions)
+was the scene of the story, and Brook Farm was within a fair walk of
+West Newton. I visited the place 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
+improbable that he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books
+contain but few comments upon the routine of life of the community; his
+letters to his wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can
+trace several of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the
+romance. The episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the
+scene of the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably
+close reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years
+before, Hawthorne had been an actor.
+
+The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the
+hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there
+are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the
+spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse
+of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage
+containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for
+Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old
+surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red
+nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. 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." Out of this subtle
+correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old
+Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy.
+But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage,
+likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's liquor-bar)
+where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though
+it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the
+fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile,
+would have had conscience and self-denial enough, not to mention fine
+enough artistic sense, to delete it!
+
+The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way; but,
+as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his creative
+moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must have
+destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for none
+such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen
+the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was
+destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time
+no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the 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 impracticable, up and down the
+floor of his study. It was this habit which created the pathway along
+the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in Concord; it was a
+deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil, hardly nine inches
+wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in length. The monotonous
+movement of walking seemed to put his mind in the receptive state
+favorable for hearing the voices of imagination. The external faculties
+were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted, and he was able to peruse
+the vision beyond.
+
+[MAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS]
+
+But there is an important exception to this rule to be noted in the
+matter of his fictitious narratives which were posthumously published.
+These, as I have elsewhere said, are all concerned with a single
+theme--the never-dying man. There are two complete versions of
+Septimius, 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 entitled Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. All these, in short, are
+studies of one subject, and they were all unsatisfactory to the author.
+The true vein of which he had been in search was finally discovered in
+The Dolliver Romance, but the author's death prevented its completion.
+
+In this series of posthumous manuscripts there is a unique opportunity
+for making a study of the esoteric qualities of my father's style and
+methods, and on a future occasion I hope to present the result of my
+investigations in this direction. There is, furthermore, in connection
+with them, a mass of material of a yet more interesting and interior
+character. While writing the Grimshawe, he was deeply perplexed by
+certain details of the plot; the meaning of the Pensioner, and his
+proper function in the story, was one of these stumbling-blocks. But
+the prosperity 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 latter in good set terms; but he will not give up the struggle; his
+resolve to conquer is adamantine, and the conflict is always renewed.
+And there it all stands in black and white; one of the most instructive
+chapters in literary criticism in the world--the battle of a great
+writer with himself. The final issue, after all, was hardly decisive,
+for although a tolerable modus vivendi was reached and a truce declared,
+it is evident that Hawthorne regarded the entire scheme of the story as
+a mistake, and it is concluded in a perfunctory and indifferent manner.
+
+But it may be doubted whether anything of this sort ever took place
+in the making of any of the other stories. These depend but in a
+subordinate degree upon what is called technically plot interest. The
+author's method was to take a natural, even a familiar incident, and
+to transmute it into immortal gold by simply elucidating its inner
+spiritual significance. The 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 Blithedale Romance appears more
+complicated; but that is mainly because, in a masterly manner, the
+author keeps the structural lines out of sight and concentrates
+attention upon the interplay of character. The scaffolding upon which
+are hung the splendid draperies of The Marble Faun is, again, of the
+simplest formation, though the nature of the materials is unfamiliar.
+
+This is a digression; the present volume, as I have already stated,
+is not designed to include--except incidentally-anything in the way of
+literary criticism.
+
+Blithedale having been finished and published, the question of where to
+settle down permanently once more came up for an answer. Of course, our
+sojourn at Mr. Mann's house had been a temporary expedient only; and for
+that matter, the Manns, following the example of most Americans before
+and since, had rented the place merely as a stepping-stone to something
+else. My father's eyes again turned with longing towards the sea-shore;
+but the fitting nook for him there still failed to offer itself. People
+are naturally disposed to return to places in which they have formerly
+lived, and Concord could not but suggest itself to one who had passed
+some of the happiest years of his life among its serene pastures and
+piney forests. This suggestion, moreover, was supplemented by 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 indispensable
+detail of life, and that he for his part intended never to die; but
+after many years he had grown weary of the monotony of his success, or
+had realized that it would take too long a time to prove himself in
+the right, and rather than see the thing through he allowed himself to
+depart. The old structure, in its original state, consisted of a big,
+brick chimney surrounded by four rooms and an attic, with a kitchen
+tacked on at the rear. It stood almost flush with the side-path along
+the highway; behind it rose a steep hill-side to a height of about one
+hundred feet; in front, on the other side of the road, stretched broad
+meadows with a brook flowing through the midst of them. Such conditions
+would not seem altogether to favor a man wedded to seclusion.
+
+But the thing was not at this juncture quite so bad as it had been. Mr.
+Alcott, whose unselfish devotion to the welfare of the human race made
+it incumbent upon his friends to supply him with the means of earthly
+subsistence, had been recently domiciled in the house by Mr. Emerson
+(how the latter came into possession of it I have forgotten, if ever
+I knew), and he had 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 summer-house on the hill-side, and
+terraced the hill, which was also planted with apple-trees. Another
+summer-house arose in the meadow opposite, which went with the property,
+and rustic fences separated the domain from the road. The dwelling was
+now fully as commodious as the red house at Lenox, though it had no
+Monument Mountain and Stockbridge Bowl to look out upon.
+
+[IMAGE: THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)]
+
+The estate, comprising, I think, forty-two acres, all told, including
+upward of twenty acres of second-growth woodland above the hill,
+perfectly useless except for kindling-wood and for the sea-music which
+the pine-trees made, was offered to my father at a reasonable enough
+figure, to be his own and his heirs' forever. He came over and looked
+at the place, thought "The Wayside" would be a good name for it, and
+was perhaps helped to decide upon taking it by the felicity of this
+appellation. It was close upon the highway, undeniably; but then the
+highway was so 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. Alcott shone with ancillary lustre only a
+stone's-throw away. Thoreau and Ellery Channing were tramping about
+in the neighborhood, and Judge Hoar and his beautiful sister dispensed
+sweetness and light in the village itself. Walden Pond, still secluded
+as when only the Indians had seen the sky and the trees reflected in
+it, was within a two-mile walk, and the silent Musketaquid stole on its
+level way beyond the hill on the other side. Surely, a man might travel
+far and not find a spot better suited for work and meditation and
+discreet society than Concord was.
+
+But, of course, the necessity of settling down somewhere was a main
+consideration. Concord, was inviting in itself, but it was also
+recommended by the 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 sound and sight of the ocean; but that was the
+worst that could be urged against it. A man must choose, and Concord
+was, finally, Hawthorne's choice.
+
+At this epoch he had not contemplated, save in day-dreams, the
+possibility of visiting the Old World. His friend, Franklin Pierce, had
+just become President-elect, but that fact had not suggested to his mind
+the change in his own fortunes which it was destined to bring about.
+He 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 imaginative man can ever hope to find that; but as soon as we have
+called a place our Home, it acquires a charm that has nothing to do with
+material conditions. The best-known song in American poesy has impressed
+that truth upon Americans--who are the most homeless people in the
+world.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+     A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His
+     incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common
+     men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal
+     appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille
+     of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the
+     woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus
+     individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--
+     Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-
+     culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A
+     country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten
+     romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's
+     tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer
+     than in the world--The return of the pilgrim.
+
+My father's first look at "The Wayside" had been while snow was still
+on the ground, and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a
+cattle-pen.
+
+But the family advent was effected in June, and although a heavy rain
+had fallen while the domestic impedimenta were in transit, wetting the
+mattresses and other exposed furniture, yet when the summer sun came out
+things began to mend. My mother and Una came a day ahead of the others,
+and with the help of carpenters and upholsterers, and a neighboring
+Irishman and his wife for cleaning and moving purposes, they soon got
+human order into the place of savage chaos. The new carpet was down in
+the study, the walls had been already papered and the wood-work grained,
+the pictures were hung in their places, and the books placed on their
+shelves. By the time the father, the boy, the baby, and the nurse drove
+up in the hot afternoon a home had been created for their reception.
+
+Mr. Emerson was, and he always remained, the hub round which the wheel
+of Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at
+this time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of
+his beneficent powers. He had fulfilled the promise of his unique
+youth--obeyed the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. The sweet austerity of
+his nature had been mellowed by human sorrows--the loss of his brothers
+and of his eldest son; he had the breadth and poise that are given by
+knowledge of foreign lands, and friendships with the best men in them;
+he had the unstained and indomitable independence of a man who has
+always avowed his belief, and never failed to be true to each occasion
+for truth; he had the tranquillity of faith and insight, and he was
+alert with that immortal curiosity for noble knowledge the fruit of
+which enriches his writings. Upon his modestly deprecating brows was
+already set the wreath of a world-wide fame, and yet every village
+farmer and store-keeper, and every child, found in his conversation the
+wisdom and companionship suited to his needs, and was made to feel
+that his own companionship was a valued gift. Emerson becomes more
+extraordinary the further we get away from him in years; illustrating
+the truth which Landor puts into the mouth of Barrow in one of his
+Imaginary Conversations, that "No very great man ever reached the
+standard of his greatness in the crowd of his contemporaries: this hath
+always been reserved for the secondary." The wealth contained in his
+essays has only begun to be put in general circulation, and the harvest
+of his poetry is still more remote; while the sincere humility of the
+man himself, who was the best incarnate example of many of his ideals,
+still puzzles those critics who believe every one must needs be inferior
+to his professions.
+
+"Though I am fond of writing and of public speaking," said Emerson, "I
+am a very poor talker, and for the most part prefer silence"; and he
+went on to compare himself in this respect with Alcott, "the prince of
+conversers." Alcott was undoubtedly the prince of fluency, and
+Emerson rarely, in private dialogue, ventured to string together many
+consecutive sentences; but the things he did say, on small occasion or
+great, always hit the gold. On being appealed to, or when his turn came,
+he would hang a moment in the wind, and then pay off before the
+breeze of thought with an accuracy and force that gave delight with
+enlightenment. The form was often epigrammatic, but the air with which
+it was said beautifully disclaimed any epigrammatic consciousness or
+intention. It was, rather, "I am little qualified to speak adequately,
+but this, at least, does seem to me to be true." In the end, therefore,
+as the interlocutor thought it all over, he was perhaps surprised to
+discover that, little in quantity as Emerson may have said during the
+talk, he had yet said more than any one else in substance. But it may be
+admitted that he was even better in listening than in speech; his
+look, averted but attentive, with a smile which seemed to postpone full
+development to the moment when his companion should have uttered the
+expected apple of gold in the picture of silver, was subtly stimulating
+to the latter's intellect, and prompted him to outdo himself. His
+questions were often revelations, discovering truth which the other
+only then perceived, and thus beguiling him into admiration of his own
+supposed intelligence. In this, as in other things, he acted upon the
+precept that it is more blessed to give than to receive gratification;
+he never seemed to need any other happiness than that of imparting it.
+And so selflessly and insensibly were the riches of his mind and nature
+communicated to the community that innocent little Concord could not
+quite help believing that its wealth and renown were somehow a creation
+of its own. The loafers in Walcott & Holden's grocery store were, in
+their own estimation, of heroic stature, because of the unegoistic
+citizen who dwelt over yonder among the pines. Emerson was a great man,
+no doubt; but then he was no more than their own confessed equal, or
+inferior!
+
+This will and power to secularize himself is perhaps Emerson's unique
+attribute. It is comparatively easy to stand on mountain-tops and to
+ride Pegasus; but how many of those competent to such feats could at the
+same time sit cheek by jowl with hucksters and teamsters without a trace
+of condescension, and while rubbing shoulders with the rabble of the
+street in town-meeting, speak without arrogance the illuminating and
+deciding word? This, at last, is the true democracy that levels up
+instead of down. An Emerson who can make common men feel more like
+Emerson than he himself did is the kind of man we need to bring America
+up to her ideals.
+
+Emerson was ungainly in build, with narrow, sloping shoulders, large
+feet and hands, and a projecting carriage of the head, which enhanced
+the eagle-like expression of his glance and features. His head was
+small; it was covered (in 1852) with light brown hair, fine and
+straight; he was cleanshaven save for a short whisker; the peaked ends
+of an uncomfortable collar appeared above the folds of a high, black
+silk stock. His long-skirted black coat was commonly buttoned up; he
+wore, on different occasions, a soft felt hat or a high silk one, the
+latter, from use, having become in a manner humanized. On the street he
+kept his face up as he walked along, and perceived the approach of an
+acquaintance afar off, and the wise, slow smile gleamed about his mouth
+as he drew near. "How do you do?" was sometimes his greeting; but more
+often, "Good-bye!" or "Good-night!"--an original and more sensible
+greeting. Though ungainly in formation, he was not ungraceful in bearing
+and action; there was a fitness and harmony in his manifestations
+even on the physical plan. On the lecture platform he stood erect and
+unadorned, his hands hanging folded in front, save when he changed the
+leaf of his manuscript, or emphasized his words with a gesture: his
+customary one, simple but effective, was to clinch his right fist,
+knuckles upward, the arm bent at the elbow, then a downward blow of the
+forearm, full of power bridled. It was accompanied by such a glance
+of the eyes as no one ever saw except from Emerson: a glance like the
+reveille of a trumpet. Yet his eyes were not noticeably large, and their
+color was greenish-gray; but they were well set and outlined in his
+head, and, more than is the case with most men, they were the windows
+of his soul. Wendell Phillips had an eloquent and intrepid eye, but it
+possessed nothing approaching the eloquence and spiritual influence of
+Emerson's. In every Lyceum course in Concord, Emerson lectured once or
+twice, and the hall was always filled. One night he had the misfortune
+to wear a pair of abominably creaking boots; every slightest change of
+posture would be followed by an outcry from the sole-leather, and
+the audience soon became nervously preoccupied in expecting them. The
+sublimest thoughts were mingled with these base material accompaniments.
+But there was nothing to be done, unless the lecturer would finish his
+lecture in his stocking-feet, and we were fain to derive a fortuitous
+inspiration from observing the unfaltering meekness with which our
+philosopher accepted the predicament. I have forgotten the subject of
+the lecture on that occasion, but the voice of the boots will always
+sound in my memory.
+
+In his own house Emerson shone with essential hospitality, and yet he
+wonderfully effaced himself; any one but he might hold the centre of
+the stage. You felt him everywhere, but if you would see him, you must
+search the wings. He sat in his chair, bending forward, one leg crossed
+over the other, his elbows often supported on his knee; his legs were
+rather long and slender, and he had a way, after crossing his leg, of
+hitching the instep of that foot under the calf of the other leg, so
+that he seemed braided up. He seldom stood in a room, or paced to and
+fro, as my father was fond of doing. But the two men were almost equally
+addicted to outdoor walking, and both preferred to walk alone. Emerson
+formed the habit of betaking himself to Walden woods, which extended to
+within a mile or so of his door; thence would he return with an exalted
+look, saying, "The muses are in the woods to-day"; and no one who has
+read his Woodnotes can doubt that he found them there. Occasionally
+Channing, Thoreau, or my father would be his companion; Alcott preferred
+to busy himself about his rustic fences and summer-houses, or to sit
+the centre of a circle and converse, as he called it; meaning to
+soliloquize, looking round from face to face with unalterable faith and
+complacency.
+
+My father read Emerson with enjoyment; though more and more, as he
+advanced in life, he was disposed to question the expediency of stating
+truth in a disembodied form; he preferred it incarnate, as it appears in
+life and in story. But he could not talk to Emerson; his pleasure in his
+society did not express itself in that form. Emerson, on the other hand,
+assiduously cultivated my father's company, and, contrary to his general
+habit, talked to him continuously; but he could not read his romances;
+he admitted that he had never been able to finish one of them. He loved
+to observe him; to watch his silence, which was full of a kind of speech
+which he was able to appreciate; "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the
+night!" My father was Gothic; Emerson was Roman and Greek. But each was
+profoundly original and independent. My father was the shyer and more
+solitary of the two, and yet persons in need of human sympathy were able
+to reach a more interior region in him than they could in Emerson. For
+the latter's thought was concerned with types and classes, while the
+former had the individual touch. He distrusted rules, but had faith
+in exceptions and idiosyncrasies. Emerson was nobly and magnanimously
+public; my father, exquisitely and inevitably private; together they met
+the needs of nearly all that is worthy in human nature.
+
+Emerson rose upon us frequently during our early struggles with our
+new abode, like a milder sun; the children of the two families became
+acquainted, the surviving son, Edward, two years my elder, falling to
+my share. But Emerson himself also became my companion, with a humanity
+which to-day fills me with grateful wonder. I remember once being taken
+by him on a long walk through the sacred pine woods, and on another
+occasion he laid aside the poem or the essay he was writing to entertain
+Una in his study, whither she had gone alone and of her own initiative
+to make him a call! It is easy to compliment a friend upon his children,
+but how many of us will allow themselves to be caught and utilized by
+them in this fashion? But Emerson's mind was so catholic, so humble, and
+so deep that I doubt not he derived benefit even from child-prattle. His
+wife rivalled him in hospitality, though her frail health disabled her
+from entering into the physical part of social functions with the same
+fortitude; in these first months we were invited to a party where we
+were fellow-guests with all the other children of Concord. There they
+were, their mothers with them, and everything in sight that a child at
+a party could require. My new friend Edward mounted me on his pony, and
+his father was at hand to catch me when I fell off. Such things sound
+incredible, but they are true. A great man is great at all times, and
+all over.
+
+Thoreau, Channing, and Alcott were also visible to us at this time, but
+of none of them do I find any trace in my memory; though I know, as
+a matter of fact, that Channing and my father once permitted me to
+accompany them on a walk round the country roads, which inadvertently
+prolonged itself to ten miles, and I knew what it was to feel
+foot-weary. But another neighbor of ours, hardly less known to fame,
+though in a widely different line of usefulness, makes a very distinct
+picture in my mind; this was Ephraim Wales Bull, the inventor of the
+Concord grape. He was as eccentric as his name; but he was a genuine
+and substantive man, and my father took a great liking to him, which was
+reciprocated. He was short and powerful, with long arms, and a big head
+covered with bushy hair and a jungle beard, from which looked out a pair
+of eyes singularly brilliant and penetrating. He had brains to think
+with, as well as strong and skilful hands to work with; he personally
+did three-fourths of the labor on his vineyard, and every grape-vine had
+his separate care. He was married and had three children, amiable
+but less interesting than himself. He had, also, a tremendous temper,
+evidenced by his heavy and high-arched eyebrows, and once in a while he
+let slip upon his helpers in the vineyard this formidable wrath, which
+could easily be heard in our peaceful precincts, like sounds of distant
+battle. He often came over and sat with my father in the summer-house on
+the hill, and there talked about politics, sociology (though under some
+other name, probably), morals, and human nature, with an occasional
+lecture on grape-culture. He permitted my sister and me to climb the
+fence and eat all the grapes we could hold; it seems to me he could
+hardly have realized our capacity. During our second summer he built a
+most elaborate fence along the road-front of his estate; it must have
+been three hundred yards long and it was as high as a man could reach;
+the palings, instead of being upright, were criss-crossed over one
+another, leaving small diamond-shaped interstices. The whole was painted
+brilliant white, to match the liliputian cottage in which the Bull
+family contrived (I know not how) to ensconce itself. When the fence was
+built, Mr. Bull would every day come forth and pace slowly up and down
+the road, contemplating it with the pride of a parent; indeed, it was no
+puny achievement, and when I revisited Concord, thirty years later,
+the great white fence was still there, with a few gaps in it, but still
+effective. But the builder, and the grapes--where were they? Where are
+Cheops, and the hanging gardens of Babylon?
+
+Among many visitors came Richard Henry Stoddard, already a poet, but
+anxious to supplement the income from his verses by a regular stipend
+from the big pocket of Uncle Sam. His first coming was in summer, and
+he and my father went up on the hill and sat in the summer-house there,
+looking out upon the wide prospect of green meadows and distant woods,
+but probably seeing nothing of them, their attention being withdrawn to
+scenes yet fairer in the land of imagination and memory. Stoddard was
+then, as always, a handsome man, strong and stanch, black-haired and
+black-bearded, with strong eyes that could look both fierce and tender.
+He was masculine, sensitive, frank, and humorous; his chuckle had
+infinite merriment in it; but, as his mood shifted, there might be
+tears in his eyes the next moment. He was at that time little more
+than five-and-twenty years old, and he looked hardly that; he was a New
+England country youth of genius. Nature had kindled a fire in him which
+has never gone out. Like my father, he was affiliated with the sea, and
+had its freshness and daring, though combined with great modesty, and he
+felt honored by the affection with which he inspired the author of The
+Scarlet Letter. It was not until his second visit, in the winter,
+that the subject of a custom-house appointment for him came up; for my
+father, being known as a close friend of the President, whose biography
+he had written for the campaign, became the object of pilgrimages other
+than literary ones. He received sound advice, and introductions, which
+aided him in getting the appointment, and he held it for nearly twenty
+years--more to the benefit of the custom-house than of poetry, no
+doubt, though he never let poetry escape him, and he is to-day a mine
+of knowledge and wisdom on literary subjects. There is an immense human
+ardor, power, and pathos in Stoddard; better than any other American
+poet does he realize the conception of his great English brother--the
+love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn. The world has proved
+impotent to corrupt his heroic simplicity; he loved fame much, but truth
+more. He is a boy in his heart still, and he has sung songs which touch
+whatever is sweetest, tenderest, and manliest in the soul of man.
+
+[IMAGE: EDWIN P. WHIFFLE]
+
+E. P. Whipple, essentially a man of letters, and famous in his day as a
+critic of literature, appeared often in "The Wayside." His verdict on a
+book carried weight; it was an era when literary criticism was regarded
+seriously, and volumes devoted to critical studies had something more
+than, a perfunctory vogue. He had written penetrating and cordial things
+about my father's books, and foretold the high place which he would
+ultimately occupy in our Pantheon. He was rich in the kind of Attic salt
+which, was characteristic of Boston in the middle century; the product
+of an almost excessive culture erected on sound, native brains. He had
+abounding wit; not only wit of the sort that begets mirth, but that
+larger and graver wit which Macaulay notices in Bacon's writings--a
+pure, irradiating, intellectual light. It had often the effect of an
+actual physical illumination cast upon the topic. He was magnificent as
+a dinner-table companion. He was rather a short, thick-shouldered man,
+with a big head on a short neck, a broad, projecting forehead, prominent
+eyes, defended by shiny spectacles, and bushy whiskers. He is not
+remembered now, probably because he never produced any organic work
+commensurate with his huge talent. Analyses of the work of others,
+however just, useful, and creative, do not endure unless they are
+associated with writing of the independent sort. Whipple, with all his
+ability and insight, never entered the imaginative field on his own
+account, and in the press of wits he falls behind and is forgotten.
+
+My father had come to Concord with the idea of a new romance in his
+mind; he designed it to be of a character more cheerful than the
+foregoing ones. It was never written, and but the slightest traces of
+what it might have been are extant. Herman Melville had spent a day
+with us at Concord, and he had suggested a story to Hawthorne; but the
+latter, after turning it over in his mind, came to the conclusion that
+Melville could treat the subject better than he could; but Melville
+finally relinquished it also. It seems likely, however, that this
+projected tale was not the one which Hawthorne had originally been
+meditating. At all events, it was postponed in favor of a new book of
+wonder-stories from Greek mythology--the first one having had immediate
+popularity, and by the time this was finished, the occasion had arrived
+which led to the writing of Pierce's biography. This, in turn, was
+followed by the offer by the President to his friend of the Liverpool
+consulate, then the most lucrative appointment in the gift of the
+administration; and Hawthorne's acceptance of it caused all literary
+projects to be indefinitely abandoned.
+
+But even had there been time for the writing of another book, the death
+of Hawthorne's sister Louisa would doubtless have unfitted him for a
+while from undertaking it. This was the most painful episode connected
+with his life; Louisa was a passenger on a Hudson River steamboat which
+was burned. She was a gentle, rather fragile woman, with a playful humor
+and a lovable nature; she had not the intellectual force either of her
+brother or of her sister Elizabeth; but her social inclinations were
+stronger than theirs. She was a delightful person to have in the house,
+and her nephew and niece were ardently in love with her. She was on her
+way to "The Wayside" when the calamity occurred, and we were actually
+expecting her on the day she perished. Standing on the blazing deck,
+with the panic and the death-scenes around her, the gentle woman had to
+make the terrible choice between the river and the fire. She was alone;
+there was none to advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable
+death. Her thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and
+courage, his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her
+desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice.
+With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his
+mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional
+poignancy in my father's imagination. He was hard hit, and the traces of
+the blow were manifest on him. After about a month, he made a journey to
+the Isles of Shoals with Franklin Pierce, and in that breezy outpost
+of the land he spent some weeks, much to his advantage. This was in the
+autumn of 1852, and I recall well enough the gap in things which his
+long absence made for me, and my perfect joy when the whistle of the
+train at the distant railway station signalled his return. Twenty
+minutes had to elapse before the railroad carriage could bring him
+to our door; they were long and they were brief, after the manner
+of minutes in such circumstances. He came, and there was a moment of
+indescribable glory while he leaped from the carriage and faced the
+situation on the doorstep of his home. His countenance was glowing with
+health and the happiness of home-coming. I thought him, as I always did,
+the most beautiful of human beings, by which I do not mean beautiful
+in feature, for of that I was not competent to hold an opinion; but
+beautiful in the feelings which he aroused in me beholding him. He was
+beautiful to be with, to hear, touch, and experience. Such is the effect
+of the spiritual sphere of good men, in whom nature and character
+are harmonious. My father got his appointment from Washington in the
+following March, 1853. His wife had but one solicitude in leaving
+America; her mother was aged and in delicate health, and their parting
+might be forever in this world. But a month before the appointment was
+confirmed, her mother quietly and painlessly died. It was as if she had
+wished not to be separated from her beloved daughter, and had entered
+into the spiritual state in the expectation of being nearer to her there
+than she could be in the world. My mother always affirmed that she
+was conscious of her mother's presence with her on momentous occasions
+during the remainder of her own life.
+
+June came; the farewells were said, we were railroaded to Boston,
+embarked on the Cunard steamship Niagara, Captain Leitch, and steamed
+out of Boston Harbor on a day of cloudlessness and calm. Incoming
+vessels, drifting in the smoothness, saluted us with their flags, and
+the idle seamen stared at us, leaning over their bulwarks. The last
+of the low headlands grew dim and vanished in the golden haze of the
+afternoon. "Go away, tiresome old land!" sang out my sister and myself;
+but my father, standing beside us, gazing westward with a serious look,
+bade us be silent. Two hundred and twenty years had passed since our
+first ancestor had sought freedom on those disappearing shores, and our
+father was the first of his descendants to visit the Old Home whence he
+came. What was to be the outcome? But the children only felt that the
+ocean was pleasant and strange, and they longed to explore it. The
+future and the past did not concern them.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+     A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the
+     carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An
+     aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots
+     of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last
+     infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the
+     spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The
+     coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The
+     thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic
+     geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools,
+     mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is
+     this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of
+     insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle
+     against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-,
+     Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A
+     contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of
+     memorable trifles.
+
+The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical
+architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather less
+than a score of years, and had already established its reputation for
+safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red smoke-stack
+with the black ring round the top, there was little similarity between
+the boat that took us to England and the mammoths that do that service
+for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about two hundred and fifty
+feet long, and was propelled by paddle-wheels, upon the summits of
+whose curving altitudes we were permitted to climb in calm weather.
+The interior decorations were neat and pretty, but had nothing of the
+palatial and aesthetic gorgeousness which educates us in these later
+ages. The company of passengers was so small that a single cow, housed
+in a pen on deck, sufficed for their needs in the way of milk, and there
+were still left alive and pecking contentedly about their coop a number
+of fowls, after we had eaten all we could of their brethren at the ten
+dinners that were served during the voyage. The crew, from the captain
+down, were all able seamen, friendly and companionable, and not so
+numerous but that it was easy to make their individual acquaintance. The
+most engaging friend of the small people was the carpenter, who had his
+shop on deck, and from whom I acquired that passion for the profession
+which every normal boy ought to have, and from the practice of which I
+derived deep enjoyment and many bloody thumbs and fingers for ten years
+afterwards.
+
+But we had companionship historically at least more edifying. William
+D. Ticknor, the senior partner of my father's publishers, was the only
+figure familiar at the outset. He was one of the most amiable of men,
+with thick whiskers all round his face and spectacles shining over
+his kindly eyes; a sturdy, thick-set personage, active in movement and
+genial in conversation. It was James T. Fields who usually made the
+trips to England; but on this occasion Fields got no farther than
+the wharf, where the last object visible was his comely and smiling
+countenance as he waved his adieux. Conspicuous among the group on the
+after-deck, as we glided out of the smooth harbor of Boston, was an
+urbane and dignified gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age, with a
+clean-shaven mouth and chin, finely moulded, and with what Tennyson
+would call an educated whisker, short and gray, defining the region
+in front of and below his ears. He spoke deliberately, and in language
+carefully and yet easily chosen, with intonations singularly distinct
+and agreeable, giving its full value to every word. This was our first
+native Englishman; no less a personage than Mr. Crampton, in fact, the
+British Minister, who was on his way to Halifax. He had fine, calm,
+quietly observant eyes, which were pleasantly employed in contemplating
+the beauty of that summer seascape--an opalescent ocean, and islands
+slumbering in the July haze. Near him stood a light-built, tall,
+athletic individual, also obviously English, but thirty years younger;
+full, also, of artistic appreciation; this was Field Talfourd, who was
+an artist, and many things besides; a man proficient in all forms
+of culture. His features were high and refined, and, without being
+handsome, irresistibly attractive. He turned out to be a delightful
+playmate for the children, and astonished them and the rest of the
+company by surprising gymnastic feats in the rigging. The speech of
+these two Britishers gave the untravelled American a new appreciation of
+the beauty and significance of the English language. Not all Englishmen
+speak good English, but when they do, they beggar eulogy.
+
+[IMAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR]
+
+George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the
+Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an
+indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of the
+American student of those days, when out-door life and games made no
+part of our scholastic curricula. He may have been forty years old,
+slight and frail, with a thin, clean-shaven face and pallid complexion,
+but full of mind and sensibility. We do not heed travellers now, and I
+am inclined to think they are less worth heeding than they used to be.
+It is so easy to see the world in these latter days that few persons see
+it to any purpose even when they go through the motions of doing so. But
+to hear George Bradford or Silsbee talk of England, France, and Italy,
+in the fifties, was a liberal education, and I used sometimes to stare
+fascinated at the boots of these wayfarers, admiring them for the
+wondrous places in which they had trodden. Silsbee travelled with his
+artistic and historic consciousness all on board, and had so much to say
+that he never was able to say it all.
+
+But to my father himself were accorded the honors of the captain's
+table, and for him were fired the salutes of cannon which thundered us
+out of Boston Harbor and into Halifax. These compliments, however, were
+paid to him not as a man of letters, but as a political representative
+of his country, and, let a man be as renowned as he will on his personal
+account, he will still find it convenient, in order to secure smooth and
+agreeable conditions on his way through the world, to supplement that
+distinction with recommendations from the State Department. Respect for
+rank is the last infirmity even of noble republican minds, and it oils
+the wheels of the progress of those who possess it. An American widow
+of my later acquaintance, a lady of two marriageable daughters and small
+social pretensions in her own country, toured Europe with success
+and distinction, getting all the best accommodations and profoundest
+obeisances by the simple device of placing the word "Lady" before her
+modest signature in the hotel registers. She was a lady, of course, and
+had a right so to style herself, and if snobbish persons chose to read
+into the word more than it literally meant, that was not Mrs. Green's
+affair.
+
+American commerce still existed in 1853, and the Liverpool consulate was
+supposed to have more money in it than any other office in the gift
+of the administration. As a matter of fact, several of my father's
+predecessors had retired from their tenure of office with something
+handsome (pecuniarily speaking) to their credit; whether the means by
+which it had been acquired were as handsome is another question. Be
+that as it may, Congress, soon after my father's accession, passed a
+law cutting down the profits about three-fourths, and he was obliged to
+practise the strictest economy during his residence abroad in order to
+come home with a few thousand dollars in his pocket. Nevertheless, the
+dignity, in the official sense, of this consular post was considerable,
+and it brought him, in combination with his literary fame, a good deal
+more attention in England than he well knew what to do with. But, in one
+way or another, he also made friends there who remained to the end among
+the dearest of his life and more than countervailed all the time and
+energy wasted on the Philistines.
+
+The Atlantic, all the way across, with the exception of one brief
+emotional disturbance between lunch and dinner-time, wore a smile of
+fatuous serenity. The sun shone; the vast pond-surface oilily undulated,
+or lay in absolute flatness, or at most defiled under our eyes in
+endless squadrons of low-riding crests. My mother, whose last experience
+of sea-ways had been the voyage to Cuba, in which the ship was all but
+lost in a series of hurricanes, was captivated by this soft behavior,
+and enjoyed the whole of it as much, almost, as her husband, who
+expanded and drank in delight like a plant in the rain. But, in truth,
+these must have been blessed hours for them both. Behind them lay nearly
+eleven years of married life, spent in narrow outward circumstances,
+lightened only towards the last by the promise of some relaxation from
+strain, during which they had found their happiness in each other, and
+in the wise and tender care of their children, and in the converse of
+chosen friends. They had filled their minds with knowledge concerning
+the beauties and interests of foreign lands, with but a slender
+expectation of ever beholding them with bodily sight, but none the less
+well prepared to understand and appreciate them should the opportunity
+arrive. And now, suddenly, it had arrived, and they were on the way to
+the regions of their dreams, with the prospect of comparative affluence
+added. They had nearly twelve years of earthly sojourn together before
+them, the afternoon sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by
+the husband's failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual
+love, and enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled
+imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation between
+the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well symbolized the
+peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the horizons were to
+disclose.
+
+The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the
+west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the
+ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements
+against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there
+would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one
+either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs.
+An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and
+muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt
+to think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of
+adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by the
+wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock deserts
+present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in them.
+One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both are
+necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that we
+inhabit.
+
+But even the level capes of Lancashire were alluring to eyes that saw
+England, our venerable mother, loom behind them, with her thousand
+years' pageantry of warfare and civilization. The egregious little
+island is a thirsty place; the land drinks rain as assiduously as do its
+inhabitants beer and other liquors. Heavy mists and clouds enveloped it
+as we drew near, and ushered us up the Mersey into a brown omnipresence
+of rain. The broad, clear sunshine of the Atlantic was left behind, and
+we stood on wet decks and were transported to sloppy wharfs by means
+of a rain-sodden and abominably smoking little tug-boat--as the way
+was fifty years ago. Liverpool was a gray-stone labyrinth open to the
+deluge, and its inhabitants went to and fro with umbrellas over their
+heads and black respirators over their mouths, looking as if such were
+their normal plight--as, indeed, it was. Much of this was not needed to
+quench the enthusiasm of the children. The Waterloo Hotel, to which, by
+advice of friends, we were driven, seemed by its very name to carry out
+the idea of saturation, which the activities of nature so insistently
+conveyed. It was intensely discomfortable, and though the inside of the
+hotel was well supplied with gloomy English comforts, and the solemn
+meals were administered with a ceremonious gravity that suggested their
+being preliminaries to funerals, yet it was hard to be light-hearted.
+The open-grate coal fires were the most welcome feature of this summer
+season, and no doubt the wine list offered the best available substitute
+for sunlight; but we had not been trained to avail ourselves of it.
+We drank water, which certainly appeared an idle proceeding in such a
+climate. In Liverpool, however, or in its suburbs, we were to live for
+the better part of four years, and we must make the best of it. And
+there is in English people, when rightly approached, a steady and
+systematic geniality that not only makes handsome amends for their
+weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the
+country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior
+warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering
+England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the
+standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able
+to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may
+be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to the
+island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest selected
+from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British hunger for
+empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much as to their
+anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere than at home.
+
+My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be helped,
+philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his health
+was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did not suit so
+well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the lungs; she was
+soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and finally was driven
+to take refuge for the greater part of a year in Lisbon and Madeira,
+returning only a little before the departure of the family for Italy in
+1858. But there must have been in him an ancestral power of resistance
+still effective after more than two centuries of transplantation; he
+grew ruddy and robust while facing the mist and mirk, and inhaling the
+smoky moisture that did service for air. Nor was his health impaired by
+the long hours in the daily consulate--a grimy little room barely five
+paces from end to end, with its dusty windows so hemmed in by taller
+buildings that even had there been any sunshine to make the attempt, it
+could never have succeeded in effecting an entrance through them. Here,
+from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all
+varieties of scamps and mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the
+tribe of piratical cutthroats which in those days constituted a large
+part of the merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were
+his constant companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and
+sooty skies without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which
+they exhaled; he entered deeply into all their affairs, projects, and
+complaints, feeling their troubles, probably, at least as keenly as
+they did themselves, and yet he came out of it all with clear eyes and a
+sound digestion. I presume the fact may have been that he unconsciously
+regarded the whole affair somewhat as we do a drama in a theatre; it
+works upon our sensibilities, and yet we do not believe that it is real.
+There was nothing in the experience germane to his proper life; it could
+not become a part of him, and therefore its posture towards him
+remained inveterately objective. The only feature of it that quickened a
+responsive chord in him was the revelation of the intolerable condition
+of the sailors in many of our ships, and upon these abuses he enlarged
+in his communications to Washington. Improvements were made in
+consequence of his remonstrances; but the American merchant service had
+already begun its downward career, and it is only very lately, owing to
+causes which are too novel and peculiar to be intelligently discussed
+as yet, that our flag is once more promising to compete against that of
+England.
+
+It would be misleading to say, however, that my father was not
+interested in his consulate work; there was a practical side in him
+which took hold of the business in man-fashion, and transacted it so
+efficiently as to leave no room for criticism, and nobody can produce
+voluntary effects without feeling in himself a reaction from them. He had
+occasion to look into the privacy of many human hearts, to pity them and
+advise them, and from such services and insights he no doubt obtained a
+residue of wisdom which might be applied to his own ulterior uses.
+These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the consulate qua
+consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he quitted it, he
+carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he says in his remarks
+upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it were actually himself
+who had been the incumbent of the office at all.
+
+But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my
+father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in occasional
+escapes from the office into the outside England where, after the
+centuries of separation, he found so much with which he could still feel
+profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor was Henry A. Bright,
+a university man, the son of a wealthy local merchant, who sent ships
+to Australia, and was related (as most agreeable Englishmen are--though
+there are shining exceptions) to the aristocratic class. Bright, at this
+time, could not have been over thirty years of age; he was intensely
+English, though his slender figure and mental vivacity might make him
+seem near to the conventional American type. But through him, as through
+an open window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of
+England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England at
+its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It
+was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so
+uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American point
+of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as iron is
+drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each other like
+the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath the surface
+of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired the other's
+onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his admiration,
+strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate was always
+beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end; the effect
+of their blows was only to hammer each the other more firmly into his
+previous convictions. Probably all the things that are English and all
+the things that are American never before or since received such full
+and trenchant exposition as was given them by Hawthorne and by Bright.
+The whole subject of monarchy and aristocracy as against republicanism
+and democracy was threshed out to the last kernel by champions each of
+whom was thoroughly qualified to vindicate his cause. Each, constrained
+by the stress of battle to analyze and expound his beliefs more
+punctually than ever before, thereby convinced himself while leaving his
+adversary undaunted; and, of course, both were right. For this world is
+so constituted that two things incompatible in outward manifestation may
+in their roots be one and the same, and equally appeal to the suffrages
+of honest men. England and America are healthy and vigorous in
+proportion as they differ from each other, and a morbid and vicious
+tendency in either is noticeable the moment either begins to take a
+leaf from the other's book. My father and Bright could not have been the
+lifelong friends that they were had either of them yielded his point or
+stooped to compromise.
+
+Apart from political matters, and such social themes as were nearly
+allied to them, the two friends had many points of agreement and
+sympathy. Bright had from the first been an ardent and intelligent
+admirer of the romancer's writings, and though they might often differ
+in their estimates of individual works, they were in hearty accord as
+to the principles which underlie all literature and art. Upon matters
+relating to society, my father was more apt to accept theories which
+Bright might propound than to permit of their being illustrated in his
+own person; he would admit, for example, that a consul ought to mingle
+socially with the people to whom he was accredited; but when it came
+to getting him out to dinner, in evening dress and with a speech in
+prospect, obstacles started up like the armed progeny of the Dragon's
+Teeth. For, though no one enjoyed real society more than he did, he was
+ardently averse from conversing as an official with persons between whom
+and himself as a man there could be little sympathy. Almost as much,
+too, did he dislike to meet the polite world merely on the basis of the
+books that he had written, which his entertainers were bound to
+praise whether or not they had read or comprehended them, and to whose
+well-meant but inexpert eulogies he must constantly respond with the
+threadbare and pathetic phrase, "I'm glad you liked it." Bright, of
+course, insisted that fame and position carried obligations which must
+be met, and he was constantly laying plots to inveigle or surprise
+his friend into compliance. He often succeeded, but he failed quite as
+frequently, so that, as a Mrs. Malaprop might have said, Hawthorne as
+a social lion was a rara avis, from first to last. The foible of
+artificial, as distinguished from spontaneous, society is that it so
+seldom achieves simple human relations.
+
+Another chief friend of his was Francis Bennoch. England would never
+have seemed "our old home" to my father, without the presence and
+companionship of these two men. Both had literary leanings, both were
+genial, true, and faithful; but in other respects they were widely
+dissimilar. Bright was of the pure Saxon type; Bennoch represented Great
+Britain at large; there were mingled in him English, Irish, and
+Scotch ancestry. In himself he was a superb specimen of a human being;
+broad-shouldered, straight, and vigorous, massive but active, with a
+mellow, joyful voice, an inimitable brogue, sparkling black eyes full
+of hearty sunshine and kindness, a broad and high forehead over bushy
+brows, and black, wavy hair. He bubbled over with high spirits, humor,
+and poetry, being, indeed, a poet in achievement, with a printed
+and bound volume to show for it--songs, lyrics, and narrative poems,
+composed in the spirit of Burns and Scott. He was at this time one
+of the handsomest men in England, with a great heart, warmer than any
+summer England ever knew, and a soul of ardor and courage, which sent
+through his face continual flashes of sympathy and fellowship. One
+naturally thought and spoke of him in superlatives; he was the kindest,
+jolliest, most hospitable, most generous and chivalrous of men, and
+his affection and admiration for my father were also of the superlative
+kind. He had made a fortune in the wool business, and had an office
+in Wood Street, London; but his affairs permitted him to make frequent
+excursions to Liverpool, and to act as his American friend's guide
+and cicerone to many places in England which would otherwise have been
+unknown to him. My father enjoyed these trips immensely; Bennoch's
+companionship gave the right keynote and atmosphere to the sights they
+saw. A real Englishman owns his country, and does the honors of it to a
+visitor as if it were his private estate. Discussions of politics and of
+the principles of government never arose between these two, as they did
+between my father and Bright; for Bennoch, though one of the most loyal
+and enthusiastic of her Majesty's subjects, and full of traditional
+respect for the British nobility, was by nature broadly democratic,
+and met every man as an equal and a brother. One often finds this
+contradiction in Englishmen; but it is such logically only. A man
+born to the traditions of monarchy and aristocracy accepts them as the
+natural background of his ideas, just as the English landscape is the
+setting of his house and park; he will vindicate them if assailed; but
+ordinarily they do not consciously affect his mental activities, and he
+will talk good republicanism without being aware of it. The monarchy is
+a decoration, a sentiment, a habit; as a matter of fact, England is more
+democratic in many essentials than we have as yet learned how to
+be. Bennoch was not a university man, and lacked the historical
+consciousness that Bright so assiduously cultivated; he lived by feeling
+and intuition more than by deliberate intellectual judgments. He was
+emotional; tears would start to his eyes at a touch of pathos or pity,
+as readily as the laughter of a moment before. So lovable, gallant,
+honest, boyish a man is seldom born into this modern world-boyish as
+only the manliest men can be. He died thirty years after the time I
+write of, the same fresh and ardent character as ever, and loving and
+serving Hawthorne's children for Hawthorne's sake. I shall have occasion
+to mention him hereafter; but I have dwelt upon him here, both because
+he made it forever impossible for any one who knew him well to do other
+than love the land which could breed such a man, and because, for the
+American Hawthorne, he was as a hospitable gate-way through which the
+England of his dreams and imaginings was entered upon as a concrete and
+delightful reality.
+
+With Bright and Bennoch on his right hand and on his left, then, my
+father began his English experience. The two are frequently mentioned
+in his English journals, and Bennoch figures as one of the subordinate
+characters in the posthumous romance called Doctor Grimshawe's Secret.
+It is but a sketch of him, however, and considerably modified from the
+brilliant and energetic reality. Meanwhile the consul began to accustom
+himself to the routine of the consulate, and his family, leaving the
+sombre respectability of the Waterloo Hotel, moved, first, to the
+hospitable boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, and afterwards to a private
+dwelling in Rock Park, Rock Ferry, on the opposite side of the Mersey,
+where we were destined to dwell for several years. They were years full
+of events very trifling in themselves, but so utterly different from
+everything American as to stamp themselves upon the attention and the
+memory. It is the trifling things that tell, and give character to
+nations; extraordinary things may occur anywhere, and possess little
+national flavor. In another chapter I will attempt some portrayal of
+this English life of fifty years since.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+     Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--
+     Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming
+     peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and
+     hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the
+     landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the
+     material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of
+     Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon
+     tea--An East-Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
+     the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to
+     Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-
+     pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female
+     atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--
+     A psalm of praise.
+
+In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected that
+the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would be
+punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and aristocracy
+distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in remarking,
+however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between the patrician
+and the plebeian--between people of all orders--such as did not exist in
+America. And the fact, once perceived, was not difficult of explanation.
+In a monarchy of a thousand years' standing, every individual knows his
+place in the social scale and never thinks of leaving it. He represents
+a fixed function or element in the general organism, and holds to it as
+a matter of course, just as, in the human body, the body does not aspire
+to be the head, nor the liver or heart to take the place of lungs
+or stomach. The laborer looks back upon an ancestry of laborers; the
+shopkeeper has been a shopkeeper for unnumbered generations; the artisan
+on the bench to-day does the same work that his father and grandfathers
+did before him; the noble inherits his acres as inevitably as the sun
+rises, and sits in the House of Lords by immemorial usage and privilege.
+Social position all along the line being thus anchored in the nature
+of things, as it were, there is no anxiety on any one's part as to
+maintaining his status. He is secure where he is, and nothing and nobody
+can change him. There is no individual striving to rise nor fear to
+fall. Consequently there can and must be entire freedom of mutual
+conversation; the marquis with a revenue of half a million a year meets
+as an equal his gardener who gets ten pounds a month, and the tailor
+in his measuring-room offers a glass of sherry to his noble patron who
+comes to him for a new coat. Each is at his ease, conscious that he
+performs a use and fills a place which no one else can fill or perform,
+and that nothing else matters. The population is a vast mutual-benefit
+association, without envy on the one side or contempt on the other. And
+social existence moves as smoothly as a well-oiled and adjusted machine.
+
+This agreeable condition is impossible in a democracy--at all events, in
+a democracy like ours, which is based upon the assumption that all men
+are equal. Nevertheless, we are on the right track, and the English
+are on the wrong one; for the agreeable English system obstructs the
+insensible infiltration of fresh material into old forms, which is
+essential to the continued health of the latter; while the democracy,
+on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just as honorable and
+desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a good millionaire;
+that human life, in short, is a complex of countless different uses,
+each one of which is as important on its own plane as any of the others.
+But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome.
+
+So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even
+beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights,
+such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at Rock
+Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants take
+the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke and
+without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a
+hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table
+as deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the
+contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets,
+and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on
+holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise their
+native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not help
+a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor must
+finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too strongly
+contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. This contrast was very
+marked in England fifty years ago, and was comparatively unknown in our
+own country--though to-day we can hardly lay to our souls the nattering
+unction of such a difference. The rage for wealth has done for us in a
+generation what caste did for England in a thousand years.
+
+My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among
+the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though
+among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many
+interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as consul
+naturally took him often to the police courts, where magistrates passed
+upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in the consulate itself
+he saw specimens enough of human crime and misery. He visited the
+poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all
+types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door
+amusement and watched the unwashed populace at its play. Beggars
+followed him on the streets, awaited him in their chosen coigns of
+vantage on the corners, or haunted him on the ferry-boat that took
+him each day from his home to his office. Wherever he encountered
+the forsaken of fortune, he found food for sympathy, and, in spite of
+assurances that he was only encouraging mendicancy, he often gave them
+money. It was hard for him to believe that there could be abject poverty
+where there was work for all, and the appeal of man in want to man in
+plenty was too strong for him easily to resist it. He liked the very
+frankness of vulgarity and hopeless destitution of these people, and was
+appalled by the simplicity with which they accepted things as they were.
+There was no restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It
+was harrowing enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable
+to see them acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned,
+after a while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition;
+but the refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving
+did in purse.
+
+The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating
+pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the
+Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little
+settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed
+cottages, with their tiny gardens of hollyhocks and marigolds, seemed
+like parts of the framework of the land; the passage of centuries only
+served to weld them more firmly in their places. The villages were
+massed together, each in a small space, instead of being dispread
+loosely over a township, as in his native New England, and enduring
+stone and plaster took the place of timber and shingles. But the
+churches, small and fabulously ancient, affected him most. He placed his
+hand on stones which had been set in place before William the Conqueror
+landed in England, and this physical survival seemed to bring into his
+actual presence the long succession of all the intervening ages. These
+structures, still so solid and serviceable, had witnessed the passing of
+the entire procession of English history; all the mighty men and events
+of her career had come and gone while they remained unscathed. Under his
+feet were the graves of the unknown dead; within the narrow precincts he
+inhaled that strange, antique odor of mortality that made him feel as
+if he were breathing the air of long-dead centuries. This apparent
+evanescence of the spiritual attested by the survival of the material is
+one of the most singular and impressive of sensations; it takes history
+out of the realm of the mind, and brings it into sensible manifestation.
+It is almost as affecting as if the very figures of departed actors of
+former ages were to reappear and rub shoulders with us of today, and
+cast their shadows in the contemporary sunshine.
+
+On most of these walks in the neighborhood of Rock Ferry I was my
+father's companion, but, though my legs could march beside his, my
+mental-equipment could not participate in his meditations. He would
+occasionally make some half-playful, imaginative remark, calculated to
+help me realize the situation that was so vividly present to himself.
+His thoughts, however deep, were always ready to break into playfulness
+outwardly. We often walked through the village of Bebbington, whose
+church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the summit of which the
+ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view he would always say,
+in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems,
+which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington
+the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington
+the holy spire,' father!"--being offended by his use of a word so
+unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was
+somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards
+mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in
+common-sense, and he knew the value of the latter in curbing undue
+excursions into the fanciful and transcendental.
+
+In Eastham, on the village green, stood an old yew-tree which, six
+centuries before, had been traditionally called The Old Yew of Eastham,
+and was probably at least coeval with the village itself, which was one
+of the oldest in England. It was of enormous girth, and was still in
+leaf; but nothing but the bark was left of the great trunk; all the wood
+had decayed away so long ago that the memory of man held no record of
+it. There was a great conical gap in one side, like an open door, and it
+was my custom--as it had doubtless been that of innumerable children of
+ages gone--to enter this door and "play house" in the spacious interior.
+Meanwhile my father would seat himself on the twisted roots without, and
+let his thoughts drift back to the time when this huge hulk had first
+cast a slender shadow over the greensward of primitive, Saxon England.
+It was a massive tree before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer
+would not be heard of for four hundred years to come; and where was
+Shakespeare? What was suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable
+vegetable, still with life enough left in it, perhaps, to see the end of
+English monarchy. The yew was a fact; but the ghosts were the reality,
+after all.
+
+These obscure village antiquities, which had no special history
+attaching to them, were in a way more impressive than the great ruins of
+England, which had formed the scene and background of famous events. The
+latter had become conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to
+inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a professional
+showman; and this malice-prepense sort of interest and picturesqueness
+always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the
+unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the
+heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they
+partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers.
+But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private
+sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the
+great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of England; but he loved the old
+villages and their appurtenances, and could dream dreams more moving
+under the shadow of Eastham Yew than in Westminster Abbey itself.
+
+The historic houses and country-seats which were still inhabited were
+still more difficult to get in touch with from the historic point of
+view; the present dazzled the past out of sight. One was told who built
+this facade, who added that wing, who was imprisoned in yonder tower;
+where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the foot of what martyr imprinted the
+Bloody Footstep on the threshold.
+
+But you listened to these tales over a cup of tea in the drawing-room,
+or between the soup and the roast beef at the dinner-table, and
+they were not convincing. How were these ruddy-cheeked, full-bodied,
+hospitable personages who sat about you to be held compatible with the
+romantic periods and characters that they described? The duck and the
+green pease, the plum-pudding and the port, the white neck-cloths and
+the bare necks were too immediate and potent. In many cases, too,
+the denizens of the ancient houses were not lineal descendants of the
+original founders; they were interlopers, by purchase or otherwise. In
+themselves they were kind and agreeable, their manners were excellent,
+they helped one to comprehend the England of the passing moment; but
+they only clipped the wings of imagination and retrospect. It was
+only after an interval of some years that Hawthorne was able so far to
+recover from the effect of their obtrusive existence as to be able to
+see through them and beyond them to the splendid and gloomy vistas in
+front of which they were grouped.
+
+Yet England, past and present, rich and poor, real and ideal, did
+somehow enter into him and become a part of his permanent consciousness,
+and he liked it better than anything else he had known. Even the social
+life, though he came to it under some compulsion, rewarded him in the
+long run. One of the first personal invitations was to the country-seat
+of the Brights, where he met the family and relatives of his friend
+Henry Bright. Bright's father was a remarkable figure; he resembled an
+East-Indian more than an Englishman. He was dark, slender, courteous,
+and vivid; in long after-years I saw Brahmins like him in India. I would
+liken him to a rajah, except that rajahs of his age are commonly become
+gross and heavy from indulgence, whereas he had an almost ascetic
+aspect. His manners were singularly soft and caressing; he courted his
+wife, when he returned each day from business, as if they were still
+in their honeymoon, and his conduct towards all who surrounded him was
+similarly polished. He did not in the least resemble his Saxon son; and
+for my part, looking at him from the primitive boy stand-point, I never
+suspected that he was related to my father's young friend. He had made a
+fortune in colonial trade, and may possibly have been born in India. At
+this juncture the dealings of his firm were chiefly with Australia, and
+the largest merchant steamship then in the world had just been built for
+them, and Hawthorne was invited to the launching. For a British merchant
+prince such an occasion could not but be of supreme importance and
+pride. Mr. Bright's Oriental visage was radiant; his white hair seemed
+to shine with an added lustre; the reserve of the Englishman was
+forgotten, and he showed the excitement and emotion that he felt. There
+was a distinguished company on the great deck to witness his triumph
+and congratulate him upon it. All went well; at the appointed signal the
+retaining obstructions were cut away, and the mighty vessel began its
+descent into the waiting river. A lady of his family smashed a bottle
+of wine over the graceful bows. For a few moments there was a majestic,
+sweeping movement downward; then, of a sudden, it was checked. It was
+as if a great life had been quenched at the instant when its heart first
+began to throb. A murmur of dismay ran through the assemblage; but it
+was in the face of Mr. Bright that the full tragedy of the disaster was
+displayed. Never was seen a swifter change from the highest exultation
+to the depths of consternation. The color left his cheeks; heavy lines
+appeared about his handsome mouth; his eyes became fixed, and seemed to
+sink into his head; his erect figure drooped like that of one who has
+received a mortal blow. It was only that the ship had stuck in the deep
+mud of the river bottom; but all ship-owners are superstitious, and the
+old man foreboded the worst. The ship was floated again some days later;
+but the omens were fulfilled; she was lost on her first voyage. I do not
+remember seeing Mr. Bright after this event, but I know he never again
+was the same man as before.
+
+Richard Monckton Milnes, who was afterwards Lord Houghton, was greatly
+attracted towards my father, who liked him; but circumstances prevented
+their seeing much of each other. Milnes was then forty-five years old;
+he was a Cambridge man, and intimate with Tennyson, Hallam, and other
+men of literary mark, and he was himself a minor poet, and warm in the
+cause of literature. During his parliamentary career, in 1837, he was
+instrumental in passing the copyright act. He had travelled in Greece
+and Italy in his twenties; was fond of society, and society of him. A
+more urbane and attractive English gentleman did not exist; everything
+that a civilized man could care for was at his disposal, and he made the
+most of his opportunities. His manners were quiet and cordial, with a
+touch of romance and poetry mingling with the man-of-the-world tone in
+his conversation, and he was quite an emotional man. I have more than
+once seen tears in his eyes and heard a sob in his voice when matters
+that touched his heart or imagination were discussed. There was, indeed,
+a vein of sadness and pessimism in Milnes, though only his intimates
+were aware of it; it was the pessimism of a man who has too much leisure
+for intellectual analysis and not enough actual work to do to keep him
+occupied. It lent a fine flavor of irony to some of his conversation.
+He was liberal in politics and liberal in his attitude towards life in
+general; but there was not force enough in him, or, at any rate, not
+stimulus enough, to lift him to distinction. Some of his poems, however,
+betrayed a deep and radical vein of thought. He was of middle height,
+well made, light built, with a large and well-formed head and wavy, dark
+hair. His likeness to Longfellow was marked, though he was hardly so
+handsome a man; but the type of head and face was the same--the forehead
+and brain well developed, the lower parts of the countenance small and
+refined, though sensuous. His eyes were dark, brilliant, and expressive.
+He, like the old poet Rogers, made a feature of giving breakfasts to
+chosen friends, and as he had the whole social world to choose from,
+and unfailing good taste, his breakfasts were well worth attending. They
+were real breakfasts--so far as the hour was concerned--not lunches or
+early dinners in masquerade; but wine was served at them, and Milnes
+was very hospitable and had an Anacreontic or Omar touch in him.
+To breakfast with him, therefore, meant--unless you were singularly
+abstemious and strong-minded--to discount the remaining meals of the
+day. But the amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem
+not obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a
+morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of
+that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to be
+burdened by it--at any rate, he did not fifty years ago.
+
+[IMAGE: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES]
+
+Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary
+uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous, fifty
+years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary England. But
+he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his songs; there
+were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his credit published
+during the first quarter of the last century. Procter was, indeed,
+already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and bred to the
+bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the active thirty
+years of his life in the discharge of that function which seems often
+sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of lunacy. He sent my
+father a small volume containing the Songs, and some fragments; they
+fully deserved their reputation. The fragments were mostly scraps of
+dramatic dialogue, of which one at least sticks in my memory:
+
+"She was a princess; but she fell; and now Her shame goes blushing down
+a line of kings."
+
+As I recollect him, he may have looked like a commissioner of lunacy,
+but he did not look like a poet; he was rather undersized, with a
+compact head and a solemn face, and the quietest, most unobtrusive
+bearing imaginable. He was a well-made little man, and he lived to a
+great age, dying some time in the seventies, at the age of eighty-seven.
+He told my father that after leaving Harrow School he was distinguished
+in athletics, and for a time sparred in public with some professional
+bruiser. He had been a school-mate of Byron and Sir Robert Peel, and had
+known Lamb, Kean, and the other lights of that generation. He was a most
+likeable and remunerative companion. His wife, who survived him (living,
+I think, to be over ninety), was a woman of intellect and charm, and she
+retained her attractiveness to the end of her life. There are poets who
+are consumed early by their own fires, and others who are gently warmed
+by them beyond the common span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall
+was one of these, and transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic
+affection, to his wife.
+
+Of renown not less than the song-writer's was the metaphysical
+theologian, James Martineau, then in the Liverpool epoch of his career.
+He was a clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry character, with a somewhat
+Emersonian cast of countenance, but with the Emersonian humanity and
+humility left out. Like Emerson, he had ascended a Unitarian pulpit,
+but, unlike Emerson, he stayed there long after what he was pleased to
+regard as his convictions had ceased to possess even a Unitarian degree
+of religious quality. He was always apostolic in his manner, and his
+utterances were ex cathedra, and yet his whole long life was a story
+of changing views on the subjects he had chosen to be the theme of his
+career.
+
+He was the great opponent of orthodoxy in his day, yet he led his
+followers to no goal more explicit than might be surmised from a study
+of Kant and Hegel. He was, however, sincere in his devotion to
+the will-o'-the-wisp that he conceived to be the truth, and he was
+courageous enough to admit that he never satisfied himself. There was
+chilly and austere attraction about the man; he was so elevated
+and superior that one could hardly help believing that he must know
+something of value, and this illusion was the easier because he did know
+so much in the way of scholarly learning. My father felt respect for
+his character, but was bored by his metaphysics--a form of intellectual
+athletics which he had exhausted while still a young man. James's sister
+Harriet was also of the company. She was so deaf as to be obliged to use
+an ear-trumpet, and she was as positive in her views (which had become
+avowedly atheistic) as her brother, and whenever any one began to
+utter anything with which she disagreed, she silenced him by the simple
+expedient of dropping the ear-trumpet. In herself, she was an agreeable
+old lady; but she seldom let her opinions rest long enough for one to
+get at her on the merely human side, and she cultivated a retired life,
+partly on account of her deafness, partly because her opinions made
+society shy of her, and partly because she did not think society worth
+her time and attention. She was a good woman, with a mind of exceptional
+caliber, but the world admired more than it desired her.
+
+As a relief from the consideration of these exalted personages, I am
+disposed to relate a tragic anecdote about our friend Henry Bright.
+Early in our Rock Ferry residence he came to dine with us--or I rather
+think it was to supper. At any rate, it was an informal occasion, and
+the children were admitted to table. My mother had in the cupboard a jar
+of excellent raspberry jam, and she brought it forth for the delectation
+of our guest. He partook of it liberally, and said he had never eaten
+any jam so good; it had a particular tang to it, he declared, which
+outdid his best recollections of all previous raspberry jam from his
+boyhood up. While he was in the midst of these rhapsodies, and still
+consuming their subject with enthusiasm, my mother, who had taken some
+of the jam on her own plate, suddenly made a ghastly discovery. The
+jam-pot had been for several days standing in the cupboard with its top
+off, or ajar, and an innumerable colony of almost microscopic red ants
+had discovered it, and launched themselves fervently upon it and into
+it; it had held them fast in its sweet but fatal embrace, and other
+myriads had followed their fellows into the same delicious and
+destructive abyss. What the precise color of the ants may have been
+before they became incorporate with the jam is not known; but as the
+case was, they could be distinguished from it only by their voluptuous
+struggles in its controlling stickiness. Only the keenest eye could
+discern them, and the eyes of Henry Bright were among the most
+near-sighted in England. Besides, according to his custom, he was
+talking with the utmost volubility all the time.
+
+What was to be done? My father and mother stealthily exchanged an awful
+look, and the question was settled. It was too late to recall the
+ants which our friend had devoured by tens of thousands. It seemed not
+probable that, were he kept in ignorance of his predicament, they
+would do him any serious bodily injury; whereas, were he enlightened,
+imagination might get in her fatal work. Accordingly, a rigorous silence
+upon the subject was maintained, and the dear innocent actually devoured
+nearly that whole potful of red ants, accompanying the meal with a
+continual psalm of praise of their exquisite flavor; and never till the
+day of his death did he suspect what the secret of that flavor was. I
+believe the Chinese eat ants and regard them as a luxury. Very likely
+they are right; but at that period of my boyhood I had not heard of
+this, and then and often afterwards did I meditate with misgivings upon
+the predicament of Henry Bright's stomach after his banquet.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+     Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--
+     The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--
+     Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The
+     English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's
+     Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction
+     in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding,
+     verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of
+     individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff-dwelling--"The
+     Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A division in
+     the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and
+     card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--
+     Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the
+     cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr.
+     Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of
+     jolly.
+
+That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than
+any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the
+exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience
+vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in
+lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England
+are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of
+the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with
+what we have latterly been used to; but the English lodging-house system
+had peculiarities. You enjoyed independence, but you paid for it with
+inconveniences. The owner of the house furnished you with nothing except
+the house, with its dingy beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything
+else necessary to existence you got for yourself. You made your own
+contracts with butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and
+lighting. Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill
+for the rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or
+of the pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you
+must do it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so
+dingy, the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes
+bed, always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions
+which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic
+moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English
+lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the average
+man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the imagination of
+statisticians. And if the environment shows the man, one cannot help
+rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's forming the
+average man's acquaintance.
+
+There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the
+innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were
+unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit
+yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English
+could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the
+English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than
+Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a pitch
+of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining. There
+was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never be,
+anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease and
+general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the English
+upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a pleasure-dome so
+alluring to mere human nature-especially the English variety of it--as
+was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat. Tennyson's Palace
+of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the most imaginative and
+energetic real-estate dealer could not have got so good a price for it
+as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling of, for example,
+the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you got?" asked an
+American Minister of the duke of the period, after meeting a fresh
+gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the grounds, at each
+new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy about forty," replied
+the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand for precise information
+concerning the facts of his own establishment, which, until that moment,
+he probably supposed had been attended to by Providence. And really,
+the machinery of life in such a place is so hidden, it is so nearly
+automatic, that one might easily believe it to be operated according to
+some law of nature. The servants are (or were) so well trained, they did
+their jobs so well, that you were conscious only of their being done;
+you never saw them a-doing. The thought happened to cross your mind, of
+a morning, that you would like to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you
+were not aware that you had mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock
+the carriage was, somehow, at the door. At dinner, the dishes appeared
+and disappeared, the courses succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if
+by mere fiat of the will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman
+or butler meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change
+your dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could
+you recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had
+been concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed
+poking; you glanced away for a moment; when you looked at the fire again
+it had been poked--had, to all appearance, poked itself. And so in all
+relations; to desire was to get; to picture a condition was to realize
+it. You were shielded on every side by rose-leaves of culture and
+refinement; all you had to do was to allow your mind to lapse from
+one conception to another, and then, lifting your languorous eyelids,
+behold! there you were--as Mr. James would say.
+
+But I set out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock
+Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English respectable
+middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable, or not
+altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until you have
+felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England really is.
+Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull, ignorant, material,
+selfish, prejudiced, conventional; they were hospitable, on conventional
+lines; they were affable and even social, so long as you did not awaken
+their prejudices; they were confidential and communicative, if you
+conceded at the outset that England was the best of all countries and
+the English the leading nation of the world. They read a newspaper
+resembling in every particular themselves; usually several of them
+united in a subscription to a single copy, which passed solemnly from
+hand to hand. They were slow and methodical, never taking short-cuts
+across lots; but they were punctual; they knew their own business and
+business associates, their circle of relatives, their dwelling and
+social place, and Burke's Peerage; but they knew nothing else. In a
+group of intelligent persons of this degree, question was raised, once
+upon a time, of two English poets; but not one of the group had heard
+of either; the poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This may
+seem merely absurd or apocryphal; but consider the terrible power of
+concentration which it implies! And consider the effect which the impact
+against such a clay wall must make upon a man and an American like my
+father!
+
+Well, the very surprise and novelty of the adventure amused and
+interested him, and even won a good deal upon his sympathies. He loved
+the solid earth as well as the sky above it, and he was glad of the
+assurance that this people existed, though he might be devoutly thankful
+that two hundred years of America had opened so impassable a gulf
+between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability may
+have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on
+his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always
+self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably
+not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park sort of
+people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to
+be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father,
+therefore, was never obliged to say, "I'm glad you liked it" to them.
+And that relief, of itself, must have served as a substantial bond of
+fellowship.
+
+Rock Park, as I remember it, was a damp, winding, verdurous street,
+protected at each end by a small granite lodge, and studded throughout
+its length with stuccoed villas. The villas were mended-on to each other
+(as one of the children expressed it) two and two; they had front yards
+filled with ornamental shrubbery, and gardens at the back, an acre or
+two in extent; they were fenced in with iron pickets, and there were
+gates to the driveways, on which the children swung. Every normal child
+supposes that gates are made for no other purpose. The trees were not
+large, but there were many of them, and they were thick with leaves.
+There was a damp, arboreal smell everywhere, mingled with the finer
+perfume of flowers and of the hawthorns and yellow laburnums. Flowers,
+especially purple English violets, grew profusely in the gardens, and
+gooseberry-bushes, bearing immense gooseberries such as our climate
+does not nourish. There were also armies of garden--snails, handsome
+gasteropods, which were of great interest to me; for I was entering,
+at this period, upon a passionate pursuit of natural history. For many
+years I supposed that the odor of the violets proceeded from snails, and
+to this day I always associate snails with violets, or vice versa. Una,
+Rose, and I were given each a section of a garden-bed for our own; I
+cultivated mine so assiduously that it became quite a deep hole; but I
+do not recall that anything ever grew in it. The soil was a very rich
+loam, and ceaseless diligence must have been required in me to keep it
+barren.
+
+Gray skies, frequent showers, a cool or semi-chilly mildness, varied
+every little while by the intrusion of a yellow fog from Liverpool,
+over the river--such was the climate of Rock Park. There were occasional
+passages of sunshine; but never, that I recollect, an entire day of it.
+The stucco of the villas was streaked with green dampness, and peeling
+off here and there. I suspect that the fashion of castellated, stuccoed
+villas may have been set in the eighteenth century by Horace Walpole
+when he built that marvellous edifice known as Strawberry Hill. I first
+saw that achievement twenty years after the time of which I now write,
+and recognized in it, as I thought, the parent of my former Rock Park
+home and of innumerable of the latter's kindred. Strawberry Hill is
+sprawling and vast, the progeny are liliputian, but the family likeness
+is striking. The idea is to build something which shall seem to be all
+that it is not. The gray-white stucco pretends to be stone, and the
+lines of the stone courses are carefully painted on the roughened
+surface; but nobody, since Horace's time, could ever have been deceived
+by them. The castellated additions and ornamentation are all bogus, of
+the cheapest and vulgarest sort. It is singular that a people so sincere
+and solid as the English are supposed to be should adopt this fashion
+for their dwellings. But then they are used to follow conventions and
+adopt fashions set them by those whom they esteem to be their betters,
+without thought, or activity of individual conscience. It is rather
+matter for wonder, remembering what rascals and humbugs many of their
+"betters" have been, that middle-class England is not more of a whited
+sepulchre than it is. I do not mean to cast any reflections upon the
+admirable and beguiling Horace; but he was a highly civilized person,
+and had a brother named Robert, and perhaps solid sincerity should not
+be expected from such a combination.
+
+Our villa, within, was close and comfortable enough, for its era
+and degree; but the furniture was ponderous and ugly to the point of
+nightmare. The chairs, tables, and sofas wore the semblance of solid
+mahogany, twisted and tortured in a futile struggle to achieve elegance;
+the carvings, or mouldings, were screwed or glued on, and the lines of
+structure, intended to charm the eye, accomplished only the discomfort
+of the body. The dining-table was like a plateau; the sideboard
+resembled a cliff-dwelling. The carpets were of the Brussels ilk:
+acanthus-leaves and roses and dahlias wreathed in inextricable
+convolutions, glowing with the brightest and most uncompromising
+hues. The lace curtains were imitation lace; the damask curtains
+were imitation damask. The bedsteads.... But this is not a History of
+England. After all, we were snug and comfortable. On the walls were
+portraits of the family whose house this was; by name, Campbell; the
+house-painter, or wood-grainer, one would suppose, had a leaning towards
+this branch of art. I never saw the originals of these portraits, but,
+upon the assumption that they had been faithfully interpreted by the
+artist, I used to think, in my childish folly, that the refrain of the
+old song, "The Campbells are Coming," was meant as a phrase or threat to
+frighten people. Who would not have run upon such an announcement? As
+I have already made one confession in these pages not reflecting credit
+upon myself, I may as well make another now. Just thirty years after
+the events I am describing, somebody wrote to me from Rock Park, stating
+that the local inhabitants were desirous of putting up on the house
+which Hawthorne had occupied there a marble or bronze slab, recording
+the fact for the benefit of pilgrims. The committee, however, did not
+know which of three or four houses was the right one, and the writer
+enclosed photographs of them all, and requested me to put a cross over
+our former habitation. Now, all the houses in Rock Park had been turned
+out of the same mould, and I knew no more than my interrogator which was
+which. But I reflected that the committee had been put to trouble and
+expense for photographs, postage-stamps, and what not, and that all that
+was really wanted was something to be sentimental over. So, rather than
+disappoint them, I resorted to a kind of sortes Virgillana; I shut my
+eyes, turned round thrice, and made a mark at hazard on the line of
+photographs. The chances against my having hit it right were only four
+to one; the committee were satisfied, the pilgrims have been made happy,
+and it is difficult to see where harm has been done. Nevertheless, the
+matter has weighed somewhat on my conscience ever since, and I am glad
+to have thus lightened myself of it. What would one better do in such
+circumstances? Is history written in this way?
+
+The custom of our family in America had been to take all our meals
+together; but in England the elders take lunch at noon, tea at four or
+five, and dinner at seven or eight, while the children dine at noon and
+sup at six. This arrangement was adopted in Rock Park. My father used to
+leave home for the consulate at nine, and return--unless kept away by an
+official or social engagement--at five or six. There was appointed
+for us children a nurse or governess, to oversee and administer our
+supplies; our father and mother dining, with such guests as might happen
+to be present, late in the evening. We were sometimes allowed to come in
+at dessert, to eat a few nuts and raisins and exhibit our infantile good
+manners. This domestic separation was a matter of much speculation and
+curiosity to our immature minds; we used to haunt the hall through which
+the servants carried the dishes, smoking and fragrant, from the kitchen
+to the dining-room, and once in a while the too-indulgent creatures
+would allow us to steal something. How ravishingly delicious things thus
+acquired taste! And we, fancying, of course, that they must be not less
+delicious for the folks at table, used to marvel how they could ever
+bear to leave off eating. The dinners were certainly rather elaborate
+compared with the archaic repasts of Salem or of Concord; but they were
+as far inferior in grandeur and interminableness to the astonishing
+banquets at which, in some great houses, our father and mother were
+present. Consider, for example, this dinner, in no way remarkable among
+such functions, at the Hollands's, about this time. There were twelve
+persons at table. The service was of solid silver; two enormous covers
+were on the table before the soup was served; being removed, they
+revealed turbot and fried fish. Then followed boiled turkey and
+roast goose, and between them innumerable smaller dishes, including
+chicken-pies, ragouts, cutlets, fricasees, tongue, and ham, all being
+placed in their silver receptacles on the table; on the sideboard was
+a vast round of boiled beef, as a precaution against famine. With the
+sweets were served grouse and pheasants; there were five kinds of wine,
+not including the champagne, which was consumed as a collateral all
+the way along. The pudding which followed these trifles was an heroic
+compound, which Gargantua might have flinched from; then came the nuts
+and raisins, then the coffee, then the whiskey and brandy. There were
+people in England, half a century ago, who ate this sort of dinners six
+or seven times a week, and thought nothing of it. They actually ate and
+drank them--did not merely glance at them and shake their heads. The
+ancient Scandinavians, Gauls, Saxons, and Normans, of whom they were
+descendants, could not have done more. One cannot help respecting such
+prodigious trencher-men and women, or wonder that the poverty-stricken
+class were ill-fed. Dinner in England had become a very different thing
+when I lived there twenty years later, and though port and Madeira were
+generally on the table, the only man whom I saw habitually drink them
+was Robert Browning! Possibly this is the reason the British got such a
+thrashing in South Africa the other day.
+
+After dinner at Rock Park--or, if it were to be a late affair,
+before--we would have family prayers, in which the servants joined. This
+was in deference to English custom; not that we were irreligious, but we
+had not before been accustomed to express our religious feelings in just
+that manner. All being grouped in a semicircle, my father would open the
+Bible and read a chapter; then he would take a prayer-book containing
+thirty or forty well-considered addresses to the Almighty, and everybody
+would kneel down and cover their eyes with their hands. The "Amen"
+having been reached, and echoed by every one, all would rise to their
+former positions, and the servants would file out of the room. It
+must have been somewhat of an effort for my father to go through
+this ceremony; but I think he did it, not only for the reason above
+mentioned, but also because he thought it right that his children
+should have the opportunity of gaining whatever religious sentiment such
+proceedings might inculcate. But I do not think that he had much faith
+in the practice as an English institution. Indeed, he has somewhere
+written that the English "bring themselves no nearer to God when they
+pray than when they play cards."
+
+[IMAGE: ROBERT BROWNING]
+
+I understood long afterwards, as I did not at the time, how closely my
+father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of
+their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went
+pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our
+own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never sent
+to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were taught
+our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In addition to the
+constant walks which I took with my father, he encouraged me to join
+a cricket club in the Park, and sent me to Huguenin's gymnasium in
+Liverpool, to the Cornwallis swimming-baths, and to a dancing-academy
+kept by a highly ornamental Frenchman, and he bought me an enormous
+steel hoop, and set me racing after it at headlong speed. Nor did he
+neglect to stimulate us in the imaginative and aesthetic side. From the
+date of our settlement in England to the end of his life, he read aloud
+to us in the evenings many of the classics of literature. Spenser's The
+Faerie Queene, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the poems and novels of
+Scott, Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales, much of Defoe and Swift,
+Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake field, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (he
+himself was very fond of that poem), and many other things, and I cannot
+overestimate the good they did me. His talks to me during our walks
+gave me, under the guise of pleasantry, not so much specific information
+concerning things (though that was not wanting), but--character; that
+is, the questions he put to me, the remarks and comments he made, the
+stories he told, were all calculated to give me a high idea of human
+duties and aspirations; to encourage generosity, charity, courage,
+patriotism, and independence. From the reading of The Faerie Queene and
+of Don Quixote I conceived a vehement infatuation for mediaeval chivalry
+and knight-errantry; I adopted the motto of the order, "Be faithful,
+brave, and true in deed and word"; and I indulged in waking dreams of
+heroic adventures in quest of fair renown, and to succor the oppressed.
+All this he encouraged and abetted, though always, too, with a sort
+of twinkle of the eye, lest I should take myself too seriously and wax
+priggish. He permitted me to have a breastplate and a helmet with a
+golden dragon crest (made by our nurse out of pasteboard covered with
+tinsel-paper), and he bought me a real steel sword with a brass hilt
+wrought in open-work; I used to spend hours polishing it, and picturing
+to myself the giants and ogres I would slay with it. Finally--with that
+humorous arching of the eyebrow of his--he bade me kneel down, and with
+my sword smote me on the shoulder, and dubbed me knight, saying, "Rise
+up, Sir Julian!" It was worth many set moral homilies to me. He knew the
+advantage of leading a boy to regard the practice of boyish and manly
+virtues not as a burden but as a privilege and boon, and of making
+the boy's own conscience his judge. His handling of the matter was,
+of course, modified so as to reach the inner springs of my particular
+nature and temperament, which he thoroughly understood. Withal, he
+never failed to hold up to ridicule anything showing a tendency to the
+sentimental; he would test me on this point in various ways, and always
+betrayed pleasure when he found me quick to detect the sentimental or
+mawkish taint in literature or life. I breathed a manly, robust, and
+bracing atmosphere in his company, and when I reflect upon what were
+my proclivities to folly during this impressionable period, I thank my
+stars for such a father.
+
+There was abundant quiet and seclusion in Rock Park, and had my father
+been able to do any writing, he could hardly have found a retreat more
+suitable. The tradesmen called early at the houses in the Park, their
+wagon-wheels making no sound upon the unpaved street, and the two
+policemen, who lived in the stone lodges, kept the place free from
+beggars and peddlers. These policemen, pacing slowly along in their
+uniforms, rigid and dignified, had quite an imposing aspect, and it was
+some time before we children discovered that they were only men, after
+all. Each had a wife and children, who filled to overflowing the tiny
+habitations; when their blue coats and steel-framed hats were off, they
+were quite humble persons; one of them eked out his official salary by
+mending shoes. After following with awe the progress along the sidewalk
+of the officer of public order, stalking with solemn and measured gait,
+and touching his hat, with a hand encased in a snow-white cotton glove,
+to such of the denizens of the Park as he might encounter, it was
+quite like a fairy-tale transformation to see him squatting in soiled
+shirt-sleeves on his cobbler's bench, drawing waxed thread through holes
+in a boot-sole. I once saw one of them, of a Sunday afternoon, standing
+at ease in the doorway of his lodge, clad in an old sack-coat which I
+recognized as having been my father's. I am constitutionally reverent
+of law and order; but the revelation of the domestic lives of these
+policemen gave me an insight, which I have never since lost, into the
+profound truth that the man and the officer are twain.
+
+There were perhaps twenty families living in the Park, of whom we became
+acquainted with two only; the people who lived next door to us (whose
+name I have forgotten), and Mr. and Mrs. Squarey, who dwelt higher up
+the street. The people next door had two boys of about my own age, with
+whom I played cricket, and it was from the back windows of their house
+that I saw for the first time an exhibition of fireworks in their
+garden; I remember that when, just before the show began, they put out
+the lamp in the room, I asked to have it relighted, in order that
+I might see the as yet unexperienced wonder. There are folks who go
+hunting for the sun with a lantern.
+
+Mr. Squarey was tall and stiff of figure, with a singularly square
+countenance, with a short whisker on each side of it; but spiritually he
+was most affable and obliging; so was his wife; but as she was short and
+globular, my father was wont to refer to her, in the privacy of domestic
+intercourse, as Mrs. Roundey. They were profuse in invitations to go
+with us to places--to Chester, to the Welsh show-places, and so forth;
+and although I think my father and mother would rather have gone alone,
+they felt constrained to accept these suggestions. It was in their
+company, at all events, that I first saw Chester "Rows"; and also,
+from some coign of vantage on those delightful old walls, an English
+horse-race, with jockeys in silk caps and jackets tinted like the
+rainbow. Mr. Squarey's demeanor towards my sisters and myself was
+like that of the benevolent tutor in Sandford and Merton, with which
+excellent work we were very conversant at that time; as, likewise, with
+Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, and with still another engaging volume
+called, I think, the Budget of something; at any rate, it had two or
+three little boys and girls in it, who were anxious to acquire useful
+and curious information on many subjects, which was afforded them
+in generous measure by their highly cultivated elders. Such
+flower-garlanded instruction was the best specifically juvenile
+literature which those primitive ages afforded. "Pray, mamma, why does
+the sun rise in the east instead of in the west?" "Pray, papa, why was
+King Alfred called 'The Good'?" Mrs. Markham's History of England was
+constructed upon the same artless principle. What a distance we have
+travelled since then!
+
+But it was a good and happy life in Rock Park, and I think our father
+and mother enjoyed it almost as much as we children did. They were
+meeting people many of whom were delightful--I shall try to paint the
+portraits of some of them in the next chapter--and they were seeing
+towns and castles and places of historic and picturesque interest; and
+my father was earning more money than ever before, though less than a
+quarter as much as he would have earned had not Congress, soon after his
+accession to office, cut down the emoluments. This was England; the
+Old Home, and the Old World, for the understanding of which they had
+prepared themselves all their lives previous. My father once said, "If
+England were all the world, it would still have been worth while for the
+Creator to have made it." The children were radiantly content with their
+lot; and it is on record that the little boy once remarked, "I don't
+remember when I came down from heaven; but I'm glad I happened to
+tumble into so good a family." The same individual, rolling on the
+floor in excess of mirth over some childish comicality, panted out, "Oh,
+mamma, my ball of jolly is so big I can't breathe!" The ball of jolly
+became a household word for years thereafter. It was well nourished in
+those days.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+     Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--
+     "Lovely, but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the
+     artist--English robin redbreast--A sad and weary old man--
+     "Most indelicate woman I've ever known"--Perfectly chaste--
+     Something human stirred dimly--"She loves me; she loves
+     me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous and
+     thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit
+     lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and
+     charming woman of genius--Deep and wide well of human
+     sympathy--The whooping-cough.
+
+In the spring of 1854 we were visited by John O'Sullivan, his wife and
+mother, and a young relative of theirs, Miss Ella Rogers. O'Sullivan
+had been appointed Minister to the Court of Portugal, and was on his way
+thither. He was a Democrat of old standing; had edited the Democratic
+Review in 1837, and had made my father's acquaintance at that time
+through soliciting contributions from him; later they became close
+friends, and when my sister Una was born, he sent her a silver cup,
+and was ever after called "Uncle John" in the family, and, also,
+occasionally, "the Count"--a title which, I believe, had some warrant in
+his ancestry. For, although an American, Uncle John was born at sea
+off the coast of Spain, of an Irish father and a mother of aristocratic
+connections or extraction (I am a little uncertain, I find, on this
+point); I think her parents were Italian. Uncle John had all the
+charming qualities of the nations mentioned, and none of their
+objectionable ones; though this is not to say that he was devoid of
+tender faults, which were, if anything, more lovable than his virtues.
+Beneath a tranquil, comely, and gentle exterior burned all the fire
+and romance of the Celt; his faith and enthusiasm in "projects" knew no
+bounds; he might be deceived and bankrupted a hundred times, and
+would toe the mark the next time with undiminished confidence. He was
+continually, and in the quietest way, having the most astonishing and
+cataclysmic adventures; he would be blown up, as it were, by a dynamite
+explosion, and presently would return from the sky undisturbed, with
+only a slight additional sparkle in his soft eyes, and with the lock of
+hair that fell gracefully over his forehead only a trifle disordered.
+The most courteous and affectionate of men, with the most yielding and
+self-effacing manners, he had the spirit of a paladin, and was afraid of
+nothing. He would empty his pockets--or if, as too often happened, they
+were already empty, he would pledge his credit to help a friend out of
+a hole; and, on the other hand, he was always hot upon the trail of
+a dazzling fortune, which, like Emerson's Forerunners, never was
+overtaken. It would not long have availed him, had it been otherwise,
+for never was there a Monte Cristo who lavished wealth as O'Sullivan
+habitually did in anticipation, and would undoubtedly have done in
+fact had the opportunity been afforded him. He was gifted with a low,
+melodious, exquisitely modulated voice, and a most engaging and winning
+manner, and when he set out to picture the simple and easy methods
+whereby he proposed to make millions, it was next to impossible to
+resist him. He was like a beautiful, innocent, brilliant child, grown
+up, endowed with an enchanter's wand, which was forever promising all
+the kingdoms of the earth to him, but never (as our modern phrase is)
+delivered the goods. He regarded my father as a king of men, and he had,
+times without number, been on the very edge of making him, as well as
+himself, a multifold millionaire. However, President Pierce did what he
+could for him by giving him the Portuguese mission (after first offering
+it to my father), and O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became
+interested--abstractly--in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he
+clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a
+thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly
+with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father finally, in
+1858 or 1859, advanced him ten thousand dollars to finance the scheme. I
+saw the dear old gentleman, a generation later, in New York; he had the
+same clear, untroubled, tranquil face as of old; his hair, though
+gray, was as thick and graceful as ever; his manner was as sweet and
+attractive; but though, in addition to his other accomplishments, he had
+become an advanced spiritualist, he had not yet coined into bullion his
+golden imagination. He had forgotten the Spanish copper-mines, and I
+took care not to remind him of them. Peace to his generous, ardent, and
+loving soul!
+
+Uncle John's wife was a good mate for him, in her own way as brilliant
+and fascinating as he and with an unalterable belief in her husband's
+destiny. She was a tall, slender woman, with kindling eyes, a lovely
+smile, and a wonderful richness and vivacity of conversation; nor have
+I ever since known so truly witty a woman. But she lacked the delightful
+mellowness and tenderness for which Uncle John was so remarkable.
+The mother, Madame O'Sullivan, as she was called, was a type of the
+finegrained, gently bred aristocrat, every outline softened and made
+gracious by the long lapse of years through which she had lived. She sat
+like a picture of reverend but still animated age, with white, delicate
+lace about her pale cheeks and dark, kindly, weary eyes, and making a
+frost-work over her silvery hair. As for Miss Ella Rogers, it is with
+some embarrassment that I refer to her; inasmuch as I fell violently in
+love with her at first sight, and I have reason to think that she never
+fully appreciated or adequately responded to my passion, though, at the
+time, I was nearly one-third of her age--she being five-and-twenty. She
+was a dark and lively beauty, thoroughly self-possessed, and versed in
+social accomplishments, and gifted with dramatic talent. She afterwards
+made a great impression in the court of the Portuguese monarch, and more
+than once the King himself chose her as his partner in the ball. Reports
+of these gayeties came to my ears; and I found the other day part of
+a letter which I addressed to her, remonstrating against these royal
+flirtations. It is written in pencil, upon the blue office-paper of
+the consulate, and I can recall distinctly the small, indignant boy and
+knight-errant, sitting at the desk opposite his hugely diverted father,
+and beginning his epistle thus: "Lovely, but reprehensible Madham!"
+I suspect that I consulted my father as to the spelling of the second
+adjective, for it shows signs of having been overhauled; but after that
+my feelings became too strong for me, and the remainder of the letter is
+orthographically so eccentric that it was probably cast aside and a copy
+made of it. But the rough draught, by some inconceivable chance, was
+kept, and turns up now, after half a century, with a strange thread of
+pathos woven by time into the texture of its absurdity. Poor, little,
+lovely reprehensible Madham! Her after-career was not a happy one.
+
+These agreeable persons filled our stuccoed villa full, and gave
+poignant addition to the quiet, gray beauty of that English spring. A
+year or so later, when my mother's health compelled her to escape to a
+warmer climate from fog-ridden Liverpool, she went with my sisters to
+Lisbon, where the O'Sullivans were by that time established, and spent
+several months with them, and saw all the splendors of the naive but
+brilliant little court of Dom Pedro V. She brought home a portfolio
+of etchings presented to her, and done by his youthful Majesty; which
+indicate that his throne, little as he cared for it, preserved him from
+the mortification of failing as an artist.
+
+Early in the winter of the following year (1855), Mr. James Buchanan,
+appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, found his way to my
+father's retreat in Rock Park. The English winter was a mild affair
+compared with our recent experiences of the arctic snows of Lenox; there
+was no coasting, and not much snow-balling; but we had the pleasure of
+making friends with the English robin-redbreast, a most lovable little
+creature, who, every morning, hopped confidingly on our window-sill and
+took bread-crumbs almost from our hands. The old American diplomatist
+and President that was to be (though he vehemently disclaimed any such
+possibility) distracted our attention from robin for a day or two.
+He had the aspect, perhaps cultivated for political and democratic
+purposes, of a Pennsylvania farmer; he was, I believe, born on a farm in
+Franklin County, in that State, at the beginning of the last decade of
+the eighteenth century. He was tall and ungainly in figure, though he
+bore himself with a certain security and dignity; his head was high
+and thinly covered with gray hair; he carried it oddly, a little on
+one side; it was said at the time that this was due to his having once
+attempted suicide by cutting his throat. His visage--heavy, long, and
+noticeable--had the typical traits of the American politician of that
+epoch; his eyes were small, shrewd, and twinkling; there was a sort of
+professional candor in his bearing, but he looked like a sad and weary
+old man. He talked somewhat volubly to my father, who kept him going by
+a question now and then, as his way generally was with visitors. There
+was a flavor of rusticity in his speech; he was not a man of culture or
+polish, though unquestionably of great experience of the world. He was
+dressed in a wide-skirted coat of black broadcloth, and wore a white
+choker put on a little askew. The English, who were prone to be critical
+of our representatives, made a good deal of fun of Mr. Buchanan, and
+told anecdotes about him which were probably exaggerated or apocryphal.
+It was alleged, for example, that, speaking of the indisposition of a
+female relative of his, he had observed that it was due to the severity
+of the English climate. "She never enjoyed delicate health at home," he
+had declared; "in fact, she was always one of the most indelicate women
+I've ever known." And it was asserted that he had been admonished by
+the Lord High Chamberlain, or by the Gold Stick-in-Waiting, for
+expectorating upon the floor of her Majesty's palace at a levee. Such
+ribaldries used to be popular in English mouths concerning American
+visitors before the war; they were all of similar tenor. Mrs. Abbott
+Lawrence was described as having bought a handsome shawl at a shop
+on Lord Street, in Liverpool, and to have walked down that populous
+thoroughfare with her new purchase on her shoulders, ignorant that
+it bore the legend, inscribed on a white card, which the salesman had
+neglected to remove, "Perfectly chaste." The same lady was reported as
+saying, in asking an invitation to a ball on behalf of Mrs. Augustus
+Peabody, of Boston, "I assure you, on our side of the water, Mrs.
+Peabody is much more accustomed to grant favors than to ask them." Such
+anecdotes seem to bear upon them the stamp of the British manufacturer.
+There would not seem to be much harm in them, yet it is such things
+that sometimes interfere most acutely with the entente cordials between
+nations. We had another glimpse of Mr. Buchanan, in London, about a year
+later, and he then remarked to my mother, indirectly referring to such
+reports, that the Queen had treated him very kindly. For the present, he
+faded from the Rock Park horizon, and we returned to the robin; nor have
+I been able to understand how it happened that he made so distinct an
+impression upon my memory. But a child's memory is unaccountable, both
+in what it loses and in what it retains.
+
+
+One Sunday forenoon, when it was not too cold for the young folks to
+be swinging on that gate which has been mentioned, and the elders were
+in-doors, enjoying the holiday in their own way, we descried an old
+gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he
+presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt hat
+was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled; his
+boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and there
+was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness in
+his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with the
+manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the house,
+and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat a
+fashionable tattoo with the knocker.
+
+Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable personage
+sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but modulated to the
+inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many small gestures, and
+grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his ancient teeth; he
+laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat. There was about him
+an air of determined cheerfulness and affability, though between the
+efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old eyes and the lines of
+his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss my sisters, but they
+drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry one with its ragged
+nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled my younger sister to
+his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and solemnly into him with
+that persistence which characterizes little girls of four or five who
+are not quite sure of their ground. Her smooth, pink-and-white cheeks
+and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly with his seamed yellowness and
+blinking grin; for a long time he coquetted at her, and played peep-bo,
+without disturbing her gravity, making humorous side comments to the
+on-lookers meanwhile. There was a ragged and disorderly mop of gray
+hair on his head, which showed very dingy beside the clear auburn of
+the child's. One felt a repulsion from him, and yet, as he chatted and
+smirked and acted, there was a sort of fascination in him, too. Some
+original force and fire of nature still glowed and flickered in his
+old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of
+self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness
+finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands,
+emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, "There--there it is!
+I knew I'd get it; she loves me--she loves me!" He then permitted her to
+slip down from his knee and withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk
+which our entrance had interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom
+we youngsters knew nothing--though our ignorance only argued ourselves
+unknown, for he named persons all famous in their day. He had seen
+George IV., Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with
+Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of
+elder brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he
+had quaffed mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors
+shoulder to shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his
+familiar stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his
+finger-ends; he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if
+there were any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage
+we desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was
+the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been
+utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the first
+half of the last century; he was such a character as could flourish only
+in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in 1785, and was
+now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started in life
+poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less useful
+connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had somehow
+got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the basis of
+his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence, his
+faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of shame,
+conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody could
+tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good things of the
+world. After maintaining his ground during the first twenty or thirty
+years, it had probably been easier for him to forge along afterwards,
+for he could impose upon the new generation with his stories of success
+in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was by nature, the
+external polish and trick of good form which he had acquired, and, no
+doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had influenced men
+to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him extraordinary
+good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice married, and had
+many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and liaisons had been
+innumerable, and they had by no means been confined to the lower ranks
+of society. That he was a practised liar there can be no doubt, but he
+had the long memory which the proverb recommends to liars, and he was
+so circumspect that few of his claims and pretensions lacked solid basis
+enough to make them pass current in a hurrying and heedless world. Now,
+however, in his age, he was wellnigh at the end of his tether; what we
+should call his "pull" was losing its efficiency; he was lapsing to the
+condition where he would offer to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales
+or to Baron Rothschild, and then ask him for the loan of five pounds--or
+half a crown, as the case might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He
+haunted my father for a year or two more, and then vanished I know not
+where.
+
+Poor, dingy old Jerdan purported to be himself a literary man,
+though the only thing of his that I ever heard of was a work in
+four pretentious volumes of "wretched twaddle"--as my father called
+them--which he published under the title of My Autobiography. It
+contained a long array of renowned names, with passages appended of
+perfectly empty and conventional comment.
+
+But other men crossed our path who had much sounder claims to renown in
+literature; among them Samuel Warren, author of half a dozen books, two
+of which are still sometimes heard of--_The Diary of a Late Physician_
+and _Ten Thousand a Year_. He lived upon the reputation which these
+brought him, though they were published, the first as long ago as 1830
+and the other only ten years later. Like many other authors, he fancied
+himself capable of things far better than belonged to his true metier;
+and among the books in my father's library is one called _The Moral and
+Intellectual Development of the Present Age_--a thin volume, despite
+its portentous and thundering title--it carries the gloss, in Warren's
+handwriting, "the fruit of many a long year's reflection." So does every
+light comedian imagine that he can play Hamlet. Of Warren himself I
+barely recall a slight, light figure with a sharp nose and a manner
+lacking in repose; indeed, he was very much like a light comedian in
+light comedy, eager to hold the centre of the stage, full of small
+movements and remarks, and--which more interested us children--with
+a gift for turning himself into other people by slight contortions
+of countenance and alterations of voice. The histrionic abilities of
+Dickens probably affected the social antics of many writers at this
+epoch. Warren also told stories in a vivacious and engaging manner,
+though, as they were about things and people out of the sphere of his
+younger auditors, I remember only the way of the telling, not what was
+told. I recalled, later, his anecdotes of Kit North, who was a friend of
+his, on account of the contrast between the stalwart proportions of that
+old worthy and the diminutive physique of the novelist; they must have
+looked, together, like a bear and a monkey. Warren was born in Wales,
+though whether of Welsh ancestry I know not.
+
+When we saw him he was only a trifle over five-and-forty years of age,
+so his famous books must have been written when he was hardly more than
+a boy.
+
+As for Layard, eminent in his time for his work in Nineveh and Babylon,
+and afterwards as a statesman, he did not, I think, come to Rock Park,
+nor am I sure that I ever saw him. And yet it seems to me that I have
+the picture in my mind of a vigorous, frank, agreeable personage who
+was he; not a large man, still less a handsome one, but full of life,
+manliness, and honest English simplicity. He was at this time, like so
+many of his countrymen, very anxious concerning the Crimean War, then in
+its first stages, and vehemently opposed to the policy which had brought
+it about, for, up to that time, England and Russia had been on friendly
+terms, and Layard could see no promising or useful future for the
+Turk. My father shared his views, and he wrote the following passage
+in commenting upon the general European situation of that day and the
+prospects for England. It has never been printed, because it stood only
+for the sentiment of the moment, but may be opportunely quoted now that
+the aspect of European politics shows symptoms of soon undergoing vital
+changes. "The truth is," wrote my father, "there is a spirit lacking in
+England which we in America do not lack; and for the want of it she will
+have to resign a foremost position among the nations, even if there
+were not enough other circumstances to compel her to do so. Her good
+qualities are getting out of date; at all events, there should be
+something added to them in the present stage of the world." England has
+a good deal changed since those words were written, and the changes have
+probably been mainly for the better, though all the important ones have
+caused our old mother discomfort and embarrassment. The medicine of
+a new age, the subtle infiltration of anti-insular ideas, the slow
+emergence of the democracy have given her many qualms, but they are
+wholesome ones. Her best and most cultivated minds are now on the side
+of progress, instead of holding by the past, and, should the pinch come,
+these may avail to save her better than martinet generals or unwieldy
+fleets. The "spirit lacking" in her in 1855 may, perhaps, be found in
+them. Whether the spirit in question be as conspicuous with us as it
+used to be is another matter.
+
+Henry Bright was still our most frequent visitor, and he brought us the
+news and gossip of the world. It was in 1855 that Millais married the
+lady who had been Mrs. Ruskin. English society was much fluttered
+by this event, and many of Ruskin's friends cut him for a time in
+consequence of it. Ruskin was a man of a rare type, not readily
+understood in England, where a man is expected, in the fundamental
+qualities of his nature at least, to be like everybody else. There are
+two noted characters in history with whom, in some respects, he might be
+compared, Isaac Newton being one and Abelard the other. All three were
+men in whom, owing to causes either natural or accidental, the intellect
+was able to absorb all the energies of the nature. The intellect thus
+acquired extraordinary power and brilliance, and appropriated to itself,
+in a sort of image, as it were, the qualities which no longer possessed
+manifestation on the material plane. Nothing out of the way would,
+therefore, be noticed, unless or until some combination of circumstances
+should bring the exceptional condition into every-day light. This
+happened with Ruskin, and he was, of course, unable to regard the
+matter in the same light as his critics did. He viewed his wife's
+disinclination towards him by the light of mere cold logic; and the
+reason his friends were alienated from him was, not that her grounds
+of objection to him were justifiable, but that Ruskin (according to the
+common report of the time, as quoted by Mr. Bright) did not see why he
+and she and Millais should discontinue their life in common as before.
+Neither Millais nor Mrs. Ruskin would, of course, accede to this
+proposition, and the divorce was accordingly obtained. Ruskin intended
+simply to show magnanimity, and in the course of years this was
+recognized and he was forgiven, just as we forgive a person for being
+color-blind. In our present stage of civilization we must, in certain
+matters, follow strict convention on peril of ostracism, and nothing
+is less readily condoned in a man's conduct than any suspicion of
+complaisance. I did not see either Ruskin or Millais until 1879 or 1880,
+of which beholding I will speak when the time comes.
+
+But we had with us for a short time a famous and charming woman of
+genius, who made me for a season forget my infatuation for the beautiful
+Ella Rogers. This was Charlotte Cushman. The acquaintance then begun was
+renewed in Italy, and maintained till the end of her life. Such is the
+power of the spiritual in nature and character to dominate and even
+render invisible the physical, that I was astonished, in after years, to
+hear Charlotte referred to as a woman of plain or unattractive features.
+To me, won from the first by the expression, the voice, the sphere, the
+warmth, strength, and nobility of her presence, she had always seemed
+one of the handsomest as well as most delightful of women. She was in
+her fortieth year, but she had already announced her purpose of retiring
+from the stage. Some of her best work was done in the following twenty
+years. Critics might call her face plain, or ugly, if they chose, but
+there was no doubt that its range of expression was vast and poignant,
+that it could reflect with immense energy the thoughts of the mind, and
+could radiate the very soul of tragedy. Her figure was tall and superb
+and her carriage stately without any stiffness, and appalling though she
+was as Lady Macbeth or Meg Merrilies, in our little drawing-room she was
+only simple, sincere, gentle, and winning. Born actress though she was,
+her horizon was by no means restricted to things histrionic; she talked
+well on many subjects, and was at no loss for means to entertain even so
+small and inexperienced a person as myself. I had never seen a theatre,
+and did not know what an actress was, but I loved her, and she was good
+to me. It was not the interest of the stories she told me, so much as
+the personal influence that went with them, that entranced me. I was
+sensible of her kindness, and of the hearty good-will with which she
+bent her great and gracious self to the task of making me happy. That
+wonderful array of tiny charms on her watch-chain was beautiful and
+absorbing, owing less to anything intrinsic in themselves than to some
+sparkling and lovable communication from their wearer. If a woman be
+only large enough and vigorous enough to begin with, the stage seems to
+develop her as nothing else could--to bring out the best in her. It was
+perhaps the deep and wide well of human sympathy in Charlotte Cushman
+that was at the bottom of her success in her profession, though, of
+course, she was greatly aided by her mental and physical gifts. I
+suppose there may be women now capable of being actresses as great as
+she was, but the audience to call forth their latent powers and ambition
+seems, just at present, to be lacking.
+
+Our social diversions at Rock Park were interrupted, at about this
+period, by the whooping-cough, which seized upon all of us together,
+and I well remember my father almost climbing up the wall of the room in
+some of his paroxysms; but he treated it all as a joke, and was always
+ready to laugh as soon as he got through coughing. It left no ill
+effects except upon my mother, who had bronchial trouble which, as I
+have intimated, finally led to the breaking-up of our household. She was
+not made for England.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+     Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy--
+     Deep and abiding love of England--"How the Water Comes Down
+     at Lodore"--"He took an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The
+     unsentimental little quadruped--The human element in things
+     sticks--The coasts of England--A string of sleepy donkeys--
+     Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like an ogress--
+     Hideous maternal parody--The adorable inverted bell-glass--
+     Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of
+     the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening
+     security--An admonition not to climb too high--How vice may
+     become virtue by repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black-
+     Bottle Cardigan--Called to Lisbon.
+
+Emerson, as a matter of principle, was rather averse from travel, though
+he made the trip to England twice; but he fortified his theory by his
+practice of searching out great men rather than historic or picturesque
+places. Ruskin's Modern Painters had not been written when Emerson first
+left home, and I doubt if he read it at any time. He found his mountain
+scenery in Carlyle and his lakes and vales elsewhere among agreeable
+people. My father's conscience worked in a different way; he thought
+himself under obligations to see whatever in the way of towns, ruins,
+cathedrals, and scenery was accounted worthy a foreigner's attention;
+but I think he would have enjoyed seeing them much more had that
+feeling of obligation not been imposed upon him. Set sights, as he
+often remarked, wearied him, just because they were set; things that he
+happened upon unpremeditatedly, especially if they were not described
+in guide-books, pleased him more and tired him less. It can hardly be
+affirmed, however, that he would have missed the set sights if he could
+have done so, and no doubt he was glad, after the job was done, that he
+had done it. And he was greatly helped along by the inexhaustible faith
+and energy in such matters of his wife; she shrank from no enterprise,
+and seemed always in precisely the right mood to appreciate whatever she
+beheld. She could go day after day to a picture-gallery, and stay all
+day long; she would make herself as familiar with churches, castles, and
+cathedrals as she was with her own house; she would wander interminably
+and delightedly about old towns and cities, or gaze with never-waning
+joy upon lakes and mountains, and my father, accompanying her, was, in a
+measure, recuperated and strengthened by her enthusiasm. In the end, as
+is evidenced by Our Old Home and The Marble Faun, he got a good deal out
+of Europe. On the other hand, he seemed to think himself justified
+in avoiding persons as much as he decently might, even the most
+distinguished; and if he had not been a consul, and a writer of books
+that had been read, I doubt if he would have formed any acquaintances
+during his foreign residence, and he would thereby have missed one of
+the greatest and most enduring pleasures of memory that he took back
+with him. For no one cared more for a friend, or was more stimulated and
+emancipated by one, than he. It may have been that he had passed the age
+of youthful buoyancy, of appetite for novelties; that he had begun to
+lack initiative. "I have seen many specimens of mankind," he wrote down,
+in a mood of depression, in one of his note-books, "but come to the
+conclusion that there is little variety among them all." That was
+scarcely a full thought, and he would never have let it pass in one
+of his considered books. He made and published many other remarks
+on similar subjects of quite an opposite tenor, and these more truly
+represented his true feeling. But he did flag a little, once in a while,
+and the deep and abiding love of England which was his final sentiment
+had somewhat the appearance of having been forced upon him against his
+inclination. We may surmise that he feared disappointment more than he
+craved gratification.
+
+[IMAGE: FRANCIS BANNOCH]
+
+From Liverpool we explored the strangeness of the land in all
+directions. Bennoch or Bright sometimes took off my father alone;
+sometimes my father and mother would go with me, leaving my sisters at
+home with the governess. Once in a while we all went together, as,
+for example, to the Isle of Man or to Rhyl. So far as practicable, we
+children were made acquainted with the literature of places we were
+to visit before going there. Thus, before journeying to the Lakes and
+Scotland, I had by heart a good deal of Wordsworth, Southey, Burns, and
+Walter Scott, and was able, standing amid the lovely uproar of Lodore,
+to shout out the story of how the water comes down there; and, again, on
+the shores of Loch Katrine, at sunset, after spending a long hour on
+the little white beach opposite Ellen's Isle, I ran along the road in
+advance of my parents, and, climbing a cliff, saw the breadth of the
+lake below me, golden under the sunset clouds, and very aptly recited,
+as they came up, Sir Walter's descriptive verse:
+
+  "One burnished sheet of living gold,
+  Loch Katrine lay, beneath him rolled!"
+
+But I was not always so well attuned to the environment. I had got hold
+of a hook and line at some hotel on the Lakes, and the old passion
+for fishing, which had remained latent since Lenox days for lack of
+opportunity, returned upon me with great virulence. So, one day, when
+we had set out in a row-boat to visit Rob Roy's cave, I requested, on
+arriving there, to be permitted to stay in the boat, moored at the foot
+of the cliff, while the others climbed up into the cave, and, as soon as
+they had disappeared, I pulled out my line, with a dried-up worm on the
+hook, and cast it over the side. I wanted to see the cave, but I wanted
+to catch a fish more. Up to that time, I think, I had caught nothing in
+all our pilgrimages. If ever Providence is going to give me success (I
+said to myself, devoutly), let it be now! Accordingly, just before the
+others came back, I felt a strong pull on my line and hauled in amain.
+In a moment the fish, which may have been nine inches long, but which
+seemed to me leviathan himself, broke the surface, wriggling this way
+and that vigorously; but that was the extent to which my prayer was
+granted, for, in the words of a rustic fisherman who related his own
+experience to me long afterwards, "Just as I was a-goin' to land 'im,
+sir, he took an' he let go!" My fish not only took and let go, but he
+carried off the hook with him.
+
+I remember wandering with my father through a grassy old church-yard in
+search of Wordsworth's grave, which we found at last, looking quite
+as simple as his own most severely unadorned pastoral; but I had not
+attained as yet to the region of sentiment which makes such things
+impressive. The bare mountains, the blue lakes, and the gray ruins
+filled me with riotous intoxication. The North of England and Scotch
+mountains were much more effective in their nakedness than the wooded
+hills I had seen in Berkshire of Massachusetts, and their contours were
+more sharply modelled and various. They were just large enough to make
+their ascent seem easy until you undertook it, then those seemingly
+moderate slopes lengthened out unaccountably. The day we reached the
+hotel at the base of Helvellyn, I started, nothing doubting, to climb to
+its summit before supper; the weather was clear, the top looked close
+at hand, and I felt great surprise that the young gentleman mentioned in
+Scott's poem ("I climbed the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn," etc.)
+should have allowed himself to be lost. But after a breathless struggle
+of fifteen or twenty minutes, finding myself apparently no nearer my
+goal than at first, I thought differently. Mr. Bright told my father,
+by-the-way, that the legend of the fidelity of the dead adventurer's
+little dog, "who scared the hill-fox and the raven away," was far from
+being in accordance with the prosaic facts. This unsentimental little
+quadruped had, in truth, eaten up a large part of her master by the
+time his remains were discovered, and had, furthermore, brought into the
+world a litter of pups. Well, nothing can deprive us of the poem; but it
+is wholesome to face realities once in a while.
+
+Unless one have a vein of Ruskin in him, one does not recollect scenery,
+however enchanting, with the same particularity as persons. It is the
+human element in things that sticks to us. Scenes are more punctually
+recalled in proportion as they are steeped in historic or personal
+interest. The thatched cottages of Burns and of Shakespeare stand clear
+in my memory; I recall our ramble over the battlements of Carlisle,
+where imprisoned Queen Mary had walked three centuries before; I
+remember the dark stain on the floor of the dark room in which one of
+her lovers was slain; I can see the gray towers of Warwick rising above
+the green trees and reflected in the still water; and, entering the keep
+of the castle, I behold myself again trying on the ponderous helmet of
+the gigantic Guy, and climbing into his monstrous porridge-pot. But
+vain would be the attempt to marshal before my mind's eye the glorious
+pageantry of the Trosachs, though, at the time of its actual revelation,
+it certainly seemed to make a far more vivid impression. The delight and
+exhilaration which such magnificence inspired are easily summoned back,
+but not the incarnate features of them. Wild nature takes us out of
+ourselves and refreshes us; but she does not reveal her secret to us, or
+ally herself with anything in us less deep than the abstract soul--which
+also is beyond our reach.
+
+I am not sure that my father did not like the seaside sojourns as well
+as anything else, apart from the historical connections; for the spirits
+of many seafaring forefathers murmured in his heart. But he did not so
+much care for the soft, yielding, brown sands on which the sea-waves
+broke. The coasts to which he had been used in his youth were either
+rocky or firm as a macadamized road. Nor was he beguiled into
+forgetting the tedium of walking over them, as his companion was, by the
+fascination of the shells and sea curiosities to be picked up on them.
+Many a mile have I trotted along beside him or behind him, gathering
+these treasures, while he strode forward, abstracted, with his gaze
+fixed towards the long ridge of the horizon. The sands at Rhyl, near
+which Milton's friend was said to have been lost, were like a rolling
+prairie; at low tide the white fringe of the surf could scarcely be
+descried at their outermost verge, yet within a few hours it would
+come tumbling back, flowing in between the higher levels, flooding and
+brimming and overcoming, till it broke at our feet once more. Behind us
+rose the tumultuous curves and peaks of the Welsh hills; before us, but
+invisible across the Irish Channel, the black coast of rainy Ireland.
+One night, during a gale, a ship came ashore, so far out that it still
+seemed, in the morning, to be at sea, except for its motionlessness, and
+the drenched and draggled crew came straggling in--or some of them.
+At Southport the beach was narrower and the little sea-side settlement
+larger and livelier; a string of sleepy donkeys always waited there,
+with the rout of ragged and naughty little boys with sticks to thrash
+them into a perfunctory and reluctant gallop for their riders. There was
+always one boy, larger and also naughtier than the rest, who thrashed
+the thrashers and took their pennies away from them. The prevailing
+occupation of the children at these places, as on all civilized shores,
+apparently, was the building of sand-mountains and the digging of pits
+with their little wooden spades. One day an elderly gentleman, with a
+square, ruddy face, edged with gray whiskers, who had stood observing my
+labors in this kind for a long time, stepped up to me as I paused, and
+said, with a sort of amused seriousness, "You'll do something when you
+grow up, my little lad; your hill is bigger than any of the others'."
+He nodded kindly to me and walked off, and I sat down beside my
+mountain and watched the tide come up and level it, thinking unutterable
+boy-thoughts.
+
+The only approach to sea-side cliffs that we saw was at Whitby, on the
+Yorkshire coast, where the abbey of St. Hilda stood, after whom the
+American maiden in The Marble Faun was named. But the German Ocean was
+bleak and cold, and my experiences in it were even more harrowing than
+elsewhere; I can imagine nothing more dispiriting to a small boy than
+to be dragged down over a harsh beach in an old-fashioned British
+bathing-machine, its damp floor covered with gritty sand, with a tiny
+window too high up for him to look out of; undressing in the cold
+draughtiness and trying to hang up his clothes on pegs too high for
+him to reach; being tossed from side to side, and forward and
+backward, meanwhile, by the irregular jerking and swaying of the dismal
+contrivance, drawn by the amphibious horses of the region; until at last
+he hears the waves begin to dash against it, and it comes to a pause in
+a depth which he feels must be fathomless. Then comes a thumping at
+the door, and he knows that the bathing-woman is hungrily awaiting his
+issuing forth. Nothing else is so terrible in the world--nothing even
+in Alice in Wonderland--to a small, naked, shivering boy as the British
+bathing-woman. There she stands, waist-deep in the swelling brine; she
+grins and chuckles like an ogress; her red, grasping hands stretch
+forth like the tentacles of an octopus; she seizes her victim in an
+irresistible embrace, and with horrid glee plunges him head-under the
+advancing wave. Ere he can fetch his breath to scream, down again he
+goes, and yet again. The frigid, heavy water stings his cowering body;
+he has swallowed quarts of it; his foot has come in contact with a crab
+or a starfish; before him rolls the tumultuous expanse of desolation,
+surging forward to take his life; behind him are the rickety steps of
+the bathing-machine, which, but now a chamber of torture, has become his
+sole haven of refuge. Buffeted by the billows, he makes shift at last
+frantically to clamber back into it; he snatches the small, damp towels,
+and attempts to dry his shivering limbs; his clothes have fallen on the
+wet floor; he cannot force his blue toes into his oozy socks. At the
+moment he is attempting to wriggle himself into his trousers the horse
+is hitched-to again, and the jerky and jolty journey back up the
+beach begins. If the hair of a boy of ten could turn white in a single
+morning, there would be many a hoary-headed youngster in British
+watering-places. John Leech, in Punch, used to make pictures of the
+experiences I have outlined, and I studied them with deep attention and
+sympathy. The artist, too, must have suffered from the sea-ogresses in
+his youth, else he could not have portrayed the outrage so vividly. The
+mock-cheerfulness and hideous maternal parody of their "Come, my little
+man!" has no parallel in life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the
+fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would
+forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the
+decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that
+nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite
+found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I
+detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity
+may use it, as I have done, for a paper-weight. Thanks to eternal
+justice, the bathing-machines and the bathing-women will have gone to
+their place long ere then!
+
+My father had given me a book called The Aquarium, written by Philip
+Henry Gosse (father of the present poet, essayist, and critic),
+illustrated with pictures of sea-anemones and other marine creatures
+done from his own drawings in color, and so well done that nothing which
+has been done since in the way of color-reproductions surpasses them.
+It was delightfully written, and I absorbed it into my very soul, and my
+dreams by night and longings by day were for an aquarium of my own. At
+last--I think this was at Southport--a glass jar was given me; it was
+an inverted bell-glass, mounted on a wooden stand, and it cost ten
+shillings. I wonder if men often love their wives or children with
+the adoring tenderness that I lavished upon that bell-glass and its
+contents! I got sand and covered the bottom; I found two jagged stones
+and leaned them against each other on the sand; I gathered fronds of
+ulva latissima; I persuaded a boatman to bring me a bucket of salt-water
+from beyond the line of breakers, and I poured it carefully into the
+jar. During the next twenty-four hours I waited impatiently for the
+water to settle and clear; then I began to introduce the living inmates.
+I collected prawns and crabs and sea-snails, and a tiny sole or two, a
+couple of inches long, and by good chance I found a small sepiola, or
+cuttle-fish, as big as a beetle, which burrowed in the sand and changed
+color magically from dark brown to faintest buff. I also had a pair of
+soldier-crabs, which fought each other continually. When the sunlight
+fell on my aquarium, I saw the silver bubbles of oxygen form on the
+green fronds of the sea-weed; the little snails crawled along the sides
+of the glass, sweeping out their tiny, scythelike tongues at every step;
+the prawns hovered in the shade of the stones or darted back and forward
+light as thoughts; the soles scuffled over the surface of the sand or
+hid themselves in it from the stalking, felonious crabs. But I had
+no sea-anemones; they are not found on sandy coasts, and without
+sea-anemones my felicity could not be complete.
+
+But strange things happen in this world occasionally, good as well as
+bad. There came up a heavy storm, and the next morning, walking with my
+father on the beach, strewn with deep-sea flotsam and jetsam, we came
+upon the mast of a ship, water-logged till it had the weight of iron; it
+might have been, as my father remarked, a relic of the Spanish Armada.
+And it was covered from end to end with the rarest and most beautiful
+species of sea-anemones!
+
+This was fairy-land come true. I chipped off a handkerchiefful of the
+best specimens, wishing I could take them all, and carried them to
+my aquarium. I deposited them, each in a coign of vantage, and in the
+course of an hour or two they had swelled out their tinted bodies and
+expanded their lovely tentacles, and the cup of my joy was full. This
+prosperity continued for near a week, during which I remained with my
+nose against the glass, as the street boys of Liverpool held theirs
+against the windows of pastry-cooks' shops. At length I noticed an
+ominous clouding of the water, which, as Mr. Gosse had forewarned me,
+signified disaster of some sort, and, searching for the cause, I finally
+discovered the body of the little sepiola, which had died without being
+missed, and was contaminating with his decay the purity of the aquarium.
+The water must be changed at once. I sent out the servant for a fresh
+bucketful from the sea, while I poured the polluted liquid from the jar.
+
+Presently the bucket of water was brought in. It was unusually clear.
+I filled the jar with it, and then, as bedtime was near, I left the
+aquarium to settle down to business again. The next morning I hastened
+to it in my night-gown, and was confronted by a ghastly spectacle. The
+crabs lay dead on the bottom, stomachs upward; the prawns hung lifeless
+and white from the rocks; the soldier-crabs were motionless, half out of
+their shells; the sea-anemones had contracted themselves into buttons,
+and most of them had dropped from their perches. Death had been rampant
+during the night; but what could be the cause?
+
+A sudden suspicion caused me to put a finger in the water and apply it
+to my tongue. It was not salt-water at all, but had been taken fresh
+from the cistern. That traitress servant-girl, to save her indolence a
+few steps, had destroyed my aquarium!
+
+I was too heart-broken to think of killing her; but she had killed
+something in me which does not readily grow again. My trust in my
+fellow-creatures was as shrunken and inanimate as the sea-anemones. We
+left Southport soon after, and that was my last aquarium.
+
+Let us turn to lighter matters. I accompanied my father and mother on
+that pilgrimage to Old Boston which is described in Our Old Home. The
+world does not know that it is to my presence on the little steamer
+on the trip down the level river, through the Lincolnshire fens, with
+nothing but the three-hundred-foot tower of St. Botolph's Church, in the
+extreme distance, to relieve the tedium of a twenty-four-mile journey
+made at the rate of never more than six miles per hour--it is not known,
+I say, that to that circumstance is due my father's description of the
+only incident which enlivened the way--the tragedy, namely, of the duck
+family. For it was that tragedy which stood out clearest in my memory,
+and when I learned, in Concord, that my father was preparing his paper
+about Old Boston for the Atlantic Monthly, I besought him to insert an
+account of the episode. The duck and her five ducklings had probably
+seen the steamer many times before, and had acquired a contempt for its
+rate of progression, imagining that it would always be easy to escape
+from it. But, somehow, in their overweening security, they lingered on
+this occasion a little too long, and we succeeded in running them down.
+Even then, as my father notes, it was only one of them that was carried
+under; but the shock to the nerves of the other youngsters must have
+stunted their growth, and the old bird cannot but have suffered tortures
+from anxiety and remorse.
+
+The sadness caused by this event, added to the chilliness of the
+sea-wind which blew against us all the way down the river, rendered my
+first impressions of the ancient town, which had given its name to the
+one I was born in, somewhat gloomy. But the next morning it brightened
+up, and our own spirits were correspondingly improved; insomuch that
+I struck my head a violent blow against the stone roof of the topmost
+pinnacle of St. Botolph's tower, such was the zeal of my ascent into
+it. All this happened two years after the aquarium, in 1857, when I was
+older and wiser, but had not yet outgrown the ambition to climb to the
+top of all high places; this bump may have been an admonition not
+to climb too high. We went down and strayed into Mr. Porter's little
+book-shop, and he transformed himself into a new and more genial
+proprietor of a virtuoso's collection, and showed us treasures, some
+of which his predecessor in Mosses from an Old Manse might not have
+despised. I have never since then heard of his portrait in crayon of
+the youthful Sterne; it would be worth a good deal to any latter-day
+publisher of his works in a de luxe edition. As for the green tassel
+from the bed of Queen Mary, in Holyrood House, there is a passage in
+my father's description of it in his journal which, out of regard,
+doubtless, for the feelings of Mr. Porter, he forbore to quote in his
+published article; but as the good old gentleman (unless he has lived
+to be more than one hundred and twenty years old) must have gone to the
+place where treasures are indestructible, I will reproduce it now. "This
+tassel," says my father, "Mr. Porter told us (with a quiet chuckle and
+humorous self-gratulation), he had personally stolen, and really, for my
+part, though I hope I would not have done it myself, I thought it no sin
+in him--such valuables being attracted by a natural magnetism towards
+such a man. He obeys, in stealing them, a higher law than he breaks.
+I should like to know precisely what portion of his rich and rare
+collection he has obtained in a similar manner. But far be it from me
+to speak unkindly or sneeringly of the good man; for he showed us great
+kindness, and obliged us so much the more by being greatly and evidently
+pleased with the trouble that he took on our behalf." It may be added
+that each new stealing enhances the value of all the previous ones,
+and therefore creates an obligation to steal yet more. Thus does an act
+which would, standing by itself, be criminal, become a virtue if often
+enough repeated.
+
+I am not arranging this narrative in chronological sequence; but I think
+it was in this year that we went to Manchester to see the exposition.
+The town itself was unlovely; but, as we had Italy in prospect, it
+was deemed expedient to accustom ourselves in some measure to the
+companionship of works of art, and the exhibition professed to contain
+an exceptionally fine and catholic collection of them. My father made a
+thorough study of them, going to learn and not to judge, and he learned
+much, though not quite to believe in Turner or to like the old masters.
+For my own part, when not taken on these expeditions, I busied myself
+with the building of a kite six feet high, of engineer's cambric, with a
+face painted on it, and used to go out and fly it on a vacant lot in the
+rear of our lodgings, accompanied by a large portion of the unoccupied
+population of Manchester. The kite broke its string one day, and I saw
+it descend over the roofs of a remote slum region towards the south, and
+I never recaptured it. But my chief energies were devoted to acquiring
+the art of fencing with the small-sword from one Corporal Blair, of the
+Fourth Dragoon Guards--a regiment which had distinguished itself in the
+Crimean War. The corporal was a magnificent-looking creature, and he
+was as admirable inwardly as outwardly--the model of an English
+non-commissioned officer. He used to come to our lodgings in his
+short scarlet jacket and black trousers, and my father once asked
+him, remarking the extraordinary prominence of his chest, what kind of
+padding was used to produce so impressive a contour. "There's nothing
+here but my linen, sir," answered the corporal, modestly, and blushing
+a good deal; a fact which I, having often taken my lessons at the
+barracks, in the private quarters of the corporal, where he permitted
+himself to appear in his shirt-sleeves, already knew. My experience of
+the British army not being so large as that of some other persons, I
+am unable to say whether there were many other soldiers in it fit to be
+compared with Blair; but my acquaintance with mankind in general would
+lead me to infer that there could not have been then, and that there are
+still less of such to-day. An army of six--footers like him, with his
+intelligence, instincts of discipline, capacity and expertness, physical
+strength and activity, and personal courage, would easily account for
+more than all of England's warlike renown and success; the puzzle is,
+how to account for anything but disaster without them--though, to be
+sure, other armies might be equally lacking in Blairs. He was well
+educated, modest, and moral; he was a married man, with a wife who was
+the model of a soldier's consort, and two or three little sons, all
+of them experts with the foils and the broadsword. It was against the
+regulations of the service for privates or non-commissioned officers to
+have families, and, when Blair's connubial condition became known to the
+authorities, he was degraded in rank from sergeant to corporal, though
+he wore the Balaklava medal; for he had taken part in that immortal
+charge, and I only wish I could recall the story of it as he
+told it to me. His regiment had been under the command of Lord
+Cardigan--"Black-Bottle Cardigan," as he was nicknamed in the army,
+on account of the well-known (real or apocryphal) incident. It was
+my good--fortune, by-the-way, once to see this eminent captain. I was
+taking my lesson at the barracks, when Blair told me that his lordship
+was expected to visit them that afternoon. The hour appointed was three
+o'clock. Punctually at three o'clock a carriage drove rapidly through
+the gates of the barracks, and the guard turned out on the run and
+lined up to salute the noble occupant. But, much to their disgust, the
+occupant turned out to be some one else, not meriting a salute. The
+men returned to the guard-room feeling as men do when they have been
+betrayed into exertion and enthusiasm for nothing. However, in about ten
+minutes more, another carriage drove up, and out came the guard again
+and ranged themselves smartly, to please the eye of their martinet
+commander, when lo! they had again been deceived. Again they retired
+with dark looks, not being at all in a mood to recognize the humor of
+the situation. This same thing actually occurred twice more, by which
+time it was near four o'clock, and the men were wellnigh mutinous, and
+it became evident that, for some reason, Cardigan had been prevented
+from coming. Such being the case, the approach of still another carriage
+attracted no attention whatever, until it came to a half-pause, and I
+saw, thrust out of the window, a stern, dark, warlike, soldierly face,
+full of surprise and indignation--and this was Cardigan himself. The
+unhappy guard tumbled over themselves in vain efforts to get into form;
+it was too late, and the haughty and hot-tempered commander drove on
+without his salute. Blair, not being on guard duty, had no part in this
+catastrophe, but I well remember his unaffected sorrow over it. He was
+a grave man, though of an equable and cheerful temper, and he felt his
+comrades' misfortune as his own. But I never heard that any casualties
+occurred in consequence of the mishap.
+
+I have left two years of our English sojourn unaccounted for. In
+the summer of 1855, my father nearly made up his mind to resign his
+consulship (since it had become hardly worth keeping from the money
+point of view), and, after making a visit to Italy, going back to
+Concord. This plan seemed the more advisable, because my mother's lungs
+could not endure the English climate. But while he was weighing the
+matter, John O'Sullivan wrote from Lisbon, urgently inviting my mother
+and sisters to come out and spend a few months with him and his family
+there. The Lisbon climate was a specific for bronchial disease; my
+father could complete his term, and we could go to Italy the following
+year. There was only one objection to this--it involved the parting of
+my father from my mother, a thing which had never before happened. But
+it did not take him long to decide that it would be a good thing for
+her, and, therefore, in the long run, for him. Each loved the other
+unselfishly, and had the courage of such love. Liverpool without my
+mother would be a dismal trial for him to face; Lisbon without my father
+would be tenfold an exile for her. But they made up their minds, each
+for the other's sake, to undergo the separation, and accordingly, in the
+autumn of the year, she and my sisters sailed from Southampton, and my
+father and I went back to Liverpool. How we fared there shall be told in
+the next chapter.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+     If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the
+     delight of mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort--
+     A modest, puny poise about her--Hidden thoughts derived
+     from Mother Eve and Grecian Helen--The feminine council that
+     ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds of fraternity, double-
+     riveted and copper-fastened--Through the looking-glass--Men
+     only of the manliest sort--The lady-paramount--Hands which
+     were true works of art--Retained his dignity without putting
+     it on--Sighed heavily over my efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin--
+     "From dawn to eve I fell"--The multum-in-parvo machine--
+     "Beauty and the Beast"--Frank Channing--"Blood-and water!"--
+     A lapful of Irish stew.
+
+It was observed a little way back that English boarding-houses were much
+like other boarding-houses in the civilized world. The rule is proved
+by the exception of Mrs. Blodgett's establishment. There never was such
+another; there never will be; it was unique. It has vanished from earth
+long since; but if there were boarding-houses in paradise, I should
+certainly expect it to be found again there. Who was Mrs. Blodgett? Save
+that she was a widow of the British middle class, I doubt if any one of
+her boarders knew. She had once been rich, and had lived at Gibraltar. I
+have often meditated with fruitless longing about what manner of man Mr.
+Blodgett could have been. He must have been, like the Emperor Titus,
+the delight of mankind in his day. He was a man, we must surmise, whose
+charms and virtues were such that his wife, having felt the bliss and
+privilege of knowing and living with him, registered a vow over his bier
+that she would devote her future career to the attempt to make others as
+happy as he had made her; that she would serve others as faithfully
+and generously as she had served him. It was a lofty and beautiful
+conception, for she must have perceived that only in that way could she
+keep his blessed spirit near her; that the little heaven she would make
+in Duke Street, Liverpool, would attract him from the kindred heaven
+above; that he would choose to hover, invisible, above her plenteous
+table, inhaling the grateful aromas that arose from it as from a savory
+sacrifice, basking in the smiles and sympathizing in the satisfaction
+of the fortunate guests, triumphing in their recognition of his beloved
+consort as a queen among women. One might almost fancy that the steam
+arising from the portly soup-tureen assumed as it arose something
+suggesting a human form; that from its airy and fragrant mistiness a
+shadowy countenance beamed down upon the good lady in black, with
+the white cap, who ladled out the delicious compound to her waiting
+devotees. The murmur of the tea-urn would seem to fashion itself into
+airy accents, syllabling, "Mary, thy Blodgett is here!" His genial
+spirit would preside over her labors in the kitchen, suggesting ever
+more delightsome dishes and delicate desserts. He would warn her against
+undesirable inmates and intractable servants, and would inspire her
+tradesmen to serve her with the choicest comestibles and to temper
+their bills to the unprotected widow. At night he would bless her lonely
+pillow with peace, and would gently rouse her in the morning to a new
+day of beneficences.
+
+Mrs. Blodgett was about five feet four inches high, and may have weighed
+twelve stone; into such limits were her virtues packed. She was perhaps
+in the neighborhood of her fiftieth year; her dark hair was threaded
+with honorable gray. Her countenance was rotund and ruddy; it was the
+flower of kindness and hospitality in full bloom; but there was also
+power in the thick eyebrows and in the massy substance of the chin--of
+the chins, indeed, for here, as in other gifts, nature had been generous
+with her. There was shrewdness and discernment in the good-nature of her
+eyes; she knew human nature, although no one judged it with more charity
+than she. Her old men were her brothers, her young men were her sons,
+all children were her children. Solomon foresaw her in the most engaging
+of his Proverbs. Her maid-servants arose at six in the morning and
+called her blessed, for though her rule was strict it was just and
+loving. She was at once the mistress and the friend of her household; no
+Yankee captain so audacious that he ventured to oppose her law; no cynic
+so cold as not to be melted by her tenderness. She was clad always in
+black, with a white cap and ribbons, always spotless amid the grime of
+Liverpool; in her more active moments--though she was always active--she
+added a white apron to her attire. She was ever anywhere where she
+was needed; she was never anywhere where she could be dispensed with.
+Wherever she went she brought comfort and a cheerful but not restless
+animation. Her boarders were busy men, but it was always with an effort
+that they wrenched themselves from her breakfast-table, and they sat
+down to dinner as one man. She made them happy, but she would not spoil
+them. "You're a pretty young man!" she said, severely, to complacent
+Mr. Crane, when, one morning, he came late to breakfast. "I always knew
+that," returned he, reaching self-satisfiedly for the toast-rack. "Well,
+I'm sure your glass never told you so!" was the withering retort. Mr.
+Crane did not lift his neck so high after that. The grin that went round
+the table was too crushingly unanimous.
+
+Mrs. Blodgett was helped in her duties by her niece, Miss Maria, and by
+her sister, Miss Williams. Miss Maria was a little wisp of a woman; I
+do not know her age then, but I think, were she alive today, she would
+confess to about eighty-three. She wore ringlets, after the fashion
+of the early nineteenth-century books of beauty. Her face was thin and
+narrow, and ordinarily pale; but when Miss Maria had been a little while
+in conversation with one or more of the gallant Yankee captains you
+might see in the upper corner of each cheek a slight touch of red. For
+though I would not call the little lady coquettish--that is too coarse
+and obvious a word--yet there was in her that inalienable consciousness
+of maidenhood, that sentiment, at once of attraction and of recoil,
+towards creatures of the opposite sex, that gentle hope of pleasing man,
+that secret emotion of being pleased by him, that tremor at the idea of
+being desired, and that flush at the thought of being desirable, which,
+I suppose, may animate the mystic sensibilities of spinsterhood. She
+was anything but aggressive and confident, yet there was a modest, puny
+poise about her; she was like a plant that has always lived in a narrow,
+city flower-pot, at a window too seldom visited by the sun, which has
+never known the freedom of the rain, but has been skimpingly watered
+out of a toy watering-pot; which has never so much as conceived of the
+daring and voluptuous charms of its remote sisters of the forest and
+garden, but has cherished its rudimentary perfume and its incipient
+tints in a light reflected from brick walls and in the thin, stale
+atmosphere of rear sitting-rooms. Yet it knows that it is a flower, and
+that it might, somehow, fulfil its destiny and be beautiful. So Miss
+Maria had, no doubt, hidden thoughts remotely derived from Mother Eve
+and from Grecian Helen; she was aware of the potentiality in herself of
+all virgin privileges and powers, and assumed thereupon her own little
+dignity. Never but once did I see a masculine arm round Miss Maria's
+trig, stiff little waist, and that was at Christmas-time, when there
+were sprigs of mistletoe over every doorway; but, mistletoe or not, the
+owner of that arm, if he did succeed in ravishing a kiss, got his ears
+smartly boxed the next moment. I don't know precisely what was Miss
+Maria's function in the economy of the household; I can fancy her
+setting the table, and adding touches of neatness and prettiness;
+dusting the ornaments and fine china on the shelves of the whatnot;
+straightening the frames of the pictures on the walls; and, in her less
+romantic moments, hemming towels or sheets, or putting up preserved
+fruits. I know she was always amiable and obliging and that everybody
+loved her.
+
+Miss Williams was a good deal the elder of her sister, and was of a
+clear white pallor and an aged delicacy and shyness that were very
+captivating. She had judgment and a clear, dispassionate brain, and
+I presume she acted the part in the little firm of a sort of court of
+appeals and final adviser and referee. She talked little and had little
+to do with outward affairs, but she sat observant and penetrating
+and formed conclusions in her mind. There had been no brother of The
+Blodgett to induce her to change her maidenly state, but I think there
+must have been a quiet, touching romance somewhere hidden in the shadows
+of the previous forty or fifty years. She admired and delighted in her
+energetic, practical sister as much as the latter adored her for her
+serenity and wisdom. There was between them an intimacy, confidence,
+and mutual understanding that were charming to behold. When the blessed
+Blodgett had died, one can imagine the vital support and consolation
+which Miss Williams had been able to afford to her afflicted sister.
+Each of them seemed, in some way, to explain and enlarge one's
+conception of the other. Widely different as they appeared outwardly,
+there was a true sisterly likeness deep down in them. Such was the
+feminine council that ruled the destinies of the Yankee captains and of
+their consul.
+
+These captains and this consul formed nine-tenths of the population of
+the house, and such other denizens as it had were at least Americans. I
+never learned the cause of this predilection for representatives of the
+great republic and for the seafaring variety of them in particular. Be
+that as it might (and it is an interesting inquiry in itself), it can
+be readily understood that it worked out well as a business idea. There
+were no quarrels or heart-burnings among the jolly occupants of Mrs.
+Blodgett's table; first, because they were all Americans in the country
+of their hereditary enemies, and, secondly, because they were all men
+of the same calling, and that calling the sea. The bonds of fraternity
+between them were double-riveted and copper-fastened. Thus all who had
+experienced the Blodgett regime proclaimed its excellence far and wide,
+and the number of applicants always exceeded the accommodations; in
+fact, during this year 1855-56, our hostess was compelled to buy the
+house adjoining her own, and I had the rare delight of watching every
+stroke of work done by the carpenters and bricklayers who had the job
+of cutting a doorway through the wall from the old house to the new one.
+There was something magical and adventurous in stepping through that
+opening for the first time--crossing a boundary which had maintained
+itself so long. Probably the sensation resembled that which Alice
+afterwards experienced when she stepped through the looking-glass into
+the room on the other side. The additional accommodations were speedily
+filled; but after the first fascination had worn off nobody regarded the
+new house as comparable with the old one, and the people who roomed in
+it were looked down upon by their associates of the original dwelling.
+They were, I believe, as much alike as two houses could be, and that is
+saying much in this age, but the feeling was different, and the feeling
+is everything if you have a soul.
+
+If the Blodgett house, or houses, were unique, so were the Yankee
+boarders. The race of our merchant-marine captains disappeared with
+their ships, and they will return no more. The loss is irretrievable,
+for in many respects they held the ideal of patriotic and energetic
+Americanism higher than it is likely to go again. When at sea, in
+command of and responsible for their ships and cargoes, they were, no
+doubt, upon occasion, despots and slave-drivers; but their crews were
+often recruited from among the dregs of men of all nations, who would
+interpret kindness as timidity and take an ell where you gave them
+an inch. No doubt, too, there were incarnate devils among these
+captains--actual monomaniacs of cruelty and viciousness--though none of
+these were known at Mrs. Blodgett's. Round her board sat men only of
+the manliest sort. They had the handiness and versatility of the sailor,
+wide and various knowledge of all quarters of the globe and of types of
+mankind, though, to be sure, their investigations did not proceed far
+beyond their ports, and you were sometimes more astonished at what
+they did not know than at what they did. They had the self-poise and
+self-confidence of men who day by day and month by month hold their
+lives in their hands, and are practised in finding a way out of danger
+and difficulty. They had a code of good manners and polite behavior
+which was not highly refined, but contained the sound, essential
+elements of courtesy; not expressed in fancy, but honest and solid. They
+had great shrewdness, and were capable of really fine diplomacy, for
+the school they attended demanded such proficiency. They had a dry,
+chuckling humor; a homely philosophy, often mingled with the queerest
+superstitions; a racy wit, smacking somewhat, of course, of the
+quarter-deck, or even of the forecastle; a seemingly incongruous
+sensibility, so that tears easily sprang to their eyes if the right
+chord of pathos were touched; a disposition to wear a high-colored
+necktie and a broad, gold watch-chain, and to observe a certain
+smartness in their boots and their general shore rigging; a good
+appetite for good food, and not a little discernment of what was good; a
+great and boylike enjoyment of primitive pleasures; a love of practical
+jokes and a hearty roar of laughter for hearty fun; a self-respecting
+naturalness, which made them gentlemen in substance if not in all
+technical details; a pungent contempt for humbug and artifice, though
+they might not mind a good, swaggering lie upon occasion; a robust sense
+of honor in all matters which were trusted to their honorable feeling;
+and, to make an end of this long catalogue, a practical command of
+language regarded as a means of expressing and communicating the
+essential core of thoughts, though the words might not always be
+discoverable in Johnson's dictionary or the grammatical constructions
+such as would be warranted by Lindley Murray. They were, upon the
+average, good-looking, active, able men, and most of them were on the
+sunny side of forty. They were ready to converse on any subject, but
+if left to themselves they would choose topics proper to their
+calling-ships and shipwrecks, maritime usages of various countries, of
+laws of insurance, of sea-rights, of feats of seamanship, of luck and
+ill luck, and here and there a little politics of the old-fashioned,
+elementary sort. They boasted themselves and their country not a little,
+and criticised everybody else, and John Bull especially, very severely
+often, but almost always very acutely, too. They would play euchre and
+smoke cigars from nine o'clock till eleven, and would then go to bed and
+sleep till the breakfast-bell. Altogether, they were fine company, and
+they did me much good. Such were the captains of our merchant marine
+about the middle of the last century.
+
+Some of them would bring their wives with them for the voyage; uniformly
+rather pretty women, a trifle dressy, somewhat fragile in appearance,
+but really sound enough; naive, simple, good souls, loving their
+husbands and magnifying them, and taking a vicarious pride in their
+ships and sea-craft. The lady-paramount of these, in my estimation, was
+the wife of old Captain Howes, the inventor of Howes' patent rig, which
+he was at that time perfecting. He would sometimes invite me up to his
+room to see the exquisitely finished model which he had made with his
+own hands. He was the commodore of the captains, the oldest, wisest, and
+most impressive of them; a handsome, massive, Jovelike old gentleman,
+with the gentlest and most indulgent manners, and a straightforward,
+simple mariner withal. He had ceased to make voyages, and was settled,
+for the time being, in Liverpool. Mrs. Howes seemed, to my boyish
+apprehension, to be a sort of princess of exquisite and gracious
+refinement; I could imagine nothing in feminine shape more delicate,
+of more languid grace, of finer patrician elegance. She was certainly
+immensely good-natured and indulgent towards me, and, in the absence of
+my mother, tried to teach me to be less of an Orson; she had hands which
+were true works of art, flexible, fine-grained, taper-fingered, and
+lily-white; these she used very effectively, and would fain have induced
+me to attempt the regeneration of my own dirty and ragged little fists.
+She would beseech me, also, to part my hair straight, to forbear to soil
+my jacket, and even to get my shoes blacked. I was thankful for these
+attentions, though I was unable to profit by them. Sometimes, at table,
+I would glance up to find her eyes dwelling with mild reproach upon me;
+doubtless I was continually perpetrating terrible enormities. Had she
+herself been less perfect and immaculate, I might have felt more hopes
+of my own amendment; but I felt that I was not in her class at all, and
+I gave up at the start. She was a wonderful human ornament, the despair,
+I thought, of all pursuit, not to mention rivalry. Beside the heroic
+figure of her captain, she looked like a lily mated with an oak; but
+they were as happy a pair, and as well mated, as one could hope to see.
+
+I was, perhaps, more in my proper element among the captains down in
+the smoking-room, which was at the back of the house, at the end of the
+hallway, on the left. My father sat there foot to foot with them, played
+euchre with them, listened to their yarns, laughed at their jokes, and
+felt, probably, the spirit of his own old sea-captain ancestors stirring
+within him. Some of them were a little shy of his official position at
+first, and indeed he was occasionally constrained to adopt towards one
+or another of them, in the consulate, a bearing very different from the
+easy comradeship of the Blodgett evenings; but in process of time they
+came to understand him, and accepted him, on the human basis, as a
+friend and brother. My father had the rare faculty of retaining his
+dignity without putting it on. No one ever took liberties with him, and
+he took none with anybody; yet there was no trace in his intercourse of
+stiffness or pose; there did not need to be, since there was behind his
+eye that potentiality of self--protection which renders superfluous
+all outward demonstration of personal sanctity. On the other hand, he
+obviously elevated the tone of our little society; the stout captains,
+who feared nothing else, feared their worser selves in his presence.
+None of them knew or cared a straw for his literary genius and its
+productions; but they were aware of something in him which they
+respected as well as liked, and there was no member of the company who
+was more popular or influential.
+
+
+Without letting me feel that I was the object of special solicitude or
+watchfulness, my father knew all that I did, and saw to it that my
+time was decently occupied. In addition to the dancing-lessons already
+mentioned (in which I became brilliantly proficient, and achieved such
+feats in the way of polkas, mazurkas, hornpipes, and Scotch reels as
+filled my instructor and myself with pride)--in addition to this, I was
+closeted twice a week with a very serious and earnest drawing-master,
+who taught me with infinite conscientiousness, and sighed heavily
+over the efforts which I submitted to him. The captains, who were my
+champions and abettors in all things, might take in their large hands a
+drawing of mine and the copy by the master which had been my model,
+and say, one to the other, "Well, now, I couldn't tell which was
+which--could you?" But the master could tell, and the certainty of it
+steeped his soul in constant gloom. I doubt if he recovered from the
+pangs I gave him. The fact was, I thought an hour of dancing with lovely
+Mary Warren was worth all the art in the world. Another instructor to
+whom I brought honor was thick-shouldered, portly, unctuous M. Huguenin,
+a Swiss, proprietor of the once-famous gymnasium which bore his name.
+He so anointed me with praise that I waxed indiscreet, and one day, as
+I was swinging on the rings, and he was pointing out to some prospective
+patrons my extraordinary merits, my grasp relaxed at the wrong moment
+and I came sailing earthward from on high. It seemed to me that, like
+Milton's Lucifer, "from dawn to eve I fell," M. Huguenin sprinting to
+intercept my fall; but I landed on a mat and was little the worse
+for it. I fear the prospective patrons were not persuaded, by my
+performance, of the expediency of gymnastic training. On the other
+hand, M. Huguenin managed to dispose to my father of one of his
+multum-in-parvo exercising-machines, on the understanding that it was to
+be taken back at half-price on the expiration of our stay in Liverpool;
+but, when that time came, M. Huguenin failed to remember having been a
+party to any such understanding; so the big framework was boxed up, and
+finally was resurrected in Concord, where I labored with it for seven or
+eight years more during my home-comings from Harvard.
+
+In the intervals of my other pursuits, I was, at this period, sent into
+society. The society at Mrs. Blodgett's was, indeed, all that I desired;
+but it was doubtless perceived that it was not all that my polite
+development required; my Orsonism was too much indulged. I was sent
+alone to Sandheys, the Brights' and Heywoods' place, where I was
+moderately ill at ease; and also to the house of a lady in town, who
+received a good deal of company, and there I was, at first, acutely
+miserable. The formalities of the drawing-room and the elegant
+conversation overwhelmed me with the kind of torture which Swedenborg
+ascribes to those spirits of the lower orders who are admitted
+temporarily into the upper heavens. Unlike these unfortunates, however,
+I presently got acclimated; other boys of my age appeared, and numbers
+of little girls (Mary Warren among them), and now society occupied all
+my thoughts. The lady of the house got up private theatricals--"Beauty
+and the Beast" was the play. I was cast for the parts of the Second
+Sister and of the Beast; Mary Warren was the Beauty. I got by heart not
+only my own lines, but those of all the other performers and the stage
+directions. The play was received with applause, and after it was
+done the actors were feted; my father was not present, but he appeared
+greatly diverted by my account of the proceedings. He was probably
+testing me in various ways to see what I was made of, and whether
+anything could be made of me. He encouraged my predilection for natural
+history by getting me books on conchology and taking me to museums
+to study the specimens and make pencil drawings of them. In these
+avocations I was also companioned by Frank Channing, whose specialty
+was ornithology, and who was making a series of colored portraits of the
+birds in the museum, very cleverly done.
+
+[IMAGE: WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855]
+
+Frank was the son of the Rev. William Henry Channing, who was pastor of
+a Unitarian church in Liverpool; he had brought his family to England
+at about the same time that we came. He was a nephew, I believe, of
+the William Ellery Channing who was one of the founders of American
+Unitarianism, and the brother, therefore, of the Ellery Channing of
+Concord. Frank inherited much of the talent of his family. He was
+afterwards sent to Oxford, where he took the highest honors. All
+intellectual operations came easy to him. He also showed a strong
+proclivity to art, and he was wonderfully clever in all kinds of fine
+handwork. He was at this time a tall and very handsome boy, about two
+years my senior. He was, like myself, fanatically patriotic, an American
+of Americans, and this brought us together in a foreign land; but, aside
+from that, I have seldom met a more fascinating companion. I followed
+him about with joy and admiration. He used to make for me tiny little
+three-masted ships, about six inches long, with all the rigging
+complete; they were named after the famous American clippers of the day,
+and he painted microscopic American flags to hoist over the taff-rail.
+He tried to teach me how to paint in water-colors, but I responded
+better to his eloquence regarding the future of our country. He proved
+to me by a mathematical demonstration, which I accepted without in the
+least understanding it, that in fifty years New York would be larger and
+more populous than London at the end of the same period. This brilliant
+boy seemed fitted for the highest career in his native country; his
+father did not contemplate a permanent stay in England, and in after
+years I used to look for his name in our Senate, or among the occupants
+of the Supreme Bench. But, as it turned out, he never revisited America,
+except for short periods. His father was induced to remain abroad by
+the success of his preaching, and Frank, after his career at Oxford, was
+overpowered by the subtle attractions of English culture, and could not
+separate himself from the old country. I saw him once while I was at
+Harvard. He was an Englishman in all outward respects, and seemed to
+be so inwardly likewise. The other day I heard of a Frank Channing in
+Parliament; probably the same man. But either the effect upon him of his
+voluntary expatriation--his failure to obey at eve the voice obeyed at
+prime--or some other cause, has prevented him from ever doing anything
+to attract attention, or to appear commensurate with his radiant
+promise. Henry James is the only American I know who has not suffered
+from adopting England; and even he might have risen higher than he has
+done had he overcome his distaste to the external discomforts of the
+democracy and cast in his lot with ours.
+
+Frank's father was a tall, intellectual, slender Yankee, endowed with
+splendid natural gifts, which he had improved by assiduous cultivation.
+In the pulpit he rose to an almost divine eloquence and passion, and
+a light would shine over his face as if reflected from the Holy Spirit
+itself. My father took a pew in his church, and sent me to sit in it
+every Sunday; he never went himself. He was resolved, I suppose, if
+there was any religion in me, to afford it an opportunity to come out.
+Now, I had a religious reverence for divine things, but no understanding
+whatever of dogma of any sort. I never learned to repeat a creed, far
+less to comprehend its significance. I was moved and charmed by Mr.
+Channing's discourses, but I did not like to sit in the pew; I did
+not like "church." I remember nothing of the purport of any of those
+sermons; but, oddly enough, I do recall one preached by a gentleman who
+united the profession of preacher with that of medicine; he occupied
+Channing's pulpit on a certain occasion, and preached on the text in
+John xix., 34: "But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side,
+and forthwith came thereout blood and water." The good doctor, drawing
+on his physiological erudition, demonstrated at great length how it was
+possible that blood should be mingled with the water, and showed at what
+precise point in Christ's body the spear must have entered. I seem to
+hear again his mellifluous voice, repeating at the close of each passage
+of his argument, "And forthwith came thereout blood-AND WATER!" I did
+not approve of this sermon; I was not carried to heaven in the spirit
+by it, as by Channing's; but somehow it has stuck in my memory all these
+forty-eight years.
+
+Often I stayed for a few days at a time at Channing's house; his wife
+was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a
+beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married,
+when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of
+Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph.
+She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did
+the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs.
+Channing's face of sorrow and distress when, one day at dinner, I upset
+into my lap my plate, which she had just filled with Irish stew--one
+of my best-loved dishes. "Frank never does that," she murmured, as she
+wiped me up; "never-never!" Nobody looked cheerful, and I never got over
+that mortification.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+     Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you
+     marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--
+     "The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I
+     ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire,
+     pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library
+     in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and
+     voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the os-rotundus
+     sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of
+     it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--
+     Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks
+     through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman--
+     Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole
+     line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new
+     sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--
+     Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the
+     elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine
+     will always rest on it.
+
+
+
+The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my
+mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by
+the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire,
+it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those
+regions for years--two years at least; and I was astonished and almost
+incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or
+eight months only. It was long enough.
+
+In the course of the previous spring my father made two or three little
+excursions of a few days or a week or so in various directions, commonly
+convoyed by Bright or Bennoch, who were most enterprising on his behalf,
+feeling much the same sort of ambition to show him all possible of
+England and leading English folk that a young housekeeper feels to show
+her visiting school-friend her connubial dwelling and its arrangements,
+and to take her up in the nursery and exhibit the children. Had my
+father improved all his opportunities he would have seen a great deal,
+but the consulate would have been administered by the clerks. He took
+trips through Scotland and the north of England, and south to London and
+the environs; dined at the Milton Club and elsewhere, visited the
+Houses of Parliament, spent a day with Martin Farquhar Tupper, author
+of Proverbial Philosophy, and still was not remarkably absent from the
+dingy little office down by the docks, or from the euchre games in Mrs.
+Blodgett's smoking-room. For the most part, I did not accompany him
+on these excursions, being occupied in Liverpool with my pursuit of
+universal culture; yet not so much occupied as to prevent me from
+feeling insolvent while he was away, and rich as Aladdin when he got
+back. For his part, he struggled with low spirits caused by anxiety lest
+the next mail from Portugal should bring ill news of the beloved invalid
+there (instead of the cheerful news which always did come); his real
+life was suspended until she should return. Partings between persons
+who love each other seem to be absolute loss of being; but that being
+revives, with a new spiritual strength, when all partings are over.
+
+Of the people whom he met on these sallies, I saw some, either then or
+later: Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, Tom Taylor, Bailey,
+the author of that once-famous philosophic poem, "Festus"; Samuel Carter
+Hall, and a few more. Disraeli, in 1856, had already been chancellor of
+the exchequer and leader of the house, and was to hold the same offices
+again two years later. He had written all but two of his novels, and had
+married the excellent but not outwardly attractive lady who did so
+much to sustain him in his career. At a dinner of persons eminent in
+political life, about this juncture, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli were present,
+and also Bernal Osborne, a personage more remarkable for cleverness
+and aggressiveness, in the things of statesmanship, than for political
+loyalty or for a sense of his obligations to his associates. This
+gentleman had drunk a good deal of wine at dinner, and had sat next to
+Mrs. Disraeli; when the ladies had left the table he burst out, with
+that British brutality which often passes for wit, "I say, Disraeli,
+what on earth did you marry that woman for?" All talk was hushed by this
+astounding query, and everybody looked at the sallow and grim figure
+to whom it was addressed. Disraeli for some moments played with his
+wineglass, apparently unmoved; then he slowly lifted his extraordinary
+black, glittering eyes to those of his questioner. "Partly for a
+reason," he said, measuring his words in the silence, "which you will
+never be capable of understanding--gratitude!" The answer meant much for
+both of them; it was never forgotten, and it extinguished the clever and
+aggressive personage. It was ill crossing swords with Disraeli.
+
+Douglas Jerrold was at the height of his fame and success in this year;
+he died, I think, the year following, at the age of fifty-four. He was
+very popular during his later lifetime, but he seems to have just missed
+those qualities of the humorist which insure immortality; he is little
+more than a name to this generation. He was the son of an actor, and
+had himself been on the stage; indeed, he had tried several things,
+including a short service as midshipman in his Majesty's navy. He wrote
+some two-score plays, and was a contributor to Punch from its outset;
+there are several books to his credit; and he edited Lloyd's Weekly
+Newspaper, which was first called by his own name. But people who
+have read or heard of nothing else of his, have heard of or read "Mrs.
+Caudle's Curtain Lectures." Douglas Jerrold, however, is by no means
+fully pictured by anything which he wrote; his charm and qualities
+came out in personal intercourse. Nor does the mere quotation of his
+brightnesses do him justice; you had to hear and see him say them in
+order to understand them or him. He was rather a short man, with a short
+neck and thick shoulders, much bent, and thick, black hair, turning
+gray. His features were striking and pleasing; he had large, clear,
+prominent, expressive black eyes, and in these eyes, and in his
+whimsical, sensitive mouth, he lived and uttered himself. They took all
+the bitterness and sting out of whatever he might say. When he was
+about to launch one of his witticisms, he fixed his eyes intently on his
+interlocutor, as if to call his attention to the good thing coming, and
+to ask his enjoyment of it, quite apart from such application to himself
+as it might have. It was impossible to meet this look and to resent
+whatever might go with it. Thus a friend of his, who wished to write
+telling books but could not quite do it, came to him in haste one day
+and exclaimed, aggrievedly, "Look here, Douglas, is this true that was
+told me--that you said my last book was the worst I'd ever written?"
+Douglas gazed earnestly into the flushed and troubled face, and said,
+in his softest tones, "Oh no, my dear fellow, that isn't what I said at
+all; what I did say was that it was the worst book anybody ever wrote."
+Such a retort, so delivered, could not but placate even an outraged
+author.
+
+Of Charles Reade my father saw little, and was not impressed by what he
+saw; but Reade, writing of him to my sister Una, five-and-twenty years
+after, said, "Your father had the most magnificent eye that I ever
+saw in a human head." Reade was just past forty at the time he met my
+father, and had just published _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_--the
+first of his great series of reform novels. Christie Johnstone and
+Peg Woffington were very clever, and written with immense vigor and
+keenness, but did not give the measure of the man. I doubt if my father
+had as yet read any of them; but later he was very fond of Reade's
+writings. Certainly he could not but have been moved by The Cloister and
+the Hearth, the greatest and most beautiful of all historical novels. He
+saw in him only a tall, athletic, light-haired man with blue eyes. I
+was more fortunate. I not only came to know Reade in 1879, but also
+knew several persons who knew him intimately and loved and admired him
+prodigiously; they were all in one story about him. He was then still
+tall and athletic, but his wavy hair and beard were gray; his face was
+one of the most sensitive men's faces I ever saw, and his forehead was
+straight and fine, full of observation and humor; his eyes were by turns
+tender and sparkling. There was a great deal of the feminine in Reade,
+together with his robust and aggressive masculinity. The fault of his
+head was its lack of depth; there was not much distance from the ear to
+the nostril, and the backhead was deficient. It was high above. There
+was a discord or incongruity in his nature, which made his life not
+what could be called a happy one. He had the impulses of the radical and
+reformer, but not the iron or the impassivity which would have enabled
+him to endure unmoved the attacks of conservatism and ignorance. He
+kicked against the pricks and suffered for it. He was passionate,
+impatient, and extreme; but what a lovely, irresistible genius! He was
+never a society figure, and withdrew more and more from personal contact
+with people; but he kept up to the last the ardor of his attack upon the
+abuses of civilization--or what he deemed to be such. He fell into
+some errors, but they were as nothing to the good he effected even in
+external conditions; and the happiness and benefit he brought to tens of
+thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness, and--dramatic
+animation of his stories, and by the nobility and lovableness of many
+of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable, and will touch us and
+abide with us again when the welter of the present transition state has
+passed. His devotion to the drama injured his style as a novelist, and
+also led him to adopt a sort of staccato manner of construction and
+statement which sometimes makes us smile. But upon the ground proper to
+his genius Reade had no rival. A true and full biography of him, by a
+man bold enough and broad enough to write it, would be a stirring book.
+
+Bailey, the amiable mystical poet, whom my father mildly liked, was
+another man my glimpses of whom came at a date much later than this.
+He was a small, placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a large
+beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things besides
+"Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind from the
+general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed finally to have
+recognized this, and he spent his later years (he lived to a great age)
+in issuing continually fresh editions of his book, with expansions and
+later thoughts, until it got to be a sort of philosophical library in
+itself. He appeared in society in order to give his admirers opportunity
+to offer up their grateful homage, and to settle for them all questions
+relative to the meaning of man and of religion. No misgivings troubled
+him; his smile was as an unintermittent summer noonday. He was
+accompanied by his wife, with whom he seemed to be, as Tennyson
+says, "twinned, like horse's ear and eye." She relieved him from the
+embarrassing necessity of saying illuminative and eulogistic things
+about himself and his great work. The book, upon its first publication,
+was really read by appreciable numbers of persons; later, I think,
+"Festus Bailey" came to be, to the general mind, an amusing kind of
+appanage of his own work, which was now taken as read, but ceased to
+have readers. How happy a little imperviousness may make a good man!
+
+Tom Taylor, the dramatist, Punch contributor, and society wit, I
+remember only as a pale face and a black beard. His wit had something
+of a professional tang. There are many like him in club-land and hanging
+about the stage; they catch up and remember all the satirical sayings,
+the comicalities, and quips that they hear, and they maintain a sort
+of factory for the production of puns. Their repartee explodes like an
+American boy's string of toy crackers, and involves, to set it going,
+no greater intellectual effort. They are not, in their first state, less
+intelligent than the common run of men--rather the contrary; but as
+soon as they have gone so far as to acquire a reputation for wit, their
+output begins to betray that sad, perfunctory quality which we find in
+wound-up music-boxes, and that mechanical rattle makes us forget that
+they ever had brains. However, Tom Taylor, with his century of plays and
+adaptations--among them "Our American Cousin," which the genius of
+an actor, if not its own merit, made memorable--should not be deemed
+unworthy of the reputation which, in his time and place, he won. He was
+at his best when, stimulated by applause and a good dinner, he portrayed
+persons and things with a kind of laughable extravagance, in the mode
+introduced by Dickens. Men of his ilk grow more easily in our soil than
+in the English, and are much less regarded.
+
+Henry Stevens--"the man of libraries," as my father calls him--was a
+New-Englander, born in Vermont; he took betimes to books, came abroad,
+and was employed by the British Museum in getting together Americana,
+and by various collectors as an agent to procure books, and in these
+innocent pursuits his amiable life was passed. He had a pleasing gift of
+drollery, which made his companionship acceptable at stag-parties and
+in the smoking-room of the clubs, and he had also a fund of special
+information on literary subjects which was often of value. I met him
+in after-life--twenty-five years after--and age had not altered him,
+though, perhaps, custom had somewhat staled his variety. He was of
+medium stature, dark haired and bearded. With him was often seen the
+egregious Mr. Pecksniff (as Samuel Carter Hall was commonly known to
+his acquaintances since the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit ten
+years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble
+sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before
+the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous
+hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were
+the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired.
+Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character;
+there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation
+as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before
+others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus
+escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his
+soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very
+moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite.
+No one who knew him took him seriously, but admired the ability of his
+performance, and so well was he understood that he did little or no
+harm beyond the venting of a spite here and there and the boring of his
+auditors after the absurdity of him became tedious. Self-worshippers
+of the _os-rotundus_ sort are seldom otherwise mischievous. He may be
+sufficiently illustrated by two anecdotes.
+
+They both occurred at a dinner where I was a guest, and Bennoch sat at
+the head of the table. Hall sat at Bennoch's left hand, and my place was
+next to Hall's. The old gentleman--he was at this period panoplied
+in the dignity of a full suit of snow-white hair, and that unctuous
+solemnity and simpering self-complacency of visage and demeanor which
+were inflamed rather than abated by years--began the evening by telling
+in sesquipedalian language a long tale of an alleged adventure of his
+with my father, which, inasmuch as there was no point to it, need not
+be rehearsed here; but I noticed that Bennoch was for some reason hugely
+diverted by it, and found difficulty in keeping his hilarity within due
+bounds of decorum, Hall's tone being all the while of the most earnest
+gravity. Later I took occasion to ask Bennoch the secret of his mirth;
+was the tale a fiction? "Not a bit of it," Bennoch replied; "it's every
+word of it true; but what tickled me was that it was myself and not Hall
+who was in the adventure with your father; but Hall has been telling it
+this way for twenty years past, and has long since come to believe that
+his lie is the truth." So ended the first lesson.
+
+The second was administered shortly before the company dispersed.
+Mr. Hall again got the floor to deliver one of his more formal moral
+homilies. "And, my dear friends--my very dear friends," he went
+on, resting his finger-ends upon the table, and inclining his body
+affectionately towards his auditors, "may I, as an old man--I think the
+oldest of any of you here present--conclude by asking your indulgence
+for an illustration from the personal experience and custom of one who
+may, I think--who at least has ever striven to be, a humble Christian
+gentleman--may I, my dear friends, cite this simple example of what I
+have been attempting to inculcate from my own personal practice, and
+that of my very dear and valued wife, Mrs. Hall? It has for very many
+years been our constant habit, before seeking rest at night, to kneel
+down together at our bedside, and to implore, together, the Divine
+blessing upon the efforts and labors of the foregoing day. And before
+offering up that petition to the Throne of Grace, my friends "--here
+the orator's voice vibrated a little with emotion--"we have ever been
+sedulous to ask each other, and to question our own hearts, as to
+whether, during that day, some human fellow-creature had been made
+better, or happier, because we had lived. And very seldom has it
+happened--very seldom, indeed, my dear friends, has it happened--that
+we were unable to say to ourselves, and to each other, that, during
+that day, some fellow-creature, if not more than one, had had cause for
+thankfulness because we had lived. And now I will beg of you, my dear
+friends," added Mr. Hall, producing his large, white pocket-handkerchief
+and patting his eyes with it, "to pardon a personal allusion, made in
+fulness of heart and brotherly feeling, and if there be found in it
+anything calculated to assist any of you towards a right comprehension
+of our Christian responsibilities towards our fellow-man, I entreat that
+you take it into your hearts and bosoms, and may it be sanctified unto
+you. I have done."
+
+This report may be relied upon as substantially accurate, for the
+reporter made a note of the apologue and exhortation soon afterwards.
+Mrs. Hall, like her husband, was of Irish birth, and an agreeable
+and clever woman. They were both born in 1800, and died, she in her
+eighty-second, he in his ninetieth year. He remained the same Hall to
+the very end of his long chapter, and really, if no one was the better
+because he had lived, I don't know that any one was the worse, in the
+long run, either; and there have been Pecksniffs of whom as much could
+hardly be affirmed. There is, however, an anecdote of Hall which my
+father tells, and seems to have credited; if it be true, it would appear
+that once at least in his life he could hardly have implored the Throne
+of Grace for a blessing on the deeds of the day. "He told me," writes my
+father, "(laughing at the folly of the affair, but, nevertheless, fully
+appreciating his own chivalry) how he and Charles Lever, about ten years
+since, had been on the point of fighting a duel. The quarrel was made
+up, however, and they parted good friends, Lever returning to Ireland,
+whence Mr. Hall's challenge had summoned him." I suspect good Mr. Hall
+must have once more appropriated somebody else's adventure; it was not
+in the heat of youth that the bloody-minded and unchristian episode is
+supposed to have occurred, but when Mr. Hall was in his forty-seventh
+year.
+
+Durham, the sculptor, was a lifelong friend of Bennoch's, and was often
+in my father's company, and he manifested a friendly feeling towards my
+father's son long afterwards. He was a man of medium height, compactly
+built, with slightly curling hair, and a sympathetic, abstracted
+expression of countenance. He was at this time making a bust of Queen
+Victoria, and he told us that it was contrary to court etiquette for her
+Majesty, during these sittings, to address herself directly to him,
+or, of course, for him directly to address her; they must communicate
+through the medium of the lady-in-waiting. The Queen, however, said
+Durham, sometimes broke through this rule, and so did the sculptor,
+the democracy of art, it would seem, enabling them to surmount the
+obligation to filter through the mind of a third person all such remarks
+as they might wish to make to each other. Durham also said that when
+the bust was nearly finished the Queen proposed that a considerable
+thickness of the clay should be removed from the model, which was done.
+The bust, as an ideal work, was thereby much improved, but the likeness
+to her Majesty was correspondingly diminished. Years afterwards I
+was talking with W. G. Wills, the painter and dramatist, a delightful
+Irishman of the most incorrigibly republican and bohemian type. He had,
+a little while before, been giving lessons in painting to the Princess
+Louise, who married the Marquis of Lorne, and who was, herself,
+exceptionally emancipated for a royal personage. One day, said Wills
+(telling the story quite innocently), the Princess was prevented from
+coming as usual to his studio, and he received a message from Windsor
+Castle, where the Princess and the Queen were staying, from the Queen's
+secretary, commanding his presence there to give the Princess her
+lesson, and to spend the night. This would be regarded by the ordinary
+British subject not only as an order to be instantly and unhesitatingly
+obeyed, but as a high honor and distinction. "But the fact is," said
+Wills, with his easy smile, "I'd promised to be at my friend
+Corkran's reception that evening, and, of course, I couldn't think of
+disappointing him; there was no time to write, so I just sent a telegram
+to the castle saying I was engaged." Probably English society history
+does not contain a parallel to this piece of audacity, and one would
+have liked to see the face of the private secretary of her Majesty
+when he opened the telegram. But Wills could not be made to recognize
+anything singular in the affair.
+
+Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the
+subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his
+unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off
+sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might as
+well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as the
+ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of print-shops.
+The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the exercise of it,
+I think, had better be confined to manufacture of marble fireplaces."
+As we shall see, he modified this radical view before he left Italy; but
+there is some ground of truth in it, nevertheless.
+
+Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed
+description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the
+objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice to
+record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the
+English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he
+writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not
+flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake
+or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert
+and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust,
+or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good a likeness as this
+cheap print. You see the whole line of Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed,
+shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with a simple kind of heartiness and
+truth that make one somewhat good-natured towards them."
+
+"I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon
+the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he
+never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still
+more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when
+Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see
+Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent
+a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not
+speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay,
+and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual
+appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship,
+in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the
+author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But,
+upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary
+men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find
+sympathetic.
+
+One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there
+entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black, thick-curling
+hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years of age, but had
+the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a great
+briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell of his
+experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew everything about
+the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and the coming movements
+of international politics. He was a striking, handsome, indomitable
+figure, and aggressively American. When he went away, he left with my
+father a book which he had written, with an engraved portrait of
+the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded and shelf-worn, but
+apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of a generation and a
+half ago, I recently found among my father's volumes. It bore on the
+title-page the dashing signature of George Francis Train. Train saw
+things in the large--in their cosmic relations; from us he was going
+forth to make a fortune compared with which that of Monte Cristo would
+be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I believe; but there seems to have
+been in his blood a little too much of the elixir of life--more than he
+could thoroughly digest. His development was arrested, or was continued
+on lines which carried him away from practical contact with that world
+which he believed he held in the hollow of his hand. My father suspected
+his soundness; but in 1856 there seemed to be no height to which he
+might not rise. The spiritual steam-engine in him, however, somehow got
+uncoupled from the mass of the machinery of human affairs, and has
+been plying in vacua, so to say, ever since. On the 9th of June came
+a telegram from Southampton; my mother and sisters had arrived from
+Madeira. My father and I left Liverpool the next day, feeling that our
+troubles were over. In the afternoon we alighted at the little seaport
+and took a cab to the Castle Hotel, close to the water. My father, with
+a face full of light, sprang up-stairs to the room in which my mother
+awaited him; I found myself with my sisters and Fannie Wrigley, the
+faithful nurse and companion who had accompanied them on their travels.
+How tall and mature Una was! What a big girl baby Rose had become! There
+was a little strangeness between us, but great good-will; we felt that
+there were a great many explanations to be made. In a few minutes I was
+called up-stairs to my mother. At the first glance she seemed smaller
+than formerly; her face appeared a little different from my memory of
+it; I was overcome by an odd shyness. She smiled and held out her arms;
+then I saw my beloved mother, and a great passion of affection poured
+through me and swept me to her. I was whole again, and indescribably
+happy.
+
+There was never such another heavenly room as that parlor in the Castle
+Hotel; never another hotel so delightful, or another town to be compared
+with Southampton. I was united to all I loved there, and in my thoughts
+sunshine will always rest on it.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+     Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl
+     who giggled all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch
+     terrier named Towsey--A sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--
+     London as a physical entity--Ladies in low-necked dresses--
+     An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the bowels of the
+     earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and tragic
+     situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great,
+     wild, mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and
+     awful--"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave,
+     gouge, and chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-
+     grams-A graduate of Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A
+     catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"--"In truth
+     I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide--awake of these
+     things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at
+     Folkestone for France.
+
+We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was founded
+on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were shown to
+guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of Wight,
+white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I suppose,
+during that week, we were enough employed in telling one another our
+histories during our separation; and naturally that of my mother and
+sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home words and phrases
+in a foreign tongue, which made me feel very ignorant; they had talked
+familiarly with kings and queens; they had had exciting experiences in
+Madeira; they brought with them photographs and colored prints of people
+and places, unlike anything that I had seen. My mother, who was an
+unsurpassed narrator of events, gave us wonderful and vivid accounts of
+all they had seen and done, which I so completely assimilated that to
+this day I could repeat a great deal of them; my father listened with
+eyes like stars (as my mother would have said), and with a smile in the
+corners of his mouth. It was glorious weather all the time, or so it
+seems to have been to me. My sisters and I renewed our acquaintance,
+and found one another none the worse. Nobody called on us except a Mrs.
+Hume, with whom a stay of a fortnight was projected; she kept a girls'
+school, and, this being vacation, she would take us as boarders. We
+were starved there, as only a pinching, English, thin-bread-and-butter
+housekeeper can starve people; and my sisters and I had for our playmate
+a half-witted girl who was staying over the vacation, and who giggled
+all the time. Mrs. Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that
+there were endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed
+hostile to my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs.
+Hume understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed
+that grew on the low bluff beside the water. I never told her my
+disappointment, imagining that it would distress her; but it gnawed me
+terribly, and she did not merit such forbearance.
+
+We would much better have stayed at the hotel, only that they charged us
+fourteen dollars a day, which was considered exorbitant in those days.
+There were seven of us, including Fanny, the nurse. What an age, when
+two dollars a head was exorbitant! What Mrs. Hume charged us I know not,
+but it is only just to admit that it must have been a good deal less
+than one hundred dollars a week; though, again, it must not be forgotten
+that translucent bread-and-butter is not expensive. We were sent there,
+I suppose, in order to remind us that this was still the world that we
+were living in, after all, and not yet Paradise. We came out from her
+sobered and chastened, but cheerful still; and meanwhile we visited
+Stonehenge and other local things of beauty or interest. Then Mr.
+Bennoch (who, to tell the truth, had introduced Mrs. Hume to us) invited
+us to spend a month at his house in Blackheath, while he and his wife
+were making a little tour in Germany, and we arrived at this agreeable
+refuge during the first half of July. My father records that he was as
+happy there as he had ever been since leaving his native land. It was
+a pleasant little house, in a semi-countrified spot, and it contained,
+besides the usual furniture proper to an English gentleman and his wife
+of moderate fortune, a little Scotch terrier named Towsey, who commanded
+much of the attention of us children, and one day inadvertently bit my
+thumb; and I carry the scar, for remembrance, to this day.
+
+Many well-known persons passed across our stage here; and London,
+with all its wonders, was at our doors, the wide expanse of its
+smoke-piercing towers visible in our distance. All the while my father
+kept the official part of himself at Liverpool, where his consular
+duties still claimed his attention; he went and came between Mrs.
+Blodgett's and Black-heath. The popularity of the incomparable
+boarding-house in Duke Street had continued to increase, and he was
+obliged to bestow himself in a small room at the back of the building,
+which was reputed to be haunted by the spirit of one of his predecessors
+in office, who had not only died in it, but had often experienced there
+the terrors of delirium tremens; but the ghost, perhaps from a sentiment
+of diplomatic etiquette, never showed itself to my father. Or it may
+have been that the real self of him being in Blackheath, what remained
+was not sufficient to be conscious of a spiritual presence. He came and
+went, like sunlight on a partly cloudy day. I recollect taking a walk
+over the Heath at evening with him and the doctor who was attending my
+mother; Mr. Bennoch was with us; it must have been just before he
+and his wife went to the Continent. After walking some distance (the
+gentlemen chatting together, and I gambolling on ahead) we came to the
+summit of a low rise, from which we beheld London, flung out, all its
+gloomy length, before us; and in all my thoughts of London as a physical
+entity the impression then received of it returns to me. It lay vast,
+low, and obscure in front of the dull red of the sunset, with dim
+lights twinkling dispersedly throughout it, and the dome of St. Paul's
+doubtfully defining itself above the level. There is no other general
+view of London to be compared with this, seen under those conditions.
+Soon after, we came to some ridges and mounds, which, said Bennoch,
+marked the place where were buried the heaps of the slain of some great
+prehistoric battle--one, at least, which must have taken place while
+the Romans yet ruled Britain. It was a noble scene for such an antique
+conflict, when man met man, foot to foot and hand to hand, with sword
+and spear. My mind was full of King Arthur and his Round-Table knights
+of the Pendragonship, and I doubted not that their mightiest fight had
+been fought here.
+
+There were many walks in London itself. One day, going west along the
+Strand, we found ourselves drawn into the midst of a vast crowd near
+Charing Cross; some royal function was in progress. Threading our
+way slowly through the press, we saw a troop of horsemen in steel
+breastplates, with nodding plumes on their helmets, and drawn swords
+carried upright on their thighs--the famous Horse Guards; and farther
+on we began to see carriages with highly ornamental coachmen and footmen
+passing in dilatory procession; within them were glimpses of ladies in
+low-necked dresses, feathers in their hair, and their necks sparkling
+with jewels.
+
+At length we turned off towards the north, and by-and-by were entering a
+huge building of gray stone, with tall pillars in front of it, which my
+father told me was the British Museum. What a place for a boy! Endless
+halls of statues; enormous saloons filled with glass-cases of shells;
+cases of innumerable birds; acres of butterflies and other insects;
+strange objects which I did not understand--magic globes of shining
+crystal, enormous masses of iron which were said to have fallen from the
+sky; vases and jewels; and finally, at the farther end of a corridor,
+a small door, softly opening, disclosed a circular room of stupendous
+proportions, domed above, the curving walls filled with myriads of
+books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks, and in the
+midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his web; but it
+was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat or walked to
+and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the world. It was my
+first vision of a great library.
+
+Another time we went--all of us, I think--to the Tower of London. I
+vibrated with joy at the spectacle of the array of figures in armor, and
+picked out, a score of times, the suit I would most gladly choose to put
+on. Here were St. George, King Arthur, Sir Scudamour, Sir Lancelot--all
+but their living faces and their knightly deeds! Then I found myself
+immured in dungeons with walls twenty feet thick, darksome and
+low-browed, with tiny windows, and some of them bearing on their stones
+strange inscriptions, cut there by captives who were nevermore to issue
+thence, save to the block. Here the great Raleigh had been confined;
+here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the noble Sir Henry Vane,
+who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New England. Everywhere
+stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters in their brilliant
+fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then passed the portals of
+the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam of the Koh-i-noor--if
+it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and not a glass model
+foisted on my innocence.
+
+Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the bowels
+of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we passed
+through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us two
+endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a man,
+with people walking in them, and disappearing in their interminable
+perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them, and after we
+had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the river Thames was
+flowing over our heads, with its ships on its surface, and its fishes,
+and its bottom of mud and gravel--under all these this illuminated
+corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing and walking therein. Would
+we ever again behold the upper world and the sky? The atmosphere was not
+pleasant, and I was glad to find myself climbing up another flight of
+stairs and emerging on the other side of the river, which we had crossed
+on foot, dry-shod.
+
+Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I
+remember that a woman who seemed taller than common, dressed in a dark
+silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew
+she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose features
+were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation unlike other
+voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name which I had heard
+often, and which had a glamour for my boyish imagination--Jenny Lind.
+There also rises before me the dark, courteous visage and urbane figure
+of Monckton Milnes; but there was something more and better than mere
+courtesy and urbanity about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of
+what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for
+the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father
+thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about
+Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me
+long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's
+library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting
+volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified
+by the discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles
+term, I think, "Facetiae"--of which Milnes had a collection unmatched
+among private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast,
+which he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable--in
+England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the afternoon.
+Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw nothing, but
+heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father seemed to have
+little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of the despotic
+attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was far more
+intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who disregarded
+her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure compassion, I
+believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which the poor woman
+had placed herself, tried with all her might to read the book and
+believe the theory; she would take up the mass of manuscript night after
+night, and wade through it with that truly saintlike self-abnegation
+which characterized her, occasionally, too, reading out a passage
+which struck her. The result was that she could not bring herself to
+disbelieve in Shakespeare, but she conceived a higher admiration than
+ever of Bacon; and that, too, was characteristic of her.
+
+We made several incursions into the surrounding country. One was to
+Newstead, where, from the talkative landlady of the hotel, we heard
+endless stories about Byron and his wife; this was before Mrs. Harriet
+Beecher Stowe published her well-intended but preposterous volume about
+the poet. Then we visited Oxford, and were shown about by the mayor of
+the town, and by Mr. S. C. Hall, and were at one moment bathed in the
+light emanating from Lady Waldegrave, of which interview my father, in
+his private note-book, speaks thus: "Lady Waldegrave appeared; whereupon
+Mr. Speirs (the mayor) instantly was transfigured and transformed--like
+the English snob he is, worthy man--and looked humbler than he does in
+the presence of his Maker, and so respectful and so blest that it was
+pleasant to behold him. Nevertheless, she is but a brummagem kind of
+countess, after all, being the daughter of Braham, the famous singer,
+and married first to an illegitimate son of an Earl Waldegrave--not
+to the legitimate son and possessor of the title (who was her first
+love)--and after the death of these two to the present old Mr. Harcourt.
+She is still in her summer, even if it be waning, a lady of fresh
+complexion and light hair, a Jewish nose (to which her descent entitles
+her), a kind and generous expression of face, but an officer-like
+figure and bearing. There seems to be a peculiarity of manner, a lack
+of simplicity, a self-consciousness, which I suspect would not have been
+seen in a lady born to the rank which she has attained. But, anyhow, she
+was kind to all of us, and complimentary to me, and she showed us
+some curious things which had formerly made part of Horace Walpole's
+collection at Twickenham--a missal, for instance, splendidly bound and
+beset with jewels, but of such value as no setting could increase, for
+it was exquisitely illuminated by the own hand of Raphael himself! I
+held the precious volume in my grasp, though I fancy (and so does my
+wife) that the countess scarcely thought it safe out of her own hands.
+In truth, I suppose any virtuoso would steal it if he could; and Lady
+Waldegrave has reason to look to the safe-keeping of her treasures, as
+she exemplified by telling us a story while exhibiting a little silver
+case. This once contained a portion of the heart of Louis XII. (how
+the devil it was got I know not), and she was showing it one day to
+Strickland, Dean of Westminster, when, to her horror and astonishment,
+she saw him open the case and swallow the royal heart! Ate ever man such
+a morsel before! It was a symptom of insanity in the dean, and I believe
+he is since dead, insane." It was after this interview with the countess
+that we visited Old Boston, and when my parents told old Mr. Porter
+about the missal his jolly eyes took on a far-away expression, as if he
+saw himself in the delightful act of purloining it, "in obedience to a
+higher law than that which he broke."
+
+The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those years,
+and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had already
+begun to read. The publication of this work had made him famous, though
+he had written two or three volumes before that, and was at this
+very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow was never a
+hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One day, however,
+Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing to turn on
+Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates, and that the
+latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular influence over
+other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of them to run away
+from the school and lead a life of freedom and adventure on the roads
+and lanes of England. To this part of Mr. Martineau's tale I lent an
+eager and sympathetic ear; but the narrator was lowered in my estimation
+by the confession that he himself had not been a member of Borrow's
+party. He went on to say that the fugitives had been pursued and
+captured and brought back to bondage; and upon Borrow's admitting that
+he had been the instigator of the adventure, he was sentenced to be
+flogged, and that it was on the back of this very Martineau that he
+had been "horsed" to undergo the punishment! Imagine the great, wild,
+mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic and precise cleric that
+was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the
+accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau
+replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to
+mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in
+his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal
+fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to
+essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts
+could bring most men.
+
+One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch--though I cannot
+fix the exact date--was to an old English country-seat, built in the
+time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since
+then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of
+plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children
+wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the
+family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only
+twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being
+twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for
+the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was
+Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting lost,
+and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and passages
+through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that when one
+of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would come out.
+Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great, black
+lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end of a
+corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in addition to
+its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and there were
+bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we proposed
+to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been closed one
+hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened since then,
+and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some reason, had become
+very objectionable or dangerous to other persons concerned. The windows
+of the room, they added, had been walled up at the same time; so there
+this unhappy creature slowly starved to death in pitch darkness. There,
+doubtless, within a few feet of where we stood, lay her skeleton,
+huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she wore in life. Sometimes,
+too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound,
+like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught
+through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young
+blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like
+frivolous chatter beside it.
+
+About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the Continent,
+and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in Southport
+which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to meet with the
+crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding spirits, and he told my
+father an anecdote of our friend Grace Greenwood, which is recorded in
+one of the private note-books. "Grace, Bennoch says," he writes, "was
+invited to a private reading of Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she
+thought it behooved her to manifest her good taste and depth of feeling
+by going into hysterics and finally fainting away upon the floor.
+Hereupon Charles Kemble looked up from his book and addressed himself to
+her sternly and severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you
+disturb the company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'"
+
+This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought
+that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps
+she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be imparted
+to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and, after a few
+flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch says he had this
+story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes it; and I think it
+not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a morbid exaggeration
+of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed into this awful fix. I
+wonder how she survived it!
+
+At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following
+July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the
+ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my
+designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved,
+gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and
+companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little models
+of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a sail-boat
+for myself. My father seems to have thought that some practical
+acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me no harm--by
+adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture--so he arranged
+with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for instruction.
+Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in the mysteries
+of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel, and finally
+presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches long and
+nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my labors, but
+conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them himself; the
+model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a bluff-bowed,
+broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French fishing-boats
+which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and Havre. The outside
+form being done, I entered upon the delightful and exciting work of
+hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding, more than once,
+piercing through from the hold into the outer world. But the little ship
+became more buoyant every day, and finally stood ready for her
+deck. This I prepared by planing down a bit of plank to the proper
+thickness--or thinness--and carefully fitted it into its place, with
+companionways fore and aft, covered with hatches made to slide in
+grooves. Next, with chisel, spoke-shave, and sand-paper, I prepared
+the mast and fitted a top-mast to it, and secured it in its place with
+shrouds and stays of fine, waxed fishing-line. The boom and gaff
+were then put in place, and Fanny Wrigley (who had aforetime made my
+pasteboard armor and helmet) now made me a main-sail, top-sail, and jib
+out of the most delicate linen, beautifully hemmed, and a tiny American
+flag to hoist to the peak. It only remained to paint her; I was provided
+with three delectable cans of oil-paint, and I gave her a bright-green
+under-body, a black upper-body, and white port-holes with a narrow red
+line running underneath them. Thus decorated, and with her sails
+set, she was a splendid object, and the boys with bought models were
+depressed with envy, especially when I called their attention to the
+stars and stripes. This boat-building mania of mine had originated while
+we were at Mrs. Blodgett's, where the captain of one of the clippers
+gave me a beautiful model of his own ship, fully rigged, and perfect
+in every detail; only it would not sail, being solid. Concerning
+his clipper, by-the-way, I once overheard a bit of dialogue in Mrs.
+Blodgett's smoking-room between my captain and another. "Do you mean to
+say," demanded the latter, "that you passed the Lightning?" To which
+my captain replied, in measured and impressive tones,
+"I-passed-the-Lightning!" The Lightning, it may be remarked, was at that
+time considered the queen of the Atlantic passage; she had made the trip
+between Boston and Liverpool in ten days. But my captain had once shown
+her his heels, nevertheless. I wanted to christen my sloop The Sea
+Eagle, but my father laughed so much at this name that I gave it up;
+he suggested The Chub, The Mud-Pout, and other ignoble titles, which I
+indignantly rejected, and what her name finally was I have forgotten.
+She afforded me immense happiness.
+
+At Southport we had a queer little governess, Miss Brown, who came to us
+highly recommended both as to her personal character and for ability to
+instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English composition,
+and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as
+thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up
+to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the
+"branches" specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was
+particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always
+calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with a strong emphasis on
+the penultimate syllable; and she spent several days repeating over to
+herself, with a mystified countenance, the famous words, "The square
+of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs."
+What were legs of a triangle, and how, if there were any, could they be
+square? She never solved this enigma; and although we liked little Miss
+Brown very much, she speedily lost all shadow of control over us; we
+treated her as a sort of inferior sister, and would never be serious.
+"English governess" became for us a synonym for an amiable little
+nonentity who knew nothing; and I was surprised to learn, later, from
+the early works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, that they could be beautiful
+and intelligent. Miss Brown did not outlast our residence in Southport.
+
+From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting
+the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of
+1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and Italy,
+but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of 1858.
+
+It was in Leamington that we were joined by Ada Shepard. She was a
+graduate of Antioch, a men-and-women's college in Ohio, renowned in its
+day, when all manner of improvements in the human race were anticipated
+from educating the sexes together. Miss Shepard had got a very
+thorough education there, so that she knew as much as a professor,
+including--what would be of especial service to us--a knowledge of most
+of the modern European languages. What seemed, no doubt, of even more
+importance to her was her betrothal to her classmate, Henry Clay Badger;
+they were to be married on her return to America. Meanwhile, as a matter
+of mutual convenience (which rapidly became mutual pleasure), she was
+to act as governess of us children and accompany our travels. Ada (as my
+father and mother presently called her) was then about twenty-two years
+old; she had injured her constitution--never robust--by addiction to
+learning, and had incidentally imbibed from the atmosphere of Antioch
+all the women's-rights fads and other advanced opinions of the day.
+These, however, affected mainly the region of her intellect; in her
+nature she was a simple, affectionate, straightforward American maiden,
+with the little weaknesses and foibles appertaining to that estate;
+and it was curious to observe the frequent conflicts between these
+spontaneous characteristics and her determination to live up to her
+acquired views. But she was fresh-hearted and happy then, full of
+interest in the wonders and beauties of the Old World; she wrote,
+weekly, long, criss-crossed letters, in a running hand, home to
+"Clay," the king of men; and periodically received, with an illuminated
+countenance, thick letters with an American foreign postage-stamp on
+them, which she would shut herself into her chamber to devour in secret.
+She was a little over the medium height, with a blue-eyed face, not
+beautiful, but gentle and expressive, and wearing her flaxen hair in
+long curls on each side of her pale cheeks. She entered upon her duties
+as governess with energy and good-will, and we soon found that an
+American governess was a very different thing from an English one
+(barring the Rhoda Broughton sort). Her special aim at present was to
+bring us forward in the French and Italian languages. We had already,
+in Manchester, made some acquaintance with the books of the celebrated
+Ollendorff; and my father, who knew Latin well, had taught me something
+of Latin grammar, which aided me in my Italian studies. I liked Latin,
+particularly as he taught it to me, and it probably amused him, though
+it must also often have tried his patience to teach me. I had a certain
+aptitude for the spirit of the language, but was much too prone to leap
+at conclusions in my translations. I did not like to look out words
+in the lexicon, and the result was sometimes queer. Thus, there was
+a sentence in some Latin author describing the manner in which the
+Scythians were wont to perform their journeys; relays of fresh horses
+would be provided at fixed intervals, and thus they were enabled to
+traverse immense distances at full speed. The words used were, I think,
+as follows: "Itaque conficiunt iter continuo cursu." When I translated
+these, "So they came to the end of their journey with continual
+cursing," I was astonished to see my father burst into inextinguishable
+laughter, falling back in his chair and throwing up his feet in the
+ebullience of his mirth. I heard a good deal of that "continual cursing"
+for some years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay
+stricter attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done.
+
+However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves,
+by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in fair
+condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother, indeed,
+had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not Italian;
+my father, though he read these languages easily enough, never attained
+any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up his consular
+affairs, about the first week in October, we left Leamington and took
+the train for a few days in London, stopping at lodgings in Great
+Russell Street, close to the British Museum.
+
+We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at
+this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but
+his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too
+much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his
+return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much
+involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those
+days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it
+is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built
+up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work,
+and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time
+almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender
+sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a
+report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded),
+that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth--they had never had children.
+"Troubles," commented my father "(as I myself have experienced, and
+many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to
+come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with
+long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune." He was doubtless thinking
+of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in
+Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born.
+
+A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood
+Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for
+the light it casts on the characters of the two friends:
+
+"When I inquired for Bennoch, in the warehouse where two or three clerks
+seemed to be taking account of stock, a boy asked me to write my name on
+a slip of paper, and took it into his peculiar office. Then appeared Mr.
+Riggs, the junior partner, looking haggard and anxious, poor man. He is
+somewhat low of stature, and slightly deformed, and I fancied that he
+felt the disgrace and trouble more on that account. But he greeted me
+in a friendly way, though rather awkwardly, and asked me to sit down a
+little while in his own apartment, where he left me. I sat a good while,
+reading an old number of Blackwood's Magazine, a pile of which I found
+on the desk, together with some well-worn ledgers and papers, that
+looked as if they had been pulled out of drawers and pigeon-holes and
+dusty corners, and were not there in the regular course of business.
+By-and-by Mr. Riggs reappeared, and, telling me that I must lunch with
+them, conducted me up-stairs, and through entries and passages where I
+had been more than once before, but could not have found my way again
+through those extensive premises; and everywhere the packages of silk
+were piled up and ranged on shelves, in paper boxes, and otherwise--a
+rich stock, but which had brought ruin with it. At last we came to that
+pleasant drawing-room, hung with a picture or two, where I remember
+enjoying the hospitality of the firm, with their clerks all at the
+table, and thinking that this was a genuine scene of the old life
+of London City, when the master used to feed his 'prentices at a
+patriarchal board. After all, the room still looked cheerful enough; and
+there was a good fire, and the table was laid for four. In two or three
+minutes Bennoch came in--not with that broad, warm, lustrous presence
+that used to gladden me in our past encounters--not with all that
+presence, at least--though still he was not less than a very genial
+man, partially be-dimmed. He looked paler, it seemed to me, thinner,
+and rather smaller, but nevertheless he smiled at greeting me, more
+brightly, I suspect, than I smiled back at him, for in truth I was very
+sorry. Mr. Twentyman, the middle partner, now came in, and appeared as
+much or more depressed than his fellows in misfortune, and to bear it
+with a greater degree of English incommunicativeness and reserve. But
+he, too, met me hospitably, and I and these three poor ruined men sat
+down to dinner--a good dinner enough, by-the-bye, and such as ruined men
+need not be ashamed to eat, since they must needs eat something. It was
+roast beef, and a boiled apple-pudding, and--which I was glad to see, my
+heart being heavy--a decanter of sherry and another of port, remnants
+of a stock which, I suppose, will not be replenished. They ate pretty
+fairly, but scarcely like Englishmen, and drank a reasonable quantity,
+but not as if their hearts were in it, or as if the liquor went to their
+hearts and gladdened them. I gathered from them a strong idea of what
+commercial failure means to English merchants--utter ruin, present and
+prospective, and obliterating all the successful past; how little chance
+they have of ever getting up again; how they feel that they must plod
+heavily onward under a burden of disgrace--poor men and hopeless men
+and men forever ashamed. I doubt whether any future prosperity (which
+is unlikely enough to come to them) could ever compensate them for this
+misfortune, or make them, to their own consciousness, the men they were.
+They will be like a woman who has once lost her chastity: no after-life
+of virtue will take out the stain. It is not so in America, nor ought it
+to be so here; but they said themselves they would never again have put
+unreserved confidence in a man who had been bankrupt, and they could
+not but apply the same severe rule to their own case. I was touched by
+nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness
+against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault with
+anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple dignity, too,
+in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism. I could really have shed
+tears for them, to see how like men and Christians they let the tears
+come to their own eyes. This is the true way to do; a man ought not to
+be too proud to let his eyes be moistened in the presence of God and
+of a friend. They talked of some little annoyances, half laughingly.
+Bennoch has been dunned for his gas-bill at Blackheath (only a pound or
+two) and has paid it. Mr. Twentyman seems to have received an insulting
+message from some creditor. Mr. Riggs spoke of wanting a little money
+to pay for some boots. It was very sad, indeed, to see these men of
+uncommon energy and ability, all now so helpless, and, from managing
+great enterprises, involving vast expenditures, reduced almost to reckon
+the silver in their pockets. Bennoch and I sat by the fireside a little
+while after his partners had left the room, and then he told me that he
+blamed himself, as holding the principal position in the firm, for not
+having exercised a stronger controlling influence over their operations.
+The two other men had recently gone into speculations, of the extent of
+which he had not been fully aware, and he found the liabilities of
+the firm very much greater than he had expected. He said this without
+bitterness, and said it not to the world, but only to a friend. I am
+exceedingly sorry for him; it is such a changed life that he must
+lead hereafter, and with none of the objects before him which he might
+heretofore have hoped to grasp. No doubt he was ambitious of civic, and
+even of broader public distinction; and not unreasonably so, having the
+gift of ready and impressive speech, and a behavior among men that
+wins them, and a tact in the management of affairs, and many-sided
+and never-tiring activity. To be a member of Parliament--to be lord
+mayor--whatever an eminent merchant of the world's metropolis may
+be--beyond question he had dreamed wide-awake of these things. And now
+fate itself could hardly accomplish them, if ever so favorably inclined.
+He has to begin life over again, as he began it twenty-five years ago,
+only under infinite disadvantages, and with so much of his working-day
+gone forever.
+
+"At parting, I spoke of his going to America; but he appeared to think
+that there would be little hope for him there. Indeed, I should be loath
+to see him transplanted thither myself, away from the warm, cheerful,
+juicy English life into our drier and less genial sphere; he is a good
+guest among us, but might not do well to live with us."
+
+Bennoch was never lord mayor or member of Parliament; I do not know
+that he cared to be either; but he lived to repay all his creditors with
+interest, and to become once more a man in easy circumstances, honored
+and trusted as well as loved by all who knew him, and active and happy
+in all good works to the end of his days. There could be no keeping down
+such a man, even in England; and when I knew him, in after years, he was
+the Bennoch of yore, grown mellow and wise.
+
+We were now ready for the Continent, when symptoms of some malady began
+to manifest themselves among the younger persons of the family, which
+presently culminated in an attack of the measles. It was six weeks
+before we were in condition to take the road again. Meanwhile we were
+professionally attended by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, a homoeopathist, a
+friend of Emerson and of Henry James the elder, a student of Swedenborg,
+and, at this particular juncture, interested in spiritualism. In a
+biography of my father and mother, which I published in 1884, I alluded
+to this latter circumstance, and some time afterwards I received from
+his wife a letter which I take this opportunity to print:
+
+"4 FINCHLEY ROAD, N. W., June 19, 1885.
+
+"DEAR SIR,--May I beg of you in any future edition of the Life of your
+father to leave out your passage upon my husband and spiritualism? He
+is utterly opposed to it now. On Mr. Home's first appearance in England
+very remarkable things did occur; but from the first I was a most
+decided opponent, and by my firmness I have kept all I know and love
+from having anything to do with it for at least thirty-five years. You
+may imagine, therefore, I feel hurt at seeing so spiritually minded
+a man as my husband really is to be mixed up with so evil a thing as
+spiritism. You will pardon a faithful wife her just appreciation of
+his character. One other author took the liberty of using his name in a
+similar way, and I wrote to him also. Believe me,
+
+"Yours faithfully,
+
+"E. A. WILKINSON."
+
+The good doctor and his wife are now, I believe, both of them in the
+world where good spirits go, and no doubt they have long ere this found
+out all about the rights and wrongs of spiritism and other matters, but
+there is no doubt that at the time of my father's acquaintance with him
+the doctor was a very earnest supporter of the cult. He was a man of
+mark and of brains and of most lovable personal quality; he wrote books
+well worth deep study; Emerson speaks of "the long Atlantic roll" of
+their style. Henry James named his third son after him--the gentle and
+brave "Wilkie" James, who was my school-mate at Sanborn's school in
+Concord after our return to America, and who was wounded in the fight at
+Fort Fisher while leading his negro soldiers to the assault. But for the
+present, Dr. Wilkinson, so far as we children knew him, was a delightful
+and impressive physician, who helped us through our measles in masterly
+style, under all the disadvantages of a foggy London winter.
+
+On the 5th of January, 1858--we were ready to start the next
+day--Bennoch came to take tea with us and bid us farewell. "He keeps up
+a manly front," writes my father, "and an aspect of cheerfulness, though
+it is easy to see that he is a very different man from the joyous one
+whom I knew a few months since; and whatever may be his future
+fortune, he will never get all the sunshine back again. There is a
+more determinate shadow on him now, I think, than immediately after his
+misfortunes; the old, equable truth weighs down upon him, and makes him
+sensible that the good days of his life have probably all been enjoyed,
+and that the rest is likely to be endurance, not enjoyment. His temper
+is still sweet and warm, yet, I half fancy, not wholly unacidulated by
+his troubles--but now I have written it, I decide that it is not so,
+and blame myself for surmising it. But it seems most unnatural that
+so buoyant and expansive a character should have fallen into the
+helplessness of commercial misfortune; it is most grievous to hear his
+manly and cheerful allusions to it, and even his jokes upon it; as,
+for example, when we suggested how pleasant it would be to have him
+accompany us to Paris, and he jestingly spoke of the personal restraint
+under which he now lived. On his departure, Julian and I walked a good
+way down Oxford Street and Holborn with him, and I took leave of him
+with the truest wishes for his welfare."
+
+The next day we embarked at Folkestone for France, and our new life
+began.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+     Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but
+     perilous woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal
+     ice-palace--Confused mountain of family luggage--Poplars for
+     lances--Miraculous crimson comforters--Rivers of human gore--
+     Curling mustachios and nothing to do--Odd behavior of grown
+     people--Venus, the populace, and the MacDaniels--The
+     happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her
+     constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--
+     Sitting up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An
+     old passion reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-
+     anemones--If you were in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella
+     full of napoleons--Was Byron an Esquimau?
+
+
+
+No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years'
+residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the
+consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions
+from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour of
+tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and formed
+associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting, take
+deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show
+their strength only when we test them by removing ourselves from their
+physical sphere.
+
+Accordingly, though he looked forward with pleasure to leaving England
+for the Continent, he was no sooner on the farther side of the narrow
+seas than he began to be conscious of discomfort, which was only partly
+bodily or sensible. An unacknowledged homesickness afflicted him--an
+Old-Homesickness, rather than a yearning for America. He may have
+imagined that it was America that he wanted, but, when at last we
+returned there, he still looked back towards England. As an ideal,
+America was still, and always, foremost in his heart; and his death was
+hastened partly by his misgiving, caused by the civil war, lest her best
+days were past. But something there was in England that touched a deep,
+kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might
+be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found
+himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of
+his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament,
+combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment
+of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end,
+I do not try to be contented, but weary of it while it lasts."
+
+It is true that Rome, vehemently as at first he rebelled against it,
+came at last to hold a power over him. Rome, if you give it opportunity,
+subtly fastens its grasp upon both brain and heart, and claims
+sympathies which are as undeniable as our human nature itself. Yet there
+is something morbid in our love for the mystic city, like a passion for
+some beautiful but perilous woman with a past--such as Miriam in The
+Marble Faun, for example. Only an exceptionally vigorous and healthy
+constitution can risk it without danger. Had my father visited Rome in
+his young manhood, he might have both cared for it less and in a sense
+have enjoyed it more than he did during these latter years of his life.
+
+But from the time we left London, and, indeed, a little before that, he
+was never quite himself physically. Our departure was made at the most
+inclement moment of a winter season of unusual inclemency; they said (as
+they always do) that no weather to be compared with it had been known
+for twenty years. We got up before dawn in London, and after a dismal
+ride in the train to Folkestone, where the bitter waves of the English
+Channel left edgings of ice on the shingle beach where I went to pick
+up shells, we were frost-bitten all our two-hours passage across to
+Boulogne, where it became cold in dead earnest, and so continued all
+through Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles, and down the Mediterranean to
+Genoa and Civita Vecchia, and thence up the long, lonely, bandit-haunted
+road to Rome, and in Rome, with exasperating aggravations, right up to
+April, or later. My own first recollection of St. Peter's is that I
+slid on the ice near one of the fountains in the piazza of that famous
+edifice; and my father did the same, with a savage satisfaction, no
+doubt, at thus proving that everything was what it ought not to be.
+Either in London, or at some intermediate point between that and Paris,
+he caught one of the heaviest colds that ever he had; and its feverish
+and debilitating effects were still perceptible in May. "And this is
+sunny Italy--and this is genial Rome!" he wrathfully exclaims. It was
+like looking forward to the Garden of Eden all one's life, and going
+to vast trouble and expense to get there, and, on arriving, finding the
+renowned spot to be a sort of Montreal ice-palace. The palaces of Rome
+are not naturally fitted to be ice-palaces, and the cold feels all the
+colder in them by consequence.
+
+But I am going too fast. The first thing my father did, after getting on
+board the little Channel steamer, was to go down in the cabin and drink
+a glass of brandy-and-water, hot, with sugar; and he afterwards remarked
+that "this sea-passage was the only enjoyable part of the day." But the
+wind cut like a scimitar, and he came on deck occasionally only--as when
+I came plunging down the companion-way to tell him, with the pride of a
+discoverer, that France was broad in sight, and the sun was shining
+on it. "Oh!" exclaimed my mother, looking up from her, pale
+discomfortableness on a sofa, with that radiant smile of hers, and
+addressing poor Miss Shepard, who was still further under the sinister
+influence of those historic alpine fluctuations which have upset so
+many. "Oh, Ada, Julian says the sun is shining on France!" Ada never
+stirred. She was the most amiable and philosophic of young ladies; but
+if thought could visit her reeling brain at that moment, she probably
+wondered why Providence had been so inconsiderate as to sever Britain
+from its Gallic base in those old geologic periods before man was yet
+born to sea-sickness.
+
+Sunshine on the pale, smooth acclivities of France, and half a dozen
+bluff-bowed fishing-boats, pitching to the swell, were all that was
+notable on our trip across; and of Boulogne I remember nothing, except
+the confused mountain of the family luggage on the pier, and afterwards
+of its being fed into the baggage-car of the train. Ollendorff abandoned
+me thus early in my travels; nor was my father much better off. But Miss
+Shepard, now restored to life, made amends for her late incompetence
+by discoursing with excited French officials with what seemed to me
+preternatural intelligence; indeed, I half doubted whether there were
+not some conspiracy to deceive in that torrent of outlandish sounds
+which she and they were so rapidly pouring forth to one another.
+However, all turned out well, and there we were, in a compartment of a
+French railway-train, smelling of stale tobacco, with ineffective zinc
+foot-warmers, and an increasing veil of white frost on the window-panes,
+which my sisters and myself spent our time in trying to rub off that
+France might become visible. But the white web was spun again as fast
+as we dissipated it, and nothing was to be seen, at all events, but
+long processions of poplars, which interested me only because I imagined
+myself using them as lances in some romantic Spenserian adventure of
+knight-errantry--for the spell of that chivalric dream still hung
+about me. So we came to Amiens, a pallid, clean, chilly town, with
+high-shouldered houses and a tall cathedral, and thence went on to Paris
+at five o'clock. It was already dusk, and our transit to the Hotel de
+Louvre in crowded cabs, through streets much unlike London, is the sum
+of my first impressions of the wonderful city.
+
+Then, marshalled by princely yet deferential personages in rich
+costumes, we proceeded up staircases and along gilded corridors to a
+suite of sumptuous apartments, with many wax candles in candelabra,
+which were immediately lighted by an attendant, and their lustre was
+reflected from tall mirrors which panelled the rooms. The furniture
+thus revealed was costly and elegant, but hardly comfortable to an
+English-bred sense; the ceilings were painted, the floor rich with
+glowing carpets. But the glow of color was not answered by a glow of any
+other sort; a deadly chill pervaded this palatial place, which fires, as
+big as one's fist, kindled in fireplaces as large as hall bedrooms, did
+nothing to dissipate. Hereupon our elders had compassion on us, and,
+taking from the tall, awful bedsteads certain crimson comforters, they
+placed each of us in an easy-chair and tucked the comforters in over us.
+These comforters, covered with crimson silk, were of great thickness,
+but also of extraordinary lightness, and for a few minutes we had
+no confidence in their power to thaw us. But they were filled with
+swan's-down; and presently a novel and delightful sensation--that of
+warmth--began to steal upon us. It steadily increased, until in quarter
+of an hour there might be seen upon our foreheads and noses, which were
+the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a
+marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained
+with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the
+miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen
+arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this
+treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed
+we somehow got, and slept the blessed sleep of childhood.
+
+
+The next morning my father, apparently as an accompaniment of his cold,
+was visited by a severe nosebleed; no importance was attached to
+it, beyond its preventing him from going forth to superintend the
+examination of our luggage at the custom-house--the mountain having been
+registered through from London. This duty was, therefore, done by Miss
+Shepard and my mother. The next day, at dinner, the nosebleeding began
+again. "And thus," observed my father, "my blood must be reckoned among
+the rivers of human gore which have been shed in Paris, and especially
+in the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotines used to stand"--and
+where our restaurant was. But these bleedings, which came upon him at
+several junctures during his lifetime, and were uniformly severe and
+prolonged, probably had a significance more serious than was supposed.
+The last one occurred not many weeks before his death, and it lasted
+twenty-four hours; he was never the same afterwards. He joked about it
+then, as now, but there was the forewarning of death in it.
+
+But that day lies still unsuspected in the future, six years away.
+For the present, we were in splendid Paris, with Napoleon III. in the
+Tuileries, and Baron Haussmann regnant in the stately streets. For a
+week we went to and fro, admiring and--despite the cold, the occasional
+icy rains, and once even a dark fog--delighted. In spirit and in
+substance, nothing could be more different from London. For my part,
+I enjoyed it without reservation; the cold, which depressed my sick
+father, exhilarated me. For Notre Dame, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the
+Madeleine, the pictures, and the statues, I cared little or nothing; I
+hardly even heeded the column of the Place Vendome or the mighty mass
+of the Arc de Triomphe. But the Frenchiness of it all captivated me.
+The throngs in the streets were kaleidoscopic in costume and character:
+priests, soldiers, gendarmes, strange figures with turbans and other
+Oriental accoutrements; women gayly dressed and wearing their dresses
+with an air; men with curling mustachios, and with nothing to do,
+apparently, but amuse themselves; romantic artists with soft felt hats
+and eccentric beards; grotesque figures of poverty in rags and with
+ominous visages, such as are never seen in London; martial music,
+marching regiments, with gorgeous generals on horseback, with shining
+swords; church processions; wedding pageants crowding in and out of
+superb churches; newspapers, shop-signs, and chatter, all in French,
+even down to the babble of the small children. And the background of
+this parade was always the pleasant, light-hued buildings, the majority
+of them large and of a certain uniformity of aspect, as if they had been
+made in co-operation, and to look pretty, instead of independently and
+incongruously, as in England. These people seemed to be all playing and
+prattling; nobody worked; even the shopkeepers held holiday in their
+shops. Such was my boyish idea of Paris. Napoleon had been emperor only
+five or six years; he had been married to Eugenie only four or five;
+and, so far as one could judge who knew nothing of political coups
+d'etat and crimes, he was the right man in the right place. Moreover,
+the French bread was a revelation; it tasted better than cake, and
+was made in loaves six feet long; and the gingerbread, for sale on
+innumerable out-door stalls, was better yet, with quite a new flavor. I
+ate it as I walked about with my father. He once took a piece himself,
+and, said he, "I desired never to taste any more." How odd is,
+sometimes, the behavior of grown-up people!
+
+But even my father enjoyed the French cookery, though he was in some
+doubt whether it were not a snare of the evil one to lure men to
+indulgence. We dined in the banquet-hall of our hotel once or twice
+only; in general we went to neighboring restaurants, where the food was
+just as good, but cost less. I was always hungry, but hungrier than ever
+in Paris. "I really think," wrote my father, "that Julian would eat a
+whole sheep." In his debilitated state he had little appetite either for
+dinners or for works of art; he looked even upon the Venus of Milo with
+coldness. "It seemed," wrote he, speaking of the weather one morning,
+"as if a cold, bitter, sullen agony were interposed between each
+separate atom of our bodies. In all my experience of bad atmospheres,
+methinks I never knew anything so atrocious as this. England has nothing
+to compare with it." The "grip" was a disease unnamed at that epoch,
+but I should suppose that it was very vividly described in the above
+sentence. He had the grip, and for nearly six months he saw everything
+through its medium.
+
+Besides the Venus and the populace, we saw various particular persons. I
+went with my father to the bank, and saw a clerk give him a long roll
+of bright gold coins, done up in blue paper; and we visited, or were
+visited by, a Miss MacDaniel and her mother, two Salem women, "of plain,
+New England manners and appearance," wrote my father, "and they have
+been living here for nearly two years. The daughter was formerly at
+Brook Farm. The mother suffered so much from seasickness on the passage
+that she is afraid to return to America, and so the daughter is kept
+here against her will, and without enjoyment, and, as I judge, in narrow
+circumstances. It is a singular misfortune. She told me that she had
+been to the Louvre but twice since her arrival, and did not know Paris
+at all." This looks like a good theme for Mr. Henry James.
+
+We called on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason,
+a simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked
+like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it
+was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted
+of seventeen thousand dollars a year in order that the good old
+judge should sleep after dinner in a French armchair. The judge was
+anticipating being superseded in his post, but, as it turned out, was
+not driven to seek second-rate employment to support himself in his old
+age; he had the happiness to die in Paris the very next year.
+
+But the most agreeable of our meetings was with Miss Maria Mitchell, the
+astronomer, who, like ourselves, was stopping a few days in Paris on her
+way to Rome. She desired the protection of our company on the journey,
+though, as my father remarked, she looked well able to take care of
+herself. She was at this time about forty years old; born in Nantucket;
+the plainest, simplest, heartiest of women, with a face browned by the
+sun, of which she evidently was accustomed to see as much as of
+the other stars in the heavens. Her mouth was resolute and full of
+expression; but her remarkable feature was her eyes, which were dark and
+powerful, and had the kindest and most magnetic look of comradeship
+in them. Her dark hair was a little grizzled. She was dressed in plain
+gray, and was active and energetic in her movements. She was, as the
+world knows, a woman of unusual intellect and character; but she had
+lived alone with her constellations, having little contact with the
+world or practical knowledge of it, so that in many respects she was
+still as much a child as I was, and I immediately knew her for my friend
+and playmate and loved her with all my heart. There was a charming
+quaintness and innocence about her, and an immense, healthy curiosity
+about this new old world and its contents. She had a great flow of
+native, spontaneous humor, and could say nothing that was not juicy
+and poignant. She was old-fashioned, yet full of modern impulses and
+tendencies; warmhearted and impulsive, but rich in homely common-sense.
+Though bold as a lion, she was, nevertheless, beset with the funniest
+feminine timidities and misgivings, due mainly, I suppose, to her
+unfamiliarity with the ways of the world. There was already a friendship
+of long standing between her and Miss Shepard, and they did much of
+their sightseeing during the coming year together, and debated between
+themselves over the statues and pictures. Her talk with us children was
+of the fine, countrified, racy quality which we could not resist; and in
+the evenings, as we journeyed along, she told us tales of the stars
+and gave us their names. On the steamer going to Genoa, one night, she
+pointed out to me the constellation Orion, then riding high aloft
+in glittering beauty, and I kindly communicated to my parents the
+information that the three mighty stars were known to men as O'Brien's
+Belt. This was added to the ball of jolly as a household word.
+
+[IMAGE: MARIA MITCHELL]
+
+Miss Mitchell's trunk was contributed to our mountain, when we set
+out anew on our pilgrimage, with a result at first deplorable, for the
+number of our own pieces of luggage being known and registered in the
+official documents, it turned out, at our first stopping-place, that
+the trunk of our new companion had been substituted for one of our
+own, which, of course, was left behind. It was ultimately recovered, I
+believe, but it seemed as if the entire world of French officialdom had
+to be upheaved from its foundations in order to accomplish it.
+
+Our route lay through Lyons to Marseilles. At Lyons I remember only the
+enormous hotel where we slept the first night, with corridors wandering
+like interminable streets, up-stairs and down, turning corners,
+extending into vistas, clean-swept, echoing, obscure, lit only by the
+glimmering candle borne by our guide. We seemed to be hours on our
+journey through these labyrinths; and when at last we reached our rooms,
+they were so cold and so unwarmable that we were fain to journey back
+again, up and down, along and athwart, marching and countermarching past
+regiments of closed doors, until at length we attained the region of
+the hotel dining-saloon, where it was at least two or three degrees
+less cold than elsewhere. After dinner we had to undertake a third
+peregrination to bed, and a fourth the next morning to get our train.
+The rooms of the hotel were on a scale suited to the length of the
+connecting thoroughfares, and the hotel itself stood hard by a great,
+empty square with a statue in the middle of it. But the meals were not
+of a corresponding amplitude. And I think it was at the railway station
+of this town that the loss of the trunk was discovered.
+
+The region from Lyons to Marseilles, along the valley of the Rhone, with
+the lower ranges of the Alps on our left hand, was much more picturesque
+than anything France had shown us hitherto. Ancient castles crowned
+many of the lower acclivities; there were villages in the vales, and
+presently vineyards and olive groves. The Rhone, blue and swift as its
+traditions demanded, kept us close company much of the way; the whole
+range of country was made for summer, and the wintry conditions under
+which we saw it seemed all the more improper. It must have been near
+midnight when our train rolled into the station at Marseilles, and my
+pleasure in "sitting up late" had long become stale.
+
+The sun shone the next morning, and, being now in the latitude of
+Florence and such places, it could not help being hot, though the shaded
+sides of the streets were still icy cold; and most of the streets were
+so narrow that there was a great deal of shade. The whole population
+seemed to be out-of-doors and collecting in the sun, like flies, a very
+animated and voluble population and of a democratic complexion; the
+proportion of poor folks was noticeable, and the number of women, who
+seemed to camp out in the squares and market-places, and there gossip
+and do their knitting, as other women might at their firesides; but here
+the sun is the only fire. But a good deal of the bustle this morning
+was occasioned by the news from Paris that an attempt to assassinate
+Napoleon III. had been made the day before; had we remained one day
+longer in Paris we might have assisted at the spectacle. The Marseilles
+people seemed to take it comfortably; nobody was very sorry that the
+attempt had been made, nor very glad that it had not succeeded. It was
+something to talk about. It was ten years more before the French got
+thoroughly used to the nephew of his uncle and decided that he was, upon
+the whole, a good thing; and soon after they lost him. And for a decade
+after Sedan, chatting with the boulevardiers in Paris, they would
+commonly tell me that they wished they had the empire back again.
+Perhaps they will have it, some day.
+
+There was a great deal of filth in Marseilles streets and along her
+wharves and in the corners of her many public squares; and even our
+hotel, the "Angleterre," was anything but clean; it was a tall, old
+rookery, from the windows of our rooms in which I looked down into an
+open space between the strange, old buildings, and saw a juggler do his
+marvels on a bit of carpet spread on the pavement, while a woman handed
+him the implements of magic out of a very much travelled and soiled
+deal-box. Later in the day, when the place was deserted, I heedlessly
+flung out of the window the contents of a glass of water, and, looking
+after it in its long descent, I was horrified to see approaching a man
+of very savage and piratical aspect, with a terrible black beard and a
+slouch hat. As luck would have it, the water struck him full on the side
+of the face, probably the first time in many a year that he had felt the
+impact of the liquid there. I withdrew my head from the window in alarm,
+mingled with the natural joy that a boy cannot help feeling at such a
+catastrophe; and by-and-by, when I felt certain that he must have passed
+on, I peeped out again, but what were my emotions at beholding him
+planted terribly right under the window where he had been baptized, and
+staring upward with a blood-thirsty expression. I immediately drew back
+again, but too late--our eyes had met, and he had made a threatening
+gesture at me. I now felt that a very serious thing had happened, and
+that if I ventured out upon the streets again I should assuredly be
+assassinated; that it would be no mere attempt, as in the case of the
+Emperor, but a pronounced success. I did not tell my fears to any of
+my family--I had not, to say the truth, informed any of them of
+the incident which had imperilled my life, but I no longer felt any
+curiosity to see more of Marseilles, and was sincerely thankful when I
+found myself, betimes next morning, on board the Calabrese, bound for
+Genoa. I never saw my murderer again, but I could make a fair likeness
+of him, I believe, to-day. The trip to Genoa, and onward to Civita
+Vecchia, lasted two or three days, the steamer generally pursuing her
+course by night and laying up by day.
+
+The first morning, soon after sunrise, found us approaching the bay
+of Genoa, with the sun rising over the Mediterranean on our right and
+throwing its light upon the curving acclivity on which the city stands.
+The water had a beautiful blue-green color and was wonderfully clear, so
+that, looking down through it over the ship's side, as we glided slowly
+to our moorings, I saw sea-weeds and blocks of marble and other marine
+curiosities which reawakened my old passion for aquariums. Indeed, to
+be candid with the reader--as is my study throughout this
+narrative--nothing in Genoa the Superb itself has, I find, remained with
+me so distinctly as that glimpse of the floor of the bay through the
+clear sea-water. I did not care to go up into the town and see the
+palaces and churches; I wanted to stay on the beach and hunt for
+shells--Italian shells--and classical or mediaeval sea-anemones. Of
+course, I had to go up into the town; and I saw, no doubt, the churches
+and the palaces, with their rooms radiant with the mellow brilliance of
+precious marbles and painted ceilings, and statues and pictures,
+under the personal conduct of no less an individual than Salvator Rosa
+himself--for that was the name of our guide--and for years afterwards
+I never doubted that he was the creator of the paintings which, in Rome
+and elsewhere, bore his signature. I say I must have seen these things,
+but in memory I cannot disentangle them from the innumerable similar
+objects which I beheld, later, in other Italian cities; their soft
+splendor and beautiful art could not hold their own for me beside that
+cool translucence of the Mediterranean inlet, with its natural marvels
+dimly descried as'I bent over the boat's side. It was for that, and not
+for the other, that my heart yearned, and that became a part of me,
+all the more, no doubt, that it was denied me. Our aim in the world is
+beauty and happiness; but we are late in learning that they exist in the
+will and imagination, and not in this or that accredited and venerable
+thing or circumstance that is mechanically obtruded on our unready
+attention. If you were put down in the Garden of Eden, and told that you
+might stay there an hour and no more, what would you do? How would you
+"improve" your time? Would you run to and fro, and visit the spot where
+Adam first stood erect, and the place where he sat when he named the
+animals, and the thymey bank on which he slept while Eve was taking form
+from his rib, and the tree on which grew the fruit of the knowledge of
+good and evil, and the precise scene of the temptation and the fall, and
+the spot on which stood the altars on which Cain and Abel offered their
+sacrifices, and where, presently, wrathful Cain rose up against his
+brother and slew him? Would you make sure of all these set sights in
+order that you might reply satisfactorily to the cloud of interviewers
+awaiting you outside the Garden? Or would you simply throw yourself down
+on the grass wherever the angel happened to leave you, and try to see or
+to realize or to recall nothing, but passively permit your soul to feel
+and experience and grow what way it would, prompted by the inner voice
+and guided by the inner light, heedless of what the interviewers were
+expecting and of what duty and obligation and the unique opportunity
+demanded? It is worth thinking about. It may be conceded that there is
+some risk to run.
+
+I next find myself in a coach, with four horses harnessed to it,
+trundling along the road from Civita Vecchia to Rome; for of Monaco I
+recall nothing, nor of Leghorn; and though we passed within sight of
+Elba, I saw only a lonely island on our starboard beam. As for the
+coach, it was a necessity, if we would continue our journey, for the
+railroad was still in the future in 1858. The coach-road was not only as
+rugged and uneasy as it had been any time during the past three hundred
+years, but it was outrageously infested by banditti; and, indeed, a
+robbery had taken place on it only a week or two before. For miles and
+miles on end it was totally destitute of dwellings, and those that we
+saw might well have been the harboring-places of iniquity. Moreover, we
+were so long delayed in making our start that it was already afternoon
+before we were under way, and finally one of our horses gave out ere
+we were many miles advanced, compelling us to hobble along for the
+remainder of the trip at reduced speed. As the shades of evening began
+to fall, we saw at intervals sundry persons lurking along the roadway,
+clad in long cloaks and conical hats, with the suggestion of the barrel
+of a musket about them, and it is probable that we were preserved from a
+tragic fate only by the fortunate accident that we were just behind the
+mail-coach and might theoretically have hailed it for help had we been
+attacked. Meanwhile, my father, with ostensible pleasantry, suggested
+that we should hide our gold coin (of which we carried a considerable
+store) in various queer, out-of-the-way receptacles. I remember that
+an umbrella was filled with a handful or two of the shining pieces, and
+stuck with studied carelessness through the straps in the roof of the
+vehicle. This was regarded by us children as excellent sport, though I
+think there was a lingering feeling of apprehension in the bottom of
+my soul. My father kept a moderate sum in napoleons in his pockets, so
+that, should the worst happen, the bandits might fancy it was our all.
+But then there was our mountain of luggage, incredibly strapped on the
+top of the conveyance, and behind it, and no reasonable bandits, one
+would suppose, could have failed to be satiated with that. However,
+it was written that we were to reach Rome unscathed, albeit long after
+dark, and though we did not get past the Porta del Popolo without
+suffering legalized robbery on the part of the custom-house officials.
+But by that time we were so weary, downcast, and chilled that
+depredation and outrage could not rouse or kindle us.
+
+We ended, at last, in one of those refrigerator hotels to which our
+travels had made us accustomed, in one of the hollow, dull, untoward
+caverns of which I was presently put to bed and to sleep. "Oh, Rome, my
+country, City of the Soul!" Oh, Byron, were you an Esquimau?
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+     Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George
+     Combe turned out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright
+     Titian hair--"All that's left of him"--The pyramidal man of
+     destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts--
+     Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A
+     stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My
+     father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as
+     whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--
+     "The brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases
+     of feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The
+     Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest
+     is silence.
+
+We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at
+night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings in
+the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just
+below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad
+flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on the left
+as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had
+not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural
+pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides to other
+edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow; it was dirty
+like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones. The place
+had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the Thompsons; Mr.
+Thompson--the same man who had painted my father's portrait in 1853--had
+a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living in Rome for five years
+or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were very comfortable people
+to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a very different and less
+delightful place without them, as will hereafter appear. The family
+consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson, the father and artist; his wife
+and his two sons and one daughter. "Cephas Giovanni," being
+interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it was said (though, I believe,
+unjustifiably) that Peter John had been the names originally given to
+Thompson by his parents at the baptismal-font, but that his wife, who
+was a notable little woman, a sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress,
+well known in America and England seventy years ago, had persuaded
+him to translate them into Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the
+romantic career of an artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose
+from the fact that Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might
+imaginably conceive so ambitious a project. She was small, active,
+entertaining, clever, and "spunky," as the New-Englanders would have
+said; indeed, she had a rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on
+the other hand, had the mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a
+low, slow voice, and a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as
+yet it was a rich brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it. Brown
+and abundant, also, was his hair; he had steady, bright, brown eyes, and
+was rather under the average height of Anglo-Saxon man. But for all this
+mild-shining aspect of his, his dark eyebrows were sharply arched, or
+gabled rather; and my mother, who had absorbed from her former friend,
+George Combe, a faith in the betrayals of phrenology, expressed her
+private persuasion that good Mr. Thompson had a temper, too. She and
+George Combe turned out to be right in this instance, though I am not
+going to tell the tale of how we happened to be made acquainted with the
+fact. Little thunder-storms once in a while occur in human skies as well
+as in the meteorological ones; and the atmosphere is afterwards all the
+sweeter and softer. No people could be more good, honest, and kind than
+the Thompsons.
+
+There was no other artist in Rome who could paint as well as Mr.
+Thompson. That portrait of my father, to which reference has been made,
+which now hangs in my house, looks even better, as a painting, to-day
+than it did when it was fresh from his easel. Rubens could not have laid
+on the colors with more solidity and with truer feeling for the hues of
+life. But the trouble with Thompson was that he had never learned how to
+draw correctly; and this defect appeared to some extent in his portraits
+as well as in his figures. The latter were graceful, significant, full
+of feeling and character; but they betrayed a weakness of anatomical
+knowledge and of perspective. They had not the conventional
+incorrectness of the old masters preceding Raphael, but an incorrectness
+belonging personally to Thompson; it was not excessive or conspicuous to
+any one, and certainly not to Thompson himself. But his color redeemed
+all and made his pictures permanently valuable. He was at this time
+painting a picture of Saint Peter being visited by an angel, which
+was rich and beautiful; and he had some sketches of a series based on
+Shakespeare's Tempest; and standing on one side in the studio was a
+glowing figure of a woman in Oriental costume, an odalisque, or
+some such matter, which showed that his sympathy with life was not
+a restricted one. Later in our acquaintance he fell in love with the
+bright Titian hair of my sister Rose, and made a little portrait of her,
+which was one of his best likenesses, apart from its admirable color; it
+even showed the tears in the child's eyes, gathering there by reason of
+her antipathy to posing.
+
+Cora Thompson, the daughter, was the most good-natured and
+sunny-tempered of girls; she may have been fifteen at this time; she
+inherited neither the handsomeness of her father nor the sharp-edged
+cleverness of her mother; but she was lovable. Of the two boys, the
+younger was named Hubert; he was about ten years old, small of his age,
+and not robust in make or constitution. He was, however, a smart, rather
+witty youth, a little precocious, perhaps, and able to take care of
+himself. Some five and twenty years after the date of which I am now
+writing I was at a large political dinner in New York and was there
+introduced to a Mr. Thompson, who was the commissioner of public works,
+and a party boss of no small caliber and power. He was an immense
+personage, physically likewise, weighing fully three hundred pounds,
+and, though not apparently advanced in years, a thorough man of the
+world and of municipal politics. After we had conversed for a few
+minutes, I was struck by a certain expression about my interlocutor's
+eyebrows that recalled long-forgotten days and things. I remembered that
+his name was Thompson, and had an impression that his initials were
+H. O. "Are you little Hubert Thompson?" I suddenly demanded. "Why, of
+course I am--all that's left of him!" he replied, with a laugh. So this
+was the boy whom, a quarter of a century before, I could have held out
+at arm's-length. We talked over the old days when we played together
+about the Roman streets and ruins. Nothing more reveals the essential
+strangeness of human life than this meeting after many years with
+persons we have formerly known intimately, who are now so much changed
+in outward guise. We feel the changes to be unreal, and yet, there they
+are! Grover Cleveland was being groomed for his first Presidential term
+then; Hubert was one of his supporters in New York, and he presented me
+to the pyramidal man of destiny. Poor Hubert died, lamentably, not
+long after. He was a good and affectionate son. He was perhaps too
+kind-hearted and loyal for the political role which he enacted.
+
+The elder Thompson boy was called Edmund, or, in my vernacular, Eddy.
+There were in his nature a gravity, depth, and sweetness which won my
+heart and respect, and we became friends in that intimate and complete
+way that seems possible only to boys in their early teens. For that
+matter, neither of us was yet over twelve; I think Eddy was part of
+a year my junior. But you must search the annals of antiquity to find
+anything so solid and unalterable as was our friendship. He was the most
+absolutely good boy I ever knew, but by no means goody-goody; he had
+high principles, noble ambitions, strong affections, the sweetest of
+tempers; his seriousness formed a healthy foil to my own more impetuous
+and hazardous character. "The thoughts of a boy are long, long
+thoughts"; and not in many long lifetimes could a tithe of the splendid
+projects we resolved upon have been carried out. We were together from
+morning till night, month after month; we walked interminably about Rome
+and frequented its ruins, and wandered far out over the Campagna and
+along the shores of famous Tiber. We picked up precious antique marbles,
+coins, and ancient curiosities of all sorts; we hunted for shells and
+butterflies and lizards; our hearts were uplifted by the martial music
+of the French army bands, which were continually resounding throughout
+Rome; and we admired the gleaming swords of the officers and the sharp,
+punctual drill and marching of the red-legged rank and file. We haunted
+the lovely Villa Borghese, the Pincian Hill, the Villa Pamphili Doria;
+we knew every nook and cranny of the Palace of the Csesars, the Baths
+of Caracalla, the Roman Forum, the Coliseum, the Egerian Grove; we were
+familiar with every gate that entered Rome; we drank at every fountain;
+we lingered through the galleries of the Vatican and of the Capitol;
+we made St. Peter's Church our refuge in inclement weather; we
+threaded every street and by-way of the city; we were on friendly and
+confidential terms with the custode of every treasure. And all the time
+we talked about what we thought, what we felt, what we would do; there
+is no looking backward in boys' confidences; they live in the instant
+present and in the infinite future. Eddy and I arranged to spend one
+lifetime in Central Africa, in emulation of the exploits of David
+Livingstone; there, freed from all civilized burdens, we would live, and
+we would run, catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl our lances in
+the sun. At another epoch of our endless lives we would enter the army
+and distinguish ourselves in heroic war; we would have swords like
+sunbeams and ride steeds like Bucephalus. Then, and interleaved with all
+this, as it were, there was an immense life of natural history; we would
+have a private museum to rival the famous ones of nations. Eddy was
+especially drawn towards insects, while my own predilection was still
+for conchology; and both of us spent hours every week in classifying
+and arranging our respective collections, not to speak of the time we
+devoted to hunting for specimens. Eddy had a green net at the end of
+a stick, and became very skilful in making his captures; and how we
+triumphed over a "swallow-tail," so difficult to catch, or an unfamiliar
+species! Eddy had his pins and his strips of cork, and paper boxes;
+and his collections certainly were fairer to look upon, to the ordinary
+view, than mine; moreover, his was the more scientific mind and the
+nicer sense of order. For the display of my snail-shells I used bits of
+card-board and plenty of gum-arabic; and I was affluent in "duplicates,"
+my plan being to get a large card and then cover it with specimens of
+the shell, in serried ranks. I also called literature to my aid, and
+produced several little books containing labored descriptions of my
+collection, couched, so far as possible, in the stilted and formal
+phraseology of the conchological works to which I had access, but with
+occasional outbursts after a style of my own. Here is a chapter from one
+of them; a pen-and-ink portrait of the shell is prefixed to the original
+essay:
+
+"CLAUSILIA BUBIGUNIA
+
+"This handsome and elegant little shell is found in mossy places, or
+in old ruins, such as the Coliseum--where it is found in immense
+numbers--or the Palace of the Caesars. But in Italy it is common in any
+mossy ruin, in the small, moss-covered holes, where it is seen at the
+farthest extremity. After a rain they always crawl out of their places
+of concealment in such numbers that one would think it had been raining
+clausilias. The shell, in large and fine specimens, is five-eighths of
+an inch in length. The young are very small and look like the top part
+of the spire of the adults. This shell is also largest in the middle,
+shaped something like a grain of wheat. It has nine whorls, marked by
+small white lines, which look like fine white threads of sewing-cotton;
+and just below them are marks which look like very fine and very small
+stitches of white cotton. The color of the shell, down to next to
+the last whorl, is a brown color, but the very last whorl is a little
+lighter. The shell is covered all over with fine lines, but they need
+to be looked at through a magnifying-glass, they are so fine. The lip
+is turning out, and very thin; inside there are three ridges, two on the
+top part of the mouth, and the other, which is very small, is below. The
+shell, when the animal is out of it, is semi-transparent, and the little
+colomella, or pillar, can be indistinctly seen through."
+
+There follows a detailed and loving description of the animal inhabiting
+the shell, which I must reserve for a future edition. Of another species
+of snail, Helix strigata, our learned author observes that "This shell
+is, when dead, one of those which is found on the banks of the Tiber. It
+is a strange circumstance that, although it is a land shell, it should
+be found more on the banks of a river than anywhere else, and also only
+on the banks of the Tiber, for it is not found on the banks of any other
+river. Any one would think that dead shells were gifted with the power
+of walking about, for certainly it is an inexplicable wonder how they
+got there." Of Helix muralis we are informed that "The Romans eat these
+snails, not the whole of them, but only their feet. In ancient times the
+most wealthy people used to eat snails, and perhaps they ate the very
+ones which the poorest people eat nowadays. It is most probable, for
+there are a great many different kinds of snails round Rome, and the
+Romans would probably select the best." I may perhaps be permitted
+to remark that the correct orthography of this writer fills me with
+astonishment, inasmuch as in later life I have reason to know that
+he often went astray in this respect. Of the uniform maturity of the
+literary style, I have no need to speak.
+
+Eddy's father was in the habit of giving him an income of two or three
+pauls a week, dependent on his good behavior and punctual preparation of
+his lessons; and since Eddy was always well behaved and faithful in his
+studies, the income came in pretty regularly. Eddy saved up this revenue
+with a view to buying himself a microscope, for the better prosecution
+of his zoological labors; being, also, stimulated thereto by the fact
+that I already possessed one of these instruments, given me by my father
+a year or two before. Mine cost ten shillings, but Eddy meant to get one
+even more expensive. I had, too, a large volume of six hundred pages on
+The Microscope, Its History, Construction, and Uses, by Jabez Hogg, the
+contents of which I had long since learned by heart, and which I gladly
+communicated to my friend. At length Eddy's economies had proceeded so
+far that he was able to calculate that on his twelfth birthday he would
+possess a fortune of five scudi, and he decided that he would buy a
+microscope at that figure; it is needless to add that the microscope
+had long since been selected in the shop, and was decidedly superior
+to mine. We could hardly contain our impatience to enter upon the
+marvellous world whereof this instrument was the key; that twelfth
+birthday seemed long in coming, but at last it came.
+
+I was to go with my friend to the shop to see him make the purchase;
+and I was at his house betimes in the morning. But what a stupendous
+surprise awaited me! Eddy was too much excited to say anything; with a
+face beaming with emotion, he led me into the sitting-room, and there,
+upon the table, was a microscope. But such a microscope! It was of such
+unheard-of magnificence and elaborateness that it took my breath away,
+and we both stood gazing at it in voiceless rapture. It was tall and
+elegant, shining with its polished brass and mirrors, and its magnifying
+powers were such as to disclose to us the very heart of nature's
+mystery. It was quiet Mr. Thompson's birthday present to his son. That
+gentleman sat smiling in his armchair by the window, and presently he
+said, with a delightful archness, "Well, Eddy, I suppose you are ready
+to give me back all that money you've been collecting?" Eddy grinned
+radiantly. He spent his savings for microscope-slides and other
+appurtenances, and for weeks thereafter he could hardly take his
+eye away from the object-lens. He was luminous with happiness, and I
+reflected his splendor from my sympathetic heart. Dear old Eddy! In
+after years he entered West Point and became a soldier, and he died
+early; I never saw him after parting from him in Italy in 1859. But he
+is still my first friend, and there has been no other more dear.
+
+I am not aware that Rome has ever been described from the point of
+view of a twelve-year-old boy, and it might be worth doing; but I have
+delayed attempting it somewhat too long; the moving pictures in my
+mind have become too faded and confused. And yet I am surprised at the
+minuteness of some of my recollections; they have, no doubt, been kept
+alive by the numerous photographs of Rome which one carries about,
+and also by the occasional perusal of The Marble Faun and other Roman
+literature. But much is also due to the wonderful separateness which
+Rome retains in the mind. It is like nothing else, and the spirit of it
+is immortal. It seems as if I must have lived a lifetime there; and yet
+I cannot make out that our total residence in the city extended over
+fourteen months. Certainly no other passage of my boyhood time looms so
+large or is rooted so deep.
+
+But the passion for Rome (unless one be a Byron) is not a plant of
+sudden growth, and I dare say that, during those first frigid weeks,
+I may have shared my father's whimsical aversion to the city. He has
+described, in his journals, how all things seemed to be what they should
+not; and he was terribly disgusted with the filth that defiled the ruins
+and the street corners. He was impressed by the ruins, but deplored
+their nakedness. "The marble of them grows black or brown, it is true,"
+says he, "and shows its age in that way; but it remains hard and
+sharp, and does not become again a part of nature, as stone walls do in
+England; some dry and dusty grass sprouts along the ledges of a ruin,
+as in the Coliseum; but there is no green mantle of ivy spreading itself
+over the gray dilapidation." We stumbled upon the Fountain of Trevi
+in one of our early rambles, not knowing what it was. "One of these
+fountains," writes my father, referring to it, "occupies the whole side
+of a great edifice, and represents Neptune and his steeds, who seem to
+be sliding down with a cataract that tumbles over a ledge of rocks
+into a marble-bordered lake, the whole--except the fall of water
+itself--making up an exceedingly cumbrous and ridiculous affair." He
+goes to St. Peter's, and "it disappointed me terribly by its want of
+effect, and the little justice it does to its real magnitude externally;
+as to the interior, I am not sure that it would not be even more grand
+and majestic if it were less magnificent, though I should be sorry to
+see the experiment tried. I had expected something dim and vast, like
+the great English cathedrals, only more vast and dim and gray; but there
+is as much difference as between noonday and twilight." The pictures,
+too, were apt in these first days to go against the grain with him.
+Contemplating a fresco representing scenes in purgatory, he broke forth:
+"I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation, but, at all
+events, it was purgatory to look at this poor, faded rubbish. Thank
+Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash; and I shall always be glad
+to hear of its application to old frescoes, even at the sacrifice of
+remnants of real excellence!" Such growlings torture the soul of the
+connoisseur; but the unregenerate man, hearing them, leaps up and shouts
+for joy. He found the old masters, in their sacred subjects, lacking
+in originality and initiative; and when they would represent mythology,
+they engendered an apotheosis of nakedness. His conclusion was that
+"there is something forced, if not feigned, in our taste for pictures
+of the old Italian school." Of the profane subjects, he instances the
+Fornarina, "with a deep bright glow on her face, naked below the waist,
+and well pleased to be so, for the sake of your admiration--ready for
+any extent of nudity, for love or money--the brazen trollop that she is!
+Raphael must have been capable of great sensuality to have painted this
+picture of his own accord, and lovingly." These are the iconoclasms
+of the Goth and Vandal at their first advent to Rome. They remained to
+alter their mood, and extol what they had before assaulted; and so did
+my father, as we shall see presently. But at first he was sick and cold
+and uncomfortable; and he consoled himself by hitting out at everything,
+in the secret privacy of his diary, since opened to the world. With
+warmer weather came equanimity and kinder judgments; but there is
+a refreshing touch of truth and justice even in these mutterings of
+exasperation.
+
+It was not so much, I suppose, that Rome was cold as that my father had
+expected it to be otherwise. When one is in a place where tradition and
+association invite the soul forth to be warmed and soothed and rejoiced,
+and the body, venturing out, finds nothing but chill winds and
+frigid temperature and discomfort, the shock is much greater and
+more disagreeable than if one had been in some northern Canada or
+Spitzbergen, where such conditions are normal. Ice in the arctic circle
+is all right and exhilarating, but in the Piazza of St. Peter's it is an
+outrage, and affects the mind and heart even more than the flesh.
+
+Circumstances caused my father to pass through several distinct phases
+of feeling while he was in Rome. First, his own indisposition and the
+inclement weather depressed and exasperated him.
+
+Time, in due course, brought relief in these respects, and he began
+to enjoy himself and his surroundings. Anon, the springs of creative
+imagination, long dormant in him, were roused to activity by thoughts
+connected with the Faun of Praxiteles in the Capitol. He now became
+happy in the way of his genius and immediately took a new interest
+in all things, looking at them from the point of view of possible
+backgrounds or incidents for the romance which had begun to take form
+in his mind. He describes what he saw con amore, and all manner of
+harmonious ideas bloom through his thoughts, like anemones and other
+flowers in the Villa Pamphili and the Borghese. This desirable mood
+continued until, after our return to Rome from the Florentine visit, my
+sister caught the Roman fever. She lay for weeks in danger of death; and
+her father's anxiety about her not only destroyed in him all thoughts of
+literary production and care for it, but made even keeping his journal
+no longer possible for him. That strain, so long continued, broke
+him down, and he never recovered from it so as to be what he had been
+before. Nevertheless, when she became convalescent, the reaction from
+his dark misgivings made him, for a time, as light-hearted as a boy;
+and, the carnival happening to be coincident with her recovery, he
+entered into the fun of it with a zest and enjoyment that surprised
+himself. But, again, it presently became evident that her recovery was
+not complete, and probably never would be so; the injury to her health
+was permanent, and she was liable to recurrences of disease. His spirits
+sank again, not so low as before, but, on the other hand, they never
+again rose to their normal level. It was in this saddened mood that he
+once more took up the Roman romance and finished it; it is a sad book,
+and when there is a ray of sunshine across the page, it has a melancholy
+gleam. After we returned to Concord, his apprehensions concerning Una's
+unsound condition were confirmed; and, in addition, the bitter cleavage
+between North and South inspired in him the gloomiest forebodings. A
+wasting away of his whole physical substance ensued; and he died, almost
+suddenly, while in years he might be considered hardly past the prime
+of his life. A sensitive eye can trace the effects of the death-blow
+all through The Marble Faun, and still more in Septimius and Grimshawe,
+published after his death. In The Dolliver Romance fragment, which was
+the last thing he wrote, there is visible once more some reminiscence
+of the old sunshine of humor that was so often apparent in his time of
+youth and vigor; but it, too, has a sad touch in it, such as belongs
+to the last rays of the star of day before it sinks below the horizon
+forever. Night follows, and the rest is silence.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+     The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor,
+     battered, wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and
+     scourge--Dulce est desipere in loco--A rollicking world of
+     happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair
+     was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never
+     drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and
+     strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of
+     dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat
+     wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed
+     and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I
+     saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding
+     close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is
+     like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--
+     "War nie sein Brod mit thranen ass."
+
+
+
+THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The
+weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father's point of view was
+correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a
+year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter's recovery
+from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the
+romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise
+describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third
+phase--as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the
+realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the
+press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything
+that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound,
+but it might be edifying for once, in a way, to do just the opposite, in
+order to mark, if we choose to take the trouble, what kind of changes or
+modifications Hawthorne the romancer would make in the work of my father
+the observer of nature. Take your Marble Faun and turn to two of the
+latter chapters and compare them with the corresponding pages in my
+excerpts from the journals in the Biography. In the latter you will
+find him always in a critical and carping humor; seeing everything
+with abundant keenness, but recognizing nothing worth while in it.
+The bouquets, he noticed, for example, were often picked up out of the
+street and used again and again; "and," he adds, "I suppose they aptly
+enough symbolized the poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts that had
+flown from one hand to another along the muddy pathway of life, instead
+of being treasured up in one faithful bosom. Really, it was great
+nonsense."
+
+It is true--such uncongenial interpretation--if you feel that way about
+it. And I remember, in my rambles along the famous thoroughfare, seeing
+a saturnine old fellow in a dingy black coat and slouch hat, with a sour
+snarl on his unprepossessing features, who made it his business, all
+day, to cuff and kick the little boys whom he caught throwing confetti,
+or picking up the fallen bouquets, and to shove the latter down into
+the sewer which ran beneath the street, through the apertures opening
+underneath the curb. He seemed to have stationed himself there as
+a living protest and scourge against and of the whole spirit of the
+carnival; to hate it just because the rest of the world enjoyed it, and
+to wish that he might make everybody else as miserable and uncharitable
+as he was. He was like a wicked and ugly Mrs. Partington, trying to
+sweep back the Atlantic of holiday merriment with his dirty mop. But
+this crabbed humor of his, while it made him conspicuous against the
+broad background of gayety, of course had no effect on the gayety
+itself. The flood of laughter, jocundity, and semi-boisterous frolic
+continued to roll up and down the Corso all day long, never attempting
+to be anything but pure nonsense, indeed, but achieving, nevertheless,
+the wise end of nonsense in the right time and place--that of refreshing
+and lightening the mind and heart. Dulce est desipere in loco--that old
+saw might have been made precisely to serve as the motto of the Roman
+carnival; and very likely it was actually suggested to its renowned
+author by some similar sport belonging to the old Roman days, before
+Christianity was thought of. The young fellows--English, American, or
+of whatever other nationality--would stride up and down the overflowing
+street hour after hour, clad in linen dust-coats down to their heels,
+with a bag of confetti slung on one side and another full of bouquets on
+the other; and they would plunge a warlike hand into the former and hurl
+ammunition at their rivals; or they would, pick out a bunch of flowers
+from the latter for a pretty girl--not that the flowers were worth
+anything intrinsically, nor was that their fault--but just to show
+the fitting sentiment. There was only one rule, the unwritten one that
+everybody was to take everything that came with a smile or a laugh, and
+never get angry at anything; and this universal good-humor lifted the
+whole affair into a wholesome and profitable sphere. Then there was
+the double row of carriages forever moving in opposite directions, and
+passing within easy arm's-reach of each other; and the jolly battle was
+waged between their occupants, with side conflicts with the foot-farers
+at the same time. And as the same carriages would repass one another
+every forty minutes or so, the persons in them would soon get to
+recognize one another; and, if they were of the sterner sex, they would
+be prepared to renew desperate battle; or if there was a pretty girl or
+two in one of them, she would be the recipient of a deluge of flowers
+or of really pretty bonbons. It was all play, all laughter, all a
+new, rollicking world of happy fools, of comic chivalry, of humorous
+gallantry. For my part, I thought it was the world which I had been born
+to live in; and I was too happy in it to imagine even that anybody could
+be less happy than I was. My sole grief was when my supply of confetti
+had given out, and I had no money to buy more. I used to look at
+those great baskets at the street-corners, filled with the white
+agglomeration, with longing eyes, and wish I had it all in my pockets.
+I picked up the fallen bouquets, muddy or not, with no misgiving, and
+flung them at the girls with the unquestioning faith of boyhood. I
+looked up at the people in the windows and on the draped balconies with
+romantic emotions, and exchanged smiles and beckonings with them. The
+February days were never long enough for me; I only wished that the
+whole year was made up of those days; if it rained, or was cold, I never
+knew it. There was an endless sunshine of some sort which sufficed for
+me. But my father, at this epoch, could catch not a glimpse of it. "I
+never in my life knew a shallower joke than the carnival at Rome; such
+a rainy and muddy day, too; Greenwich Fair (at the very last of which I
+assisted) was worth a hundred of it."
+
+The masking day, and the ensuing night of the moccolo, were the
+culminating features of the carnival; and it was on the afternoon of
+this day, I think, that the horse-race, with bare-backed horses, took
+place. The backs of these horses, though bare of riders, had attached
+to them by strings little balls with sharp points in them, which, as the
+horses ran, bobbed up and down, and did the office of spurs. The race
+was preceded by a thundering gallop of cavalry down the whole length
+of the Corso (the street having been cleared of carriages beforehand),
+ostensibly to prevent anybody from being run over by the race-horses;
+but, as a matter of fact, if any one were killed, it was much more
+likely to be by the ruthless riding of these helmeted dragoons than by
+the riderless steeds. They thundered past, never drawing rein, no matter
+what stood or ran in their way; and then, after an interval, during
+which the long crowds, packed back on the opposite sidewalks, craned
+forward as far as they dared to see them, came the eight or ten racers
+at a furious pace. They were come and gone in a breath; and finally,
+after the body of them were passed, came a laggard, who had been left at
+the post, and was trying to make up for lost time. I believe it was this
+horse who actually killed somebody on the course. The race over, back
+into the street thronged the crowd, filling it from wall to wall; then
+there was a gradual thinning away, as the people went home for supper;
+and finally came the night and the moccoli, with the biggest crowd of
+all. I was there with my twist of moccolo and a box of matches; except
+the moccoli, there was no other illumination along the length of the
+Corso. But their soft lights were there by myriads, and made a lovely
+sight, to my eyes at least. "Senza moccolo!" was the universal cry;
+young knights-errant, singly or in groups, pressed their way up and
+down, shouting the battle-cry, and quenching all lights within reach,
+while striving to maintain the flame of their own; using now the whisk
+of a handkerchief, now a puff of breath, now the fillip of a finger;
+contriving to extinguish a fair lady's taper with the same effusion of
+vain words wherewith they told her of their passion. Most of the ladies
+thus assailed sat in the lower balconies, elevated only a foot or two
+above the level of the sidewalk; but those in the higher retreats made
+war upon one another, and upon their own cavaliers; none was immune from
+peril. The cry, uttered at once by such innumerable voices far and near,
+made a singular murmur up and down the Corso; and the soft twinkling of
+the lights, winking in and out as they were put out or relighted, gave
+a singular fire-fly effect to the whole illumination. It seemed to me
+then, and it still seems in the retrospect, that nothing more charming
+and strange could be imagined; and through it all was the constant
+blossoming of laughter, more inextinguishable than the moccoletti
+themselves. The colors of the tapestries and stuffs dependent from the
+windows and balconies glowed out in light, or were dimmed by shadow; and
+the faces of the thousandfold crowd of festival-makers glimmered forth
+and were lost again on the background of the night, like the features of
+spirits in the glimpses of a dream. How long it all lasted I know not;
+but it had its term, like other mortal things, even in this fairyland of
+carnival; and when the last light was out the carnival was no more, and
+Lent, unawares, had softly settled down upon us with the darkness.
+
+But let us now listen to my father when, for the second time, he made
+proof of the carnival in the year following our return from Florence,
+and after Una had left her sick-room and could be at his side. "The
+weather has been splendid," he writes, "and the merriment far more free
+and riotous than as I remember it in the preceding year. Tokens of
+the festival were seen in flowers on street-stands, or borne aloft on
+people's heads, while bushels of confetti were displayed, looking like
+veritable sugarplums, so that a stranger might have thought that the
+whole commerce and business of stern old Rome lay in flowers and sweets.
+One wonders, however, that the scene should not be even more rich and
+various when there has been so long a time (the immemorial existence
+of the carnival) to prepare it, and adorn it with shapes of gayety
+and humor. There was an infinite number of clowns and particolored
+harlequins; a host of white dominoes; a multitude of masks, set in
+eternal grins, or with monstrous noses, or made in the guise of monkeys,
+bears, dogs, or whatever beast the wearer chooses to be akin to; a great
+many men in petticoats, and almost as many girls and women, no doubt, in
+breeches; figures, too, with huge, bulbous heads and all manner of such
+easy monstrosities and exaggerations.. It is strange how the whole
+humor of the thing, and the separate humor of each individual character,
+vanishes the moment I try to grasp it and describe it; and yet there
+really was fun in the spectacle as it flitted by--for instance, in the
+long line of carriages a company of young men in flesh-colored tights
+and chemises, representing a party of girls surprised in the midst of
+dressing themselves, while an old nurse in the midst of them expressed
+ludicrous horror at their predicament. Then the embarrassment of
+gentlemen who, while quietly looking at the scene, are surrounded by
+groups of maskers, grimacing at them, squeaking in their ears, hugging
+them, dancing round them, till they snatch an opportunity to escape into
+some doorway; or when a poor man in a black coat and cylinder hat is
+whitened all over with a half-bushel of confetti and lime-dust; the mock
+sympathy with which his case is investigated by a company of maskers,
+who poke their stupid, pasteboard faces close to his, still with the
+unchangeable grin; or when a gigantic female figure singles out some
+shy, harmless personage, and makes appeals to his heart, avowing her
+passionate love in dumb show, and presenting him with her bouquet; and a
+hundred other nonsensicalities, among which the rudest and simplest
+are not the least effective. A resounding thump on the back with a
+harlequin's sword, or a rattling blow with a bladder half full of dried
+pease or corn, answers a very good purpose. There was a good deal of
+absurdity one day in a figure in a crinoline petticoat, riding on an ass
+and almost filling the Corso with the circumference of crinoline from
+side to side. Some figures are dressed in old-fashioned garbs, perhaps
+of the last century, or, even more ridiculous, of thirty years ago, or
+in the stately Elizabethan (as we should call them) trunk hose, tunics,
+and cloaks of three centuries since. I do not know anything that I have
+seen queerer than a Unitarian clergyman (Mr. Mountford), who drives
+through the Corso daily with his fat wife in a one-horse chaise, with a
+wreath of withered flowers and oak leaves round his hat, the rest of his
+dress remaining unchanged, except that it is well powdered with the dust
+of confetti. That withered wreath is the absurdest thing he could wear
+(though, perhaps, he may not mean it to be so), and so, of course, the
+best. I can think of no other masks just now, but will go this afternoon
+and try to catch some more." You see, he has that romance in view again.
+"Clowns, or zanies," he resumes, after fresh inspection, "appear in
+great troupes, dancing extravagantly and scampering wildly; everybody
+seems to do whatever folly comes into his head; and yet, if you consider
+the matter, you see that all this apparent license is kept under
+courteous restraint. There is no rudeness, except the authorized pelting
+with confetti or blows of harlequins' swords, which, moreover, are
+within a law of their own. But nobody takes rough hold of another, or
+meddles with his mask, or does him any unmannerly violence. At first
+sight you would think that the whole world had gone mad, but at the
+end you wonder how people can let loose all their mirthful propensities
+without unchaining the mischievous ones. It could not be so in America
+or in England; in either of those countries the whole street would go
+mad in earnest and come to blows and bloodshed were the populace to
+let themselves loose to the extent we see here. All this restraint is
+self-imposed and quite apart from the presence of the soldiery."
+
+This mood, we see, is far more gentle and sympathetic than the former
+one; there is sunshine within as well as without; and, indeed, I
+remember with what glee my father took part in the frolic, as well as
+looked on at it; he laughed and pelted and was pelted; he walked down
+the Corso and back again; he drove to and fro in a carriage; he mounted
+to Mr. Motley's balcony and took long shots at the crowd below. The
+sombre spirit of criticism had ceased, for a time, to haunt him.
+
+[IMAGE: WILLIAM WETMORE STORY]
+
+We went quite often to the studio of William Story, whom my father had
+slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America.
+Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling
+easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or
+outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his
+cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, with the fingers
+and thumb of his right hand, while wrinkles would appear round his
+bright, brown eyes. "He looks thin and worn already," wrote my father;
+"a little bald and a very little gray, but as vivid as when I saw him
+last; he cannot, methinks, be over thirty-seven." He was thirty-nine in
+1858. "The great difficulty with him, I think, is a too facile power,"
+my father goes on; "he would do better things if it were more difficult
+for him to do merely good ones. Then, too, his sensibility is too quick;
+being easily touched by his own thoughts, he cannot estimate what is
+required to touch a colder and duller person, and so stops short of the
+adequate expression." He commented on the vein of melancholy beneath
+the sparkle of his surface, as if, in the midst of prosperity, he was
+conscious of a "deadly shadow gliding close behind." Boys of twelve are
+not troubled with insight, unless of that unconscious, intuitive kind
+that tells them that a person is likeable, or the reverse, no matter
+what the person may do or say. I liked Mr. Story, and thought him as
+light of spirit as he seemed; not that he was not often earnest enough
+in his talks with my father, to whom he was wont to apply himself with
+a sort of intensity, suggesting ideas, and watching, with his nervous
+smile, my father's reception of them; plunging into deep matters, beyond
+my comprehension, dwelling there a few minutes, and then emerging again
+with a sparkle of wit; he was certainly very witty, and the wit was
+native and original, not memorized. When he got into the current of
+drollery, he would, as it were, set himself afire by his own sallies,
+and soar to astonishing heights, which had an irresistible contagion
+for the hearers; and he would sometimes, sitting at a table with pen and
+paper at hand, illustrate his whimsicalities with lightning sketches
+of immense cleverness, considering their impromptu character. I have
+preserved a sheet of letter-paper covered with such drawings. The
+conversation had got upon Byron, whom Mr. Story chose to ridicule; as he
+talked, he drew a head of "Byron as he thought he was," followed by one
+of "Byron as he was," and by another of "Byron as he might have been,"
+showing a very pronounced negro type. Then he made a portrait of "Ada,
+sole daughter of my house and heart," and wrote under it, "Thy face was
+like thy mother's, my fair child!" a hideous, simpering miss, with
+a snub nose and a wooden mouth--"A poet's dream!" He also showed the
+appearance of the Falls of Terni, "as described by Byron," and
+added studies of infant phenomena, mother's darlings, a Presidential
+candidate, and other absurdities, accompanying it all with a running
+comment and imaginative improvisations which had the charm of genius in
+them, and made us ache with laughter, young and old alike. Such a
+man, nervous, high-strung, of fine perceptions and sensibilities, must
+inevitably pass through rapid and extreme alternations of feeling; and,
+no doubt, an hour after that laughing seance of ours, Mr. Story was
+plunged deep in melancholy. Yet surely his premonitions of evil were
+unfulfilled; Story lived long and was never other than fortunate.
+Perhaps he was unable to produce works commensurate with his
+conceptions; but unhappiness from such a cause is of a noble sort, and
+better than most ordinary felicities.
+
+I remember very well the statue of Cleopatra while yet in the clay.
+There she sat in the centre of the large, empty studio, pondering on
+Augustus and on the asp. The hue of the clay added a charm to the figure
+which even the pure marble has not quite maintained. Story said that he
+never was present while the cast of one of his statues was being made;
+he could not endure the sight of the workmen throwing the handfuls of
+plaster at the delicate clay. Cleopatra was substantially finished, but
+Story was unwilling to let her go, and had no end of doubts as to the
+handling of minor details. The hand that rests on her knee--should the
+forefinger and thumb meet or be separated? If they were separated, it
+meant the relaxation of despair; if they met, she was still meditating
+defiance or revenge. After canvassing the question at great length with
+my father, he decided that they should meet; but when I saw the marble
+statue in the Metropolitan Museum the other day I noticed that they
+were separated. In the end the artist had preferred despair. Such things
+indicate the man's character, and, perhaps, explain his failure to reach
+the great heights of art. He could not trust a great idea to manage
+itself, but sought subtler expression through small touches, and thus,
+finally, lost the feeling of the larger inspiration. A little more of
+the calm, Greek spirit would have done him good.
+
+He had many projects for other statues, which he would build up in fancy
+before my father and discuss with him. His words and gestures made the
+ideas he described seem actual and present, but he seldom got them
+into marble; he probably found, upon trial, that they did not belong to
+sculpture. He had the ambition to make marble speak not its own language
+merely, but those of painting and of poetry likewise; and when this
+proved impossible he was unhappy and out of conceit with himself, On
+the other hand, he did good work in poetry and in prose; but neither
+did these content him. After all, my father's observation hit the mark;
+things came too easy to him. Goethe speaks the word for him:
+
+  "Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen ass,
+   Er kennt euch nicht, ihr ewige Machte!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+     Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and
+     morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of
+     immeasurable antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead
+     hands into mine--A pleasant sound of coolness and
+     refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated to life--The
+     Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important
+     communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit--
+     Hauling in on my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made
+     Titanic--"If I had a murder on my conscience"--None can tell
+     the secret origin of his thoughts--A singularly beautiful
+     young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No leagues of
+     chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot six--
+     Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her
+     friends.
+
+We children had been drilled in Roman history, from Romulus to Caesar,
+and we could, and frequently did, repeat by heart the Lays of Ancient
+Rome by Macaulay, which were at that period better known, perhaps, than
+they are now. Consequently, everything in Rome had a certain degree
+of meaning for us, and gave us a pleasure in addition to the intrinsic
+beauty or charm that belonged thereto. Our imagination thronged the
+Capitol with senators; saw in the Roman Forum the contentions of the
+tribunes and the patricians; heard the populus Romanus roar in the
+Coliseum; beheld the splendid processions of victory wind cityward
+through the Arch of Titus; saw Caesar lie bleeding at the base of
+Pompey's statue; pondered over the fatal precipice of the Tarpeian
+Rock; luxuriated in the hollow spaces of the Baths of Caracalla; lost
+ourselves in gorgeous reveries in the palace of the Caesars, and haunted
+the yellow stream of Tiber, beneath which lay hidden precious treasures
+and forgotten secrets. And we were no less captivated by the galleries
+and churches, which contained the preserved relics of the great old
+times, and were in themselves so beautiful. My taste for blackened old
+pictures and faded frescoes was, indeed, even more undeveloped than
+my father's; but I liked the brilliant reproductions in mosaic at St.
+Peter's and certain individual works in various places. I formed a
+romantic attachment for the alleged Beatrice Cenci of Guido, or of some
+other artist, and was very sorry that she should be so unhappy, though,
+of course, I was ignorant of the occasion of her low spirits. But I
+liked much better Guide's large design of Aurora, partly because I had
+long been familiar with it on the head-board of my mother's bedstead.
+Before her marriage she had bought a set of bedroom furniture, and had
+painted it a dull gold color, and on this surface she had drawn in fine
+black lines the outlines of several classical subjects, most of them
+from Flaxman; but in the space mentioned she had executed an outline
+of this glorious work of the Italian artist. I knew every line of
+the composition thoroughly; and, by-the-way, I doubt if a truer, more
+inspired copy of the picture was ever produced by anybody. But the color
+had to be supplied by the observer's imagination; now, for the first
+time, I saw the hues as laid on by the original painter. In spite of
+time, they were pure and exquisite beyond description; these lovely
+figures seemed made of light and morning. Another favorite picture of
+mine was the same artist's "Michael Overcoming the Evil One," and I
+even had the sense to like the painting better than the mosaic copy.
+Raphael's "Transfiguration" I also knew well from the old engraving of
+it that used to hang on our parlor wall from my earliest recollections;
+it still hangs yonder. But I never cared for this picture; it was too
+complicated and ingenious--it needed too much co-operation from
+the observer's mind. Besides, I had never seen a boy with anything
+approaching the muscular development of the epileptic youth in the
+centre. The thing in the picture that I most approved of was the end of
+the log in the little pool, in the foreground; it looked true to life.
+
+But my delight in the statues was endless. It seems to me that I knew
+personally every statue and group in the Vatican and in the Capitol.
+Again and again, either with my parents, or with Eddy, or even alone,
+I would pass the warders at the doors and enter those interminable
+galleries, and look and look at those quiet, stained-marble effigies.
+My early studies of Flaxman had, in a measure, educated me towards
+appreciation of them. I never tired of them, as I did of the Cleopatras
+and the Greek Slaves. What superb figures! What power and grace and
+fleetness and athletic loins! The divine, severe Minerva, musing under
+the shadow of her awful helmet; the athlete with the strigil, resting
+so lightly on his tireless feet; the royal Apollo, disdaining his own
+victory; the Venus, half shrinking from the exquisiteness of her own
+beauty; the swaying poise of the Discobulus, caught forever as he drew
+his breath for the throw; the smooth-limbed, brooding Antinous; the
+terrible Laocoon, which fascinated me, though it always repelled me,
+too; the austere simplicity of the Dying Gladiator's stoop to death--the
+most human of all the great statues; the heads of heroic Miltiades,
+of Antony, of solitary Caesar, of indifferent Augustus; the tranquil
+indolence of mighty Nile, clambered over by his many children--these,
+and a hundred others, spoke to me out of their immortal silence. I can
+conceive of no finer discipline for a boy; I emulated while I adored
+them. Power, repose, beauty, nobility, were in their message: "Do you,
+too, possess limbs and shoulders like ours!" they said to me; "such a
+bearing, such a spirit within!" I cannot overestimate even the physical
+good they did me; it was from them that I gained the inspiration for
+bodily development and for all athletic exercise which has, since then,
+helped me over many a rough passage in the path of life. But they also
+awoke higher ambitions and conferred finer benefits.
+
+From these excursions into the ideal I would return to out-of-doors with
+another inexhaustible zest. That ardent, blue Roman sky and penetrating,
+soft sunshine filled me with life and joy. The breath and strength of
+immeasurable antiquity emanated from those massive ruins, which time
+could deface but never conquer. Emerald lizards basked on the hot walls;
+flowers grew in the old crevices; butterflies floated round them; they
+were haunted by spirits of heroes. There is nothing else to be compared
+with the private, intimate, human, yet sublimated affection which
+these antique monuments wrought in me. They were my mighty brothers,
+condescending to my boyish thoughts and fancies, smiling upon me,
+welcoming me, conscious of my love for them. Each ruin had its separate
+individuality for me, so that to-day I must play with the Coliseum,
+to-morrow with the Forum, or the far-ranging arches of the Aqueduct, or
+the Temple of Vesta. Always, too, my eyes were alert for treasures in
+the old Roman soil, coming, as it seemed, direct from the dead hands of
+the vanished people into mine. I valued the scraps that I picked up thus
+more than anything to be bought in shops or seen in museums. These
+bits of tinted marble had felt the touch of real Romans; their feet had
+trodden on them, on them their arms had rested, their hands had grasped
+them. Two thousand years had dulled the polish of their surfaces; I took
+them to the stone-workers, who made them glow and bloom again--yellow,
+red, black, green, white. They were good-natured but careless men, those
+marble-polishers, and would sometimes lose my precious relics, and when
+I called for them would say, every day, "Domane--domane," or try to put
+me off with some substitute--as if a boy could be deceived in such
+a matter! I once found in the neighborhood of a recent excavation a
+semi-transparent tourmaline of a cool green hue when held to the light;
+it had once been set in the ring of some Roman beauty. It had, from long
+abiding in the earth, that wonderful iridescent surface which ancient
+glass acquires. Rose, my sister, picked up out of a rubbish heap a
+little bronze statuette, hardly three inches high, but, as experts said,
+of the best artistic period. Such things made our Roman history books
+seem like a tale of yesterday, or they transported us back across the
+centuries, so that we trod in the footsteps of those who had been but a
+moment before us.
+
+In those warm days, after our walks and explorations, Eddy and I, and
+little Hubert, who sometimes was permitted to accompany us, though we
+deemed him hardly in our class, would greatly solace ourselves with the
+clear and gurgling fountains which everywhere in Rome flow forth into
+their marble and moss-grown basins with a pleasant sound of coolness and
+refreshment. Rome without her fountains would not be Rome; every memory
+of her includes them. In the streets, in the piazzas, in the wide
+pleasaunces and gardens, the fountains allure us onward, and comfort us
+for our weariness. In the Piazza d' Espagna, at the foot of the famous
+steps, was that great, boat-shaped fountain whose affluent waters cool
+the air which broods over the wide, white stairway; and not far away
+is the mighty Trevi, with its turmoil of obstreperous figures swarming
+round bragging Neptune, and its cataract of innumerable rills welling
+forth and plunging downward by devious ways to meet at last in the great
+basin, forever agitated with baby waves lapping against the margins.
+These, and many similar elaborate structures, are for the delight of
+the eye; but there are scores of modest fountains, at the corners of
+the ways, in shady or in sunny places, formed of an ancient sarcophagus
+receiving the everlasting tribute of two open-mouthed lion-heads, or
+other devices, whose arching outgush splashes into the receptacle made
+to hold death, but now immortally dedicated to the refreshment of life.
+It was at these minor fountains that we quenched our boyish thirst,
+each drinking at the mouth of a spout; and when we discovered that by
+stopping up one spout with our thumb the other would discharge with
+double force, we played roguish tricks on each other, deluging each
+other at unawares with unmanageable gushes of water, till we were forced
+to declare a mutual truce of honor. But what delicious draughts did we
+suck in from those lion-mouths into our own; never elsewhere did
+water seem so sweet and revivifying. And then we would peer into the
+transparent depths of the old sarcophagus, with its fringes of green,
+silky moss waving slightly with the movement of the water, and fish out
+tiny-spired water-shells; or dip in them the bits of ancient marbles
+we had collected on our walk, to see the hues revive to their former
+splendor. Many-fountained Rome ought to be a cure for wine-bibbers; yet
+I never saw an Italian drink at these springs; they would rather quaff
+the thin red and white wines that are sold for a few baiocchi at the
+inns.
+
+The Pincian Hill and the adjoining grounds of the Borghese Palace came
+at length to be our favorite haunts. The Borghese is a delectable spot,
+as my father remarks in one of those passages in his diary which
+was afterwards expanded into the art-picture of his romance. "Broad
+carriageways," he says, "and wood-paths wander beneath long vistas of
+sheltering boughs; there are ilex-trees, ancient and sombre, which, in
+the long peace of their lifetime, have assumed attitudes of indolent
+repose; and stone-pines that look like green islands in the air, so high
+above earth are they, and connected with it by such a slender length of
+stem; and cypresses, resembling dark flames of huge, funereal candles.
+These wooded lawns are more beautiful than English park scenery; all the
+more beautiful for the air of neglect about them, as if not much care of
+men were bestowed upon them, though enough to keep wildness from growing
+into deformity, and to make the whole scene like nature idealized--the
+woodland scenes the poet dreamed of--a forest of Ardennes, for instance.
+These lawns and gentle valleys are beautiful, moreover, with fountains
+flashing into marble basins, or gushing like natural cascades from rough
+rocks; with bits of architecture, as pillared porticos, arches, columns,
+of marble or granite, with a touch of artful ruin on them; and, indeed,
+the pillars and fragments seem to be remnants of antiquity, though put
+together anew, hundreds of years old, perhaps, even in their present
+form, for weeds and flowers grow out of the chinks and cluster on the
+tops of arches and porticos. There are altars, too, with old Roman
+inscriptions on them. Statues stand here and there among the trees, in
+solitude, or in a long range, lifted high on pedestals, moss-grown, some
+of them shattered, all grown gray with the corrosion of the atmosphere.
+In the midst of these sunny and shadowy tracts rises the stately front
+of the villa, adorned with statues in niches, with busts, and ornamented
+architecture blossoming in stone-work. Take away the malaria, and it
+might be a very happy place."
+
+[IMAGE: PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE]
+
+Here was a playground for boys of imaginative but not too destructive
+proclivities, such as the world hardly furnishes elsewhere. But much of
+my enjoyment of it I ascribe to my friend Eddy. My conversation with
+no person since then has rivalled the profundity and importance of my
+communings with his sympathetic soul. We not only discussed our future
+destinies and philosophical convictions, but we located in these
+delicious retreats the various worlds which we purposed to explore and
+inhabit during the next few hundred years. Here we passed through by
+anticipation all our future experiences. Sometimes we were accompanied
+by other boys; but then our visits lost their distinction; we merely
+had good times in the ordinary way of boys; we were robber barons,
+intrenched in our strongholds, and attacked by other robbers; or we ran
+races, or held other trials of strength and activity, or we set snares
+for the bright-colored fishes which lurked in some of the fountains. The
+grounds were occasionally invaded by gangs of Italian boys, between whom
+and ourselves existed an irreconcilable feud. We could easily thrash
+them in the Anglo-Saxon manner, with nature's weapons; but they would
+ambush us and assail us with stones; and once one of them struck at
+me with a knife, which was prevented from entering my side only by the
+stout leather belt which I chanced to wear. We denounced these assassins
+to the smiling custode of the grounds, and he promised, smilingly, to
+bar the entrance to them thenceforth; but he was a smiling deceiver;
+our enemies came just the same. After all, we would have regretted their
+absence; they added the touch of peril to our chronic romance which
+made it perfect. It is forty-four years since then. Are there any other
+Borghese Gardens to come for me in the future, I wonder? There was a
+rough pathway along the banks of the Tiber, extending up the stream for
+two or three miles, as far as the Ponte Molle, where the corktrees grew,
+and farther, for aught I know. This was a favorite walk of mine, because
+of the fragments of antique marbles to be found there, and also the
+shells which so mysteriously abounded along the margin, as shown by the
+learned conchological author hereinbefore cited. And, being of an early
+rising habit, it was my wont to get up long before breakfast and tramp
+up and down along the river for an hour or two, thinking, I suppose,
+as I gazed upon the turbulent flood, of brave Horatius disdainfully
+escaping from the serried hosts of Lars Porsena and false Sextus, or
+of Caesar and Cassius buffeting the torrent on a "dare," and with lusty
+sinews flinging it aside. There were also lovely effects of dawn upon
+the dome of St. Peter's, and the redoubtable mass of St. Angelo, with
+its sword-sheathing angel. Moreover, sunrise, at twelve years of age, is
+an exhilarating and congenial phenomenon. And I painted my experiences
+in colors so attractive that our Ada Shepard was inflamed with the idea
+of accompanying me on my rambles. She was a child in heart, though so
+mature in intellect, and her spirit was valiant, though her flesh was
+comparatively infirm. It was my custom to set out about five o'clock
+in the morning, and Miss Shepard promised to be ready at that hour.
+But after keeping awake most of the night in order not to fail of the
+appointment, she fell asleep and dreamed only of getting up; and, after
+waiting for her for near an hour, I went without her. She was
+much mortified at her failure, and suggested a plan to insure her
+punctuality, in which I readily agreed to collaborate. When she went to
+bed she attached a piece of string to one of her toes, the other end of
+the filament being carried underneath doors and along passages to my own
+room. I was instructed to haul in on my slack at the proper hour; and
+this I accordingly did, with good-will, and was at once made conscious
+that I had caught something, not only by the resistance which my
+efforts encountered, but by the sound of cries of feminine distress and
+supplication, heard in the distance. However, my companion appeared in
+due season, and we took our walk, which, she declared, fulfilled all the
+anticipations which my reports had led her to form.
+
+Nevertheless, I cannot remember that we ever again made the expedition
+together; it is a mistake to try to repeat a perfect joy.
+
+It seems to me that I must have been a pretty constant visitor at St.
+Peter's. The stiff, heavy, leathern curtain which protects the entrance
+having been strenuously pushed aside (always with remembrance of
+Corinne's impossible act of grace and courtesy in holding it aside
+with one hand for Lord Neville), the glorious interior expanded, mildly
+radiant, before me. As has been the case with so many other observers,
+the real magnitude of the spectacle did not at first affect me; the
+character of the decoration and detail prevented the impression of
+greatness; it was only after many times traversing that illimitable
+pavement, and after frequent comparisons with ordinary human
+measurements of the aerial heights of those arches and that dome, that
+one conies to understand, by a sort of logical compulsion, how immense
+it all is. It is a miniature cabinet magically made titanic; but the
+magic which could transform inches into roods could not correspondingly
+enlarge the innate character of the ornament; so that, instead of making
+the miniature appear truly vast, it only makes us seem unnaturally
+small. Still, after all criticisms, St. Peter's remains one of the most
+delightful places in the world; its sweet sumptuousness and imperial
+harmonies seem somehow to enter into us and make us harmonious, rich,
+and sweet. The air that we inhale is just touched with the spirit of
+incense, and mellowed as with the still memories of the summers of
+five hundred years ago. The glistening surfaces of the colored marbles,
+dimmed with faint, fragrant mists, and glorified with long slants of
+brooding sunshine, soothe the eye like materialized music; and the soft
+twinkle of the candles on the altars, seen in daylight, has a jewel-like
+charm. As I look back upon it, however, and contrast it with the
+cathedrals of England, the total influence upon the mind of St. Peter's
+seems to me voluptuous rather than religious. It is a human palace of
+art more than a shrine of the Almighty. A prince might make love to a
+princess there without feeling guilty of profanation. St. Peter himself,
+sitting there in his chair, with his highly polished toe advanced, is
+a doll for us to play with. On one occasion I was in the church with
+my father, and the great nave was thronged with people and lined with
+soldiers, and down the midst went slowly a gorgeous procession, with
+Pope Pio Nono borne aloft, swayingly, the triple crown upon his head. He
+blessed the crowd, as he passed along, with outstretched hand. One can
+never forget such a spectacle; but I was not nearly so much impressed in
+a religious sense as when, forty years later, I stood in the portals of
+a Mohammedan mosque in Central India and saw a thousand turbaned Moslems
+prostrate themselves with their foreheads in the dust before a voice
+which proclaimed the presence of the awful, unseen God.
+
+My father enjoyed the church more after each visit to it. But it was the
+confessionals and their significance that most interested him. "What an
+institution the confessional is! Man needs it so, that it seems as if
+God must have ordained it." And he dwells upon the idea with remarkable
+elaboration and persistence. Those who have followed the painful
+wanderings of heart-oppressed Hilda to the carven confessional in the
+great church, where she found peace, will recognize the amply unfolded
+flower of this seed. What I supposed to be my notion of St. Peter's
+looking like the enlargement of some liliputian edifice is also there,
+though I had forgotten it till I myself reread the pages. In this book
+of my memories, which is also the book of my forgettings, I must walk to
+and fro freely, if I am to walk at all. None can tell the secret origin
+of his thoughts.
+
+Besides the monumental and artistic features of Rome, the human side
+of it appealed to me. There was something congenial in the Romans, and,
+indeed, in the Italians generally, so that I seemed to be renewing my
+acquaintance with people whom I had partly forgotten. I picked up the
+conversational language with unusual ease, perhaps owing to the drilling
+in Latin which my father had given me; and I liked the easy, objectless
+ways of the people, and the smiles which so readily took the place of
+the sallow gravity which their faces wore in repose. But it was the
+Transteverini women who chiefly attracted me; they wore an antique
+costume familiar enough in paintings, and they claimed to be descendants
+of the ancient race; they had the noble features and bearing which one
+would have looked for in such descendants, at all events. Looking in
+their dark, haughty eyes, one seemed to pass back through the terrible
+picturesqueness of mediaeval Italy, with its Borgias and Bella Donnas,
+its Lorenzos and Fornarinas, to the Rome of Nero, Augustus, Scipio, and
+Tarquin. Eddy and I would sometimes make excursions across the river to
+Transtevere, and stroll up and down those narrow streets, imagining
+all manner of suitable adventures and histories for the inhabitants,
+stalking there in their black and scarlet and yellow habiliments,
+and glancing imperially from under the black brows of their dark
+countenances. One afternoon during the carnival I was in a dense crowd
+in the piazza, towards the lower end of the Corso, and found myself
+pushed into the neighborhood of a singularly beautiful young woman of
+this class, dressed in the height of her fashion, who was slowly making
+her way in my direction through the press. All at once a man, smartly
+clad in the garb of recent civilization, stepped in front of her and
+said something to her; what it was I knew not. She drew herself back,
+as from something poisonous or revolting, and the expression of her face
+became terrible. At the same time her right hand went swiftly to the
+masses of her sable hair, and as swiftly back again, armed with the
+small, narrow dagger which these women wear by way of hair-pin. Before
+the unhappy creature who had accosted her knew what was happening,
+she thrust the dagger, with a powerful movement--while her white teeth
+showed, set edge to edge, through her drawn lips--deep into his body.
+As he collapsed forward she drew the weapon upward, putting the whole
+strength of her body into the effort, and actually ripped the man open.
+Down he fell at her feet. There was a score or more of Roman citizens
+within arm's-reach of her at the moment; no one spoke, still less
+attempted to restrain her. On the contrary, as she turned they
+respectfully opened a way for her through the midst of them, and none
+made an offer to assist the dying wretch who lay writhing and faintly
+coughing on the cobble-stone pavement of the piazza. I was soon elbowed
+quietly away from the spot where he lay; I caught a glimpse of the
+crimson head-dress of his slayer passing away afar amid the crowd;
+presently the cocked hat of a gendarme appeared from another direction,
+advancing slowly against manifest obstructions; everybody seemed to
+get in his way, without appearing to intend it. Such was the attitude
+towards assassination of the Roman people in those days. I have often
+thought over the incident since then. Their sympathy is with private
+vengeance, never with ordained statute law. They love to use the poniard
+and to see it used, and will do their best to shield the users. Pity for
+the victim they have none; they assume that he has his deserts. For
+that matter, my own sympathies, filled though I was with horror at the
+spectacle of actual murder done before my eyes, were wholly with the
+savage beauty, and not with the fatuous creature who had probably
+insulted her. It is needless to say that the women of Transtevere were
+not so often called upon to resent insults as are the ladies of New
+York and other American cities. They did not wait for policemen or for
+"leagues of chivalry" to avenge them.
+
+Towards the French soldiers I was cordially disposed. Their dark-blue
+tunics and baggy, red peg-tops were never out of sight, and though I
+had seen troops in England, and had once observed the march of a British
+regiment in Liverpool going to embark for the Crimea (whence, I believe,
+very few of this particular regiment returned), yet the conception of a
+resident army first came to me in Rome. About the French army of those
+days still hovered the lustre bestowed upon it by the deeds of the great
+Napoleon, which their recent exploits in the Crimea had not diminished.
+There were among them regiments of fierce and romantic looking zouaves,
+with Oriental complexions and semi-barbaric attire, marching with a long
+swing, and appearing savage and impetuous enough to annihilate anything;
+and there was also a brigade, the special designation of which I have
+forgotten, every man of which was a trained athlete, and whose drill
+was something marvellous to witness. But the average French soldier was
+simply a first-class soldier, good-natured, light-hearted, active, trim,
+and efficient; in height averaging not more than five foot six; carrying
+muskets which seemed out of proportion large, though they handled them
+lightly enough, and wearing at their sides a short sword, like the sword
+of ancient Rome, which was also used as a bayonet. There was always a
+drill or a march in progress somewhere, and sentinels paced up and down
+before the palaces. The officers were immensely impressive; the young
+ones had wasp waists, surpassing those of the most remorseless belles
+of fashion; and the old ones were, en revanche, immensely stout in that
+region, as if outraged nature were resolved to assert herself at last.
+But, young or old, their swords were sun-bright and lovely to behold--I
+used to polish my own little weapon in vain in the attempt to emulate
+them. Hopelessly envious was I, too, of the heroic chests of these
+warriors (not knowing them to be padded, as the waists were corseted),
+and I would swell out my own little pectoral region to its utmost extent
+as I walked along the streets, thereby, though I knew it not, greatly
+benefiting my physical organism. Of course I had no personal commerce
+with the officers, but the rank and file fraternized with me and my
+companions readily; there was always a number of them strolling about
+Rome and its environs on leave, in pairs or groups, and they were just
+as much boys as we were. They would let me heft their short, strong
+swords, and when they understood that I was gathering shells they would
+climb lightly about the ruins, and bring me specimens displayed in their
+broad, open palms. Our conversation was restricted to few words and many
+grunts and gestures, but we understood one another and were on terms of
+gay camaraderie. A dozen years afterwards, when there was war between
+France and Germany, my sympathies were ardently with the former, and
+great were my astonishment and regret at the issue of the conflict. Man
+for man, and rightly led and managed, I still believe that Gaul could
+wipe up the ground with the Teuton, without half trying. But there were
+other forces than those of Moltke and Bismarck fighting against poor
+France in that fatal campaign. She was wounded in the house of her
+friends.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+     Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--
+     Wholly unlike anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--
+     Back to the Gods and the Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss
+     Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was in a state of some
+     little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most thorough-going
+     of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure in
+     Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and
+     saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and
+     fireworks--The Faun-Enjoying Rome--First impressions--
+     Lalla's curses.
+
+While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the
+achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise
+their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson, and
+he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain Miss
+Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she intended,
+permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is
+merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is
+unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor, and, in spite
+of what my father had said against the nude in sculpture, I think he
+liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better than paint and canvas.
+At all events, he consented to give her sittings. He was interested in
+the independence of her mode of life, and they got on very comfortably
+together; the results of his observation of her appear in the references
+to Hilda's and Miriam's unhampered ways of life in The Marble Faun.
+She had, as I recall her, a narrow, sallow face, sharp eyes, and a long
+chin. She might have been thirty years old. Unlike Miss Harriet Hosmer,
+who lived not far away, Miss Lander had no attractiveness for us
+children. I have reason to think, too, that my father's final opinion of
+her was not so favorable as his first one. Except photographs, no really
+good likeness of my father was ever taken; the portrait painted in
+Washington, in 1862, by Leutze, was the least successful of them all.
+The best, in my opinion, was an exquisitely wrought miniature of him at
+the age of thirty, which I kept for a long time, till it was stolen by a
+friend in London in 1880.
+
+Paul Akers, a Maine Yankee, with the twang of his native place still
+strong in him after ten years in Rome, was another sculptor of our
+acquaintance; he was very voluble, and escorted us about Rome, and
+entertained us at his own studio, where he was modelling his best group,
+"The Drowned Fisher-boy," as he called it. The figure is supposed to
+be lying at the bottom of the sea, face upward, with a fragment of rock
+supporting on its sharp ridge the small of the back--a most painful and
+uncomfortable attitude, suggesting that even in death there could be no
+rest for the poor youth. Mr. Akers was rather sharply critical of his
+more famous brother-artists, such as Greenough and Gibson, and was
+accused by them, apparently not wholly without justification, of
+yielding too much to the influence of other geniuses in the designing
+of his groups. But he was a sensible and obliging little personage, and
+introduced us to the studios of several of his fellow-artists in Rome,
+some of which were more interesting than his own.
+
+Bright little Miss Harriet Hosmer, with her hands in her jacket-pockets,
+and her short hair curling up round her velvet cap, struts cheerfully
+forth out of the obscurity of the past in my memory; her studio, I
+think, adjoined that of Gibson, of whom I remember nothing whatever. Her
+most notable production at that time was a Puck sitting on a toadstool,
+with a conical shell of the limpet species by way of a cap; he
+somehow resembled his animated and clever creator. Miss Hosmer's face,
+expressions, gestures, dress, and her manifestations in general were
+perfectly in keeping with one another; there never was a more succinct
+and distinct individuality; she was wholly unlike anybody else, without
+being in the least unnatural or affected. Her social manner was of a
+persistent jollity; but no doubt she had her grave moments or hours, a
+good and strong brain, and a susceptibility to tragic conceptions, as is
+shown by the noble figure of her Zenobia. This figure I saw in clay
+in her studio during our second season in Rome. Miss Hosmer's talk
+was quick, witty, and pointed; her big eyes redeemed her round,
+small-featured face from triviality; her warm heart glowed through
+all she said and did. Her studio was a contrast to the classicality of
+Gibson's, whose influence, though she had studied under him during her
+six years' residence in Rome, had affected her technique only, not her
+conceptions or aims in art. We all liked her much. She was made known to
+us, I believe, through the medium of grave, wise, humorous Sarah Clarke,
+the sister of the James Freeman Clarke who married my mother to my
+father, and who, twenty-two years later, read over my father the burial
+service. Sarah Clarke was often abroad; she was herself an admirable
+artist in water-color, and was always a dear friend of my mother's.
+After we had returned to Concord, in 1860, Miss Hosmer wrote to us, and
+one of her letters has been preserved; I quote it, because it is like
+her:
+
+"MY DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--It is not unlikely that you may be somewhat
+surprised to hear from me; but after you have received the four dozen
+letters which, sooner or later, I intend writing you, you will cease to
+be so. I begin at the present moment with the first of the forty-eight,
+partly for business and partly for pleasure. Reversing, then, the
+order of things which some unknown but well-regulated-minded individual
+considered to be correct, I will go in for pleasure first, under which
+head I seek information respecting the health and well-being of all
+members of your family. It seems cruel that you should go off to the
+glorious Republic when there are other places in Rome besides the Piazza
+Poli. Now that you are safely out of it, I must try to persuade you that
+it was the most unhealthy place in the whole city, not only because
+I really believe it to be so, but that malaria may not be mingled and
+cherished with every remembrance of this delicious, artistic, fleay,
+malarious paradise. But I suppose little short of a miracle would
+transport you here again, not only because Una is probably becoming
+the size of Daniel Lambert, in her native air, but because Julian is
+probably weaving a future President's chair out of the rattans he is
+getting at school. However that may be, the result is the same, I fear,
+as to your getting back to the Gods and the Fleas; and I must look
+forward to a meeting in America. Well, as that carries me over the
+ocean, in my mind's eye, Mrs. Hawthorne, the business clause of my
+epistle is suggested--and it is this: I have just had a letter from my
+best of friends, Mr. Crow, of St. Louis [she had studied anatomy in St.
+Louis before coming to Rome], who has been passing the summer in
+New York and Boston, and he writes: 'They are talking in Boston of a
+monument to the memory of Mr. Horace Mann, and I have said to one of the
+active men engaged in it that if you could have the commission I would
+subscribe handsomely towards it.' Now, it occurred to me that perhaps
+you or yours might have an opportunity of saying a good word for me, in
+which case I would have you know how pleased and grateful I should be.
+You may not have the occasion offered you, but if it chances, I commend
+myself to you distintamente, and trust to your good-nature not to
+consider me pushing for having suggested it. I send this through our
+well-beloved Sarah Clarke, and hope it will arrive before 1861. When
+you have nothing better to do, pray give me a line, always in care of
+Pakenham & Hooker. Good-bye, dear Mrs. Hawthorne--my best love to Mr.
+Hawthorne and the chicks--and the best wish I can make is that you are
+all as fat as yours always affectionately,
+
+"HARRIET HOSMER."
+
+All the influence which my father and mother possessed was given to Miss
+Hosmer's cause, but some other person got the commission. I remember,
+too, that my mother, at Mrs. Mann's request, was at great pains to make
+drawings for the face of the statue which now confronts from the slopes
+of Beacon Hill the culture and intelligence of Boston, which Horace
+Mann did so much to promote. But he was not a subject which accommodated
+itself readily to the requirements of plastic art. There is a glimpse of
+Miss Hosmer in one of my father's diaries, which I will reproduce, for
+the sake of indicating his amused and benevolent attitude towards her.
+"She had on," says he, "a neat little jacket, a man's shirt-bosom, and
+a cravat with a brooch in it; her hair is cut short, and curls jauntily
+round her bright and smart little physiognomy; and, sitting opposite
+me at table, I never should have imagined that she terminated in a
+petticoat any more than in a fish's tail. However, I do not mean to
+speak disrespectfully of Miss Hosmer, of whom I think very favorably;
+but, it seems to me, her reform of the female dress begins with its
+least objectionable part, and is no real improvement."
+
+One evening we visited Miss Bremer, the novelist, of Sweden, who was
+then near the end of her foreign travels, which had begun with her visit
+to America in 1849. She had met my father in Lenox, and had written of
+him in the book of her travels. She was a small woman, with a big heart
+and broad mind, packed full of sense, sentiment, and philanthropy. She
+had an immense nose, designed, evidently, for some much larger person;
+her conversation in English, though probably correct, was so oddly
+accented that it was difficult to follow her. She was a very lovable
+little creature, then nearing her sixtieth year. Most of her voluminous
+literary work was done. Her house in Rome was near the Capitol and the
+Tarpeian Rock; and after we had forgathered with her there for a
+while, she accompanied us forth--the moon being up--to see the famous
+precipice. It was to this incident that we owe the scene in The Marble
+Faun, the most visibly tragic in my father's writings. "The court-yard,"
+he writes in his notes, "is bordered by a parapet, leaning over which
+we saw a sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock, about the height of a
+four-story house; not that the precipice was a bare face of rock, but
+it appeared to be cased in some sort of cement, or ancient stone-work,
+through which the primeval rock, here and there, looked grimly and
+doubtfully. Bright as the Roman moonlight was, it would not show the
+front of the wall, or rock, so well as I should have liked to see it,
+but left it pretty much in the same degree of dubiety and half-knowledge
+in which the antiquarians leave most of the Roman ruins. Perhaps this
+precipice may have been the Traitor's Leap; perhaps it was the one on
+which Miss Bremer's garden verges; perhaps neither of the two. At any
+rate, it was a good idea of the stern old Romans to fling political
+criminals down from the very height of the Capitoline Hill on which
+stood the temples and public edifices, symbols of the institutions
+which they sought to violate." But there was no tragic suggestion in
+our little party, conducted about by the prattling, simple, affectionate
+little woman, so homely, tender, and charitable. "At parting," wrote
+my father, "she kissed my wife most affectionately on each cheek,
+'because,' she said, 'you look so sweetly'; and then she turned towards
+myself. I was in a state of some little tremor, not knowing what might
+be about to befall me, but she merely pressed my hand, and we parted,
+probably never to meet again. God bless her good heart, and every
+inch of her little body, not forgetting her red nose, big as it is
+in proportion to the rest of her! She is a most amiable little woman,
+worthy to be the maiden aunt of the whole human race!"
+
+Venerable Mrs. Jameson, author of a little library of writings on
+Italian art, was likewise of our company occasionally; and she evinced
+a marked liking for my father, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he was
+able to keep no sort of pace with her in her didactic homilies, which
+were delivered with a tranquil, ex-cathedra manner, befitting one who
+was the authority on her subject; one would no more have thought of
+questioning her verdicts than those of Ruskin; but I should have liked
+to see the latter and her together, with a difference between them. Her
+legs were less active than her mind, and most of our expeditions with
+her were made in carriages, from which she dispensed her wisdom placidly
+as we went along, laying the dust of our ignorance with the droppings
+of her erudition, like a watering-cart. However, she so far condescended
+from her altitudes as to speak very cordially of my father's books, for
+which he expressed proper acknowledgment; and she had a motherly way
+of holding his hand in hers when he took leave of her, and looking
+maternally in his face, which made him somewhat uneasy. "Were we to meet
+often," he remarked,
+
+"I should be a little afraid of her embracing me outright--a thing to be
+grateful for, but by no means to be glad of!" We drove one day to some
+excavations which had just been opened near the tomb of Cecilia Metella,
+outside the walls of Rome. Both Christian and Roman graves had been
+found, and they had been so recently discovered that, as my father
+observed, there could have been very little intervention of persons
+(though much of time) between the departure of the friends of the
+dead and our own visit. The large, excavated chambers were filled with
+sarcophagi, beautifully sculptured, and their walls were ornamented with
+free-hand decoration done in wet plaster, a marvellous testimony to the
+rapid skill of the artists. The sarcophagi were filled with the bones
+and the dust of the ancient people who had once, in the imperial prime
+of Rome, walked about her streets, prayed to her gods, and feasted at
+her banquets. My father remarked on the fact that many of the sarcophagi
+were sculptured with figures that seemed anything but mournful in their
+demeanor; but Mrs. Jameson said that there was almost always, in
+the subject chosen, some allusion to death, instancing the story of
+Meleager, an Argonaut, who, I think, slew the Calydonian boar, and
+afterwards his two uncles, who had tried to get the boar's hide away
+from Meleager's beloved Atalanta; whereupon the young hero was brought
+to death by his mother, who in turn killed herself. It is one of the
+most thoroughgoing of the classic tragedies, and was a favorite theme
+for the sculptors of sarcophagi. Certainly, in the sarcophagi of the
+Vatican the bas-reliefs are often scenes of battle, the rush of men and
+horses, and the ground strewn with dead; and in others, a dying person
+seems to be represented, with his friends weeping along the sides of the
+sarcophagus; but often, too, the allusion to death, if it exists at all,
+is very remote. The old Romans, like ourselves, had individual ways of
+regarding the great change; according to their mood and faith, they were
+hopeful or despairing. But death is death, think of it how we will.
+
+I think it was on a previous occasion that I went with my father, afoot,
+along this same mighty Appian Way, beside which rise so many rounded
+structures, vast as fortresses, containing the remains of the dead of
+long ago, and culminating in the huge mass of the Cecilia Metella tomb,
+with the mediaeval battlements on its summit. And it was on that walk
+that we met the calf of The Marble Faun: "A well-grown calf," my father
+says in his notes, "who seemed frolicsome, shy, and sociable all at the
+same time; for he capered and leaped to one side, and shook his head, as
+I passed him, but soon came galloping behind me, and again started aside
+when I looked round." How little I suspected then (or the bull-calf
+either, for that matter) that he was to frolic his way into literature,
+and go gambolling down the ages to distract the anxious soul of the
+lover of Hilda! Another walk of ours was to the huge, green mound of the
+Monte Testaccio; it was, at that period, pierced by numerous cavities,
+in the dark coolness of which stores of native wines were kept; and
+they were sold to customers at the rude wooden tables in front of the
+excavations, in flasks shaped like large drops of water, protected with
+plaited straw. When, nowadays, in New York or other cities here, I go to
+an Italian restaurant, I always call for one of these flasks, and think,
+as I drink its contents, of that afternoon with my father. It was the
+first time I had been permitted to taste a fermented liquor. I liked it
+very much, and got two glasses of it; and when we rose to depart I was
+greatly perplexed, and my father was vastly tickled, to discover a lack
+of coherence between my legs and my intentions. It speedily passed off,
+for the wines are of the lightest and airiest description; but when, a
+little later on in life, I came to read that Horatian verse describing
+how, turning from barbaric splendors such as the Persians affect, he
+binds his brows with simple myrtle, and sips, beneath the shadow of his
+garden bower, the pure vintage of the native grape, I better appreciated
+the poetry of the theme from having enjoyed that Testaccionesque
+experience.
+
+It was in Rome, too, that I first came in contact with death. It aroused
+my liveliest curiosity, but, as I remember, no alarm; partly, I suspect,
+because I was unable to believe that there was anything real in the
+spectacle. The scene has been woven into the texture of the Italian
+romance; it is there described almost as it actually presented itself
+to the author's observation. A dead monk of the Capuchin order lay on a
+bier in the nave of their church, and while we looked at him a stream
+of blood flowed from his nostrils. We went down afterwards, I recollect,
+into the vaults, and saw the fine, Oriental loam in which the body was
+to lie; and it seems to me there were arches and other architectural
+features composed of skulls and bones of long-dead brothers of the
+order. He must have been a fantastic and saturnine genius who first
+suggested this idea.
+
+Another subterranean expedition of ours was to the Catacombs, the
+midnight passages of which seemed to be made of bones, and niches
+containing the dust of unknown mortality, which were duskily revealed in
+the glimmer of our moccoli as we passed along in single file. Sometimes
+we came to chambers, one of which had in it a bier covered with glass,
+in which was a body which still preserved some semblance of the
+human form. There were occasional openings in the vaulted roof of the
+corridors, but for the most part the darkness was Egyptian, and for a
+few moments a thrill of anxiety was caused by the disappearance either
+of my sister Una or of Ada Shepard; I forget which. They were soon
+found, but the guide read us a homily upon the awful peril of lifelong
+entombment which encompassed us. But the air was dry and cool, and the
+whole adventure, from my point of view, enjoyable.
+
+Again, we went down a long flight of steps somewhere near the Forum,
+till we reached a pitch-black place, where we waited till a guide came
+up from still lower depths, down into which we followed him--each with
+a moccolo--till we felt level earth or stone beneath our feet, and stood
+in what I suppose is as lightless a hole as can exist in nature. It was
+wet, too, and the smell of it was deadly and dismal. This, however, was
+the prison in which the old Romans used to confine important prisoners,
+such as Jugurtha and the Apostle Peter; and here they were strangled to
+death or left to starve. It was the Mamertine Prison. I did not like it.
+I also recall the opening of an oubliette in the castle of San Angelo,
+which affected me like a nightmare. Before leaving Concord, in 1853, I
+had once tumbled through a rotten board into a well, dug by the side of
+the road ages before, and had barely saved myself from dropping to the
+bottom, sixty feet below, by grabbing the weeds which grew on the margin
+of the hole. I was not much scared at the moment; but the next day,
+taking my father to the scene of the accident, he remarked that had I
+fallen in I never could have got out again; upon which I conceived a
+horror of the well which haunts me in my dreams even to this day. Only
+a tuft of grass between me and such a fate! I was, therefore, far from
+comfortable beside the oubliette, and was glad to emerge again into the
+Roman sunshine.
+
+One night we climbed the Pincian Hill, and saw, far out across Rome,
+the outlines of St. Peter's dome in silver light. While we were thinking
+that nothing could be more beautiful, all of a sudden the delicate
+silver bloomed out into a golden glory, which made everybody say,
+"Oh!" Was it more beautiful or not? Theoretically, I prefer the silver
+illumination; but, as a matter of fact, I must confess that I liked the
+golden illumination better. We were told that the wonder was performed
+by convicts, who lay along the dome and applied their matches to the
+lamps at the word of command, and that, inasmuch as the service was apt
+to prove fatal to the operators, these convicts were allowed certain
+alleviations of their condition for doing it. I suppose it is done by
+electricity now, and the convicts neither are killed nor obtain any
+concessions. Such are the helps and hindrances of civilization!
+
+Shortly after this, on a cool and cloudy night, I was down in the
+Piazza, del Popolo and saw the fireworks, the only other pyrotechnic
+exhibition I had witnessed having been a private one in Rock Park,
+which, I think, I have described. This Roman one was very different, and
+I do not believe I have ever since seen another so fine. The whole front
+of the Pincian was covered with fiery designs, and in the air overhead
+wonderful fiery serpents and other devices skimmed, arched, wriggled,
+shot aloft, and detonated. A boy accepts appearances as realities; and
+these fireworks doubtless enlarged my conceptions of the possibilities
+of nature, and substantiated the fables of the enchanters.
+
+[IMAGE: THE MARBLE FAUN]
+
+The Faun of Praxiteles, as the world knows, attracted my father, though
+he could not have visited it often; for both in his notes and in his
+romance he makes the same mistake as to the pose of the figure: "He has
+a pipe," he says in the former, "or some such instrument of music in the
+hand which rests upon the tree, and the other, I think, hangs carelessly
+by his side." Of course, the left arm, the one referred to, is held
+akimbo on his left hip. That my father's eyes were, however, already
+awake to the literary and moral possibilities of the Faun is shown by
+his further observations, which are much the same as those which appear
+in the book. "The whole person," he says, "conveys the idea of an
+amiable and sensual nature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not
+incapable of being touched by pathos. The Faun has no principle, nor
+could comprehend it, yet is true and honest by virtue of his simplicity;
+very capable, too, of affection. He might be refined through his
+feelings, so that the coarser, animal part of his nature would be
+thrown into the background, though liable to assert itself at any time.
+Praxiteles has only expressed the animal part of the nature by one (or,
+rather, two) definite signs--the two ears, which go up in a little peak,
+not likely to be discovered on slight inspection, and, I suppose, they
+are covered with downy fur. A tail is probably hidden under the garment.
+Only a sculptor of the finest imagination, most delicate taste, and
+sweetest feeling would have dreamed of representing a faun under this
+guise; and, if you brood over it long enough, all the pleasantness of
+sylvan life, and all the genial and happy characteristics of the brute
+creation, seem to be mixed in him with humanity--trees, grass, flowers,
+cattle, deer, and unsophisticated man." This passage shows how much
+my father was wont to trust to first impressions, and even more on the
+moral than on the material side. He recognized a truth in the first
+touch--the first thought--which he was wary of meddling with afterwards,
+contenting himself with slightly developing it now and then, and
+smoothing a little the form and manner of its presentation. The finest
+art is nearest to the most veritable nature--to such as have the eye to
+see the latter aright. Rome, like other ancient cities which have fallen
+from the positive activity of their original estate, has one great
+advantage over other places which one wishes to see (like London, for
+instance), that the whole business of whoever goes there, who has any
+business whatever, is to see it; and when the duty-sights have been
+duly done, the sight-seer then first begins to live his true life in
+independence and happiness, going where he lists, staying no longer than
+he pleases, and never knowing, when he sallies forth in the morning,
+what, or how many, or how few things he will have accomplished by
+nightfall.
+
+The duty to see is indeed the death of real vision; the official
+cicerone leads you anywhere but to the place or thing that you are in
+the mood to behold or understand. But with his disappearance the fun
+and the pageant begin; one's eyes are at last opened, and beauty and
+significance flow in through every pore of the senses. It is in this
+better phase of his Roman sojourn that I picture my father; he trudges
+tranquilly and happily to and fro, with no programme and no obligations,
+absorbing all things with that quiet, omnivorous glance of his; pausing
+whenever he takes the fancy, and contemplating for moments or minutes
+whatever strikes his fancy; often turning aside from egregious
+spectacles and giving his attention to apparent trifles, to the mere
+passing show; pondering on the tuft of flowers in a cranny of the
+Coliseum wall, on the azure silhouette of the Alban Mountains, on the
+moss collected on the pavement beneath the aperture in the roof of the
+Pantheon, on the picturesque deformity of old, begging Beppo on the
+steps of the Piazza, d' Espagna. I am trudging joyously beside
+him, hanging on to his left hand (the other being occupied with his
+hook-headed cane), asking him innumerable questions, to which he
+comfortably, or abstractedly, or with humorous impatience, replies; or
+I run on before him, or lag behind, busy with my endless occupation of
+picking up things to me curious and valuable, and filling with them my
+much-enduring pockets; in this way drinking in Rome in my own way,
+also, and to my boyish advantage. He tells me tales of old Rome, always
+apposite to the occasion; draws from me, sometimes, my private views as
+to persons, places, and scenes, and criticises those views in his own
+terse, arch, pregnant way, the force and pertinency whereof are revealed
+to me only in my later meditations upon them. It is only after one has
+begun to deal in this way with Rome that its magic and spell begin to
+work upon one; and they are never to be shaken off. Anxiety and pain may
+be mingled with them, as was the case with my father before we said
+our final farewell to the mighty city; but it is thereby only the more
+endeared to one. Rome is one of the few central facts of the world,
+because it is so much more than a fact. Byron is right--it is the city
+of the soul.
+
+On one of the last evenings of our first season we went to the
+Thompsons', and were there shown, among other things, a portfolio
+of sketches. There is in The Marble Faun a chapter called "Miriam's
+Studio," in which occurs a reference to a portfolio of sketches by
+Miriam herself; the hint for it may have been taken from the portfolio
+of Mr. Thompson, though the sketches themselves were of a very different
+quality and character. The latter collection pleased me, because I was
+just beginning to fill an album of my own with such lopsided attempts to
+represent real objects, and yet more preposterous imaginative sallies as
+my age and nature suggested. My father was interested in them on account
+of the spiritual vigor which belongs to the artist's first vision of
+his subject. In their case, as well as in his own, he felt that it was
+impossible, as Browning put it, to "recapture that first, fine, careless
+rapture." But the man of letters has an advantage over the man of paint
+and canvas in the matter of being able to preserve the original spirit
+in the later, finished design.
+
+Towards the close of this first season in Rome the Bryants came to town,
+and the old poet, old in aspect even then, called on us; but he was not
+a childly man, and we youngsters stood aloof and contemplated with awe
+his white, Merlin beard and tranquil but chilly eyes. Near the end of
+May William Story invited us to breakfast with him; the Bryants and Miss
+Hosmer and some English people were there; and I understood nothing of
+what passed except the breakfast, which was good, until, at the end of
+the session, my father and Story began to talk about the superstition as
+to Friday, and they agreed that, of course, it was nonsense, but that,
+nevertheless, it did have an influence on both of them. It probably has
+an influence on everybody who has ever heard of it. Many of us protest
+indignantly that we don't believe in it, but the protest itself implies
+something not unlike believing.
+
+Finally, on the 24th of May, we left our Pincian palace, and got into
+and on the huge _vettura_ which was to carry us to Florence, a week's
+journey. It was to be one of the most delightful and blessed of our
+foreign experiences; my father often said that he had enjoyed nothing
+else so much, the vetturino (who happened to be one of the honestest and
+sweetest-tempered old fellows in Italy) taking upon himself the entire
+management of everything, down to ordering the meals and paying the
+tolls, thus leaving us wholly unembarrassed and free from responsibility
+while traversing a route always historically and generally scenically
+charming. But we were destined, on the threshold of the adventure, to
+undergo one of those evil quarters of an hour which often usher in a
+period of special sunshine; for we were forced into a desperate conflict
+with our servant-girl, Lalla, and her mother over a question of wages.
+The girl had done chores for us during our residence at the Palazzo
+Larazani, and had seemed to be a very amiable little personage; she
+was small, slim, and smiling, and, though dirty and inefficient, was no
+worse, so far as we could discover, than any other Roman servant-girl.
+When we had fixed on the date of our departure, Lalla had been asked how
+much warning she wanted; she replied, a fortnight; which, accordingly,
+was given her, with a few days thrown in for good measure. But when the
+day arrived she claimed a week's more pay, and her old mother had a bill
+of her own for fetching water. According to my observation, travelling
+Americans have little or no conscience; to avoid trouble they will
+submit to imposition, not to mention their habit of spoiling tradesmen,
+waiters, and other foreign attendants by excessive tips and payments.
+But my father and mother, though apt enough to make liberal bargains,
+were absolutely incorruptible and immovable when anything like barefaced
+robbery was attempted upon them; and they refused to present Lalla and
+her mother with a single baioccho more than was their due. Moreover, the
+patrone, or proprietor, of the Palazzo had mulcted them some six scudi
+for Lalla's profuse breakages of glass and crockery during our stay.
+
+It was early morning when we set out, and only the faithful Thompsons
+were there to bid us farewell. Lalla and her tribe, however, were
+on hand, and violently demanded the satisfaction of their iniquitous
+claims. "No!" said my father, and "No!" said my mother, like the judges
+of the Medes and Persians. Thereupon the whole House of Lalla, but Lalla
+and her mother especially, gave us an example of what an Italian can do
+in the way of cursing an enemy. Ancient forms of malediction, which had
+been current in the days of the early Roman kings, were mingled with
+every damning invention that had been devised during the Middle Ages,
+and ever since then; and they were all hurled at us in shrill, screaming
+tones, accompanied by fell and ominous gestures and inarticulate yells
+of superheated frenzy. Nothing could surpass the volubility of this
+cursing, unless it were the animosity which prompted it; no crime that
+anybody, since Cain slew Abel, had or could have committed deserved
+a tenth part of the calamities and evil haps which this preposterous
+family called down upon our heads, who had committed no crime at
+all, but quite the contrary. When, in after-years, I heard Booth, as
+Richelieu, threaten "the curse of Rome" upon his opponents, I shuddered,
+wondering whether he had any notion what the threat meant. Through it
+all my mother's ordinarily lovely and peaceful countenance expressed
+a sad but unalterable determination; and my father kept smiling in a
+certain dangerous way that he sometimes had in moments of great peril or
+stress, but said nothing; while Mr. Thompson indignantly called upon
+the cursers to cease and to beware, and my dear friend Eddy looked
+distressed to the verge of tears. He squeezed my hand as I got into the
+_vettura_, and told me not to mind--the Lalla people were wicked,
+and their ill-wishes would return upon their own heads. A handful of
+ten-cent pieces, or their Roman equivalent, would have stopped the whole
+outcry and changed it into blessings; but I think my father would not
+have yielded had the salvation of Rome and of all Italy depended
+upon it. His eyes gleamed, as I have seen them do on one or two other
+occasions only, as we drove away, with the screams pursuing us, and that
+smile still hovered about his mouth. But we drove on; Gaetano cracked
+his long whip, our four steeds picked up their feet and rattled our
+vehicle over the Roman cobble-stones; we passed the Porta del Popolo,
+and were stretching along, under the summer sunshine, upon the white
+road that led to Florence. It was a divine morning; the turmoil and the
+strife were soon forgotten, and for a week thenceforward there was
+only unalloyed felicity before us. Poor, evil-invoking Lalla had passed
+forever out of our sphere.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+     In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-
+     shells--Broad, flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-
+     pipes--Ghostly yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An
+     ideal bust and a living one--The enigma of spiritualism--A
+     difficult combination to overthrow--The dream-child and the
+     Philistine--Dashing and plunging this way and that--Teresa
+     screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly voices--My
+     father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A
+     miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious
+     touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was
+     left--Providence takes very long views.
+
+The railroad which now unites Rome with Florence defrauds travellers
+of some of the most agreeable scenery in Italy, and one of the most
+time-honored experiences; and as for the beggars who infested the route,
+they must long since have perished of inanition--not that they needed
+what travellers gave them in the way of alms, but that, like Othello,
+their occupation being gone, they must cease to exist. Never again could
+they look forward to pestering a tourist; never exhibit a withered arm
+or an artistic ulcer; never mutter anathemas against the obdurate, or
+call down blessings upon the profuse. What was left them in life? And
+what has become of the wayside inns, and what of the vetturinos? A
+man like Gaetano, by himself, was enough to modify radically one's
+conception of the possibilities of the Italian character. In appearance
+he was a strong-bodied Yankee farmer, with the sun-burned, homely,
+kindly, shrewd visage, the blue jumper, the slow, canny ways, the silent
+perception and enjoyment of humorous things, the infrequent but timely
+speech. It was astonishing to hear him speaking Italian out of a mouth
+which seemed formed only to emit a Down-East drawl and to chew tobacco.
+In disposition and character this son of old Rome was, so far as we,
+during our week of constant and intimate association with him, could
+judge, absolutely without fault; he was mild, incorruptible, and placid,
+as careful of us as a father of his children, and he grew as fond of
+us as we were of him, so that the final parting, after the journey was
+done, was really a moving scene. I have found the tribe of cabbies, in
+all countries, to be, as a rule, somewhat cantankerous and sinister;
+but Gaetano compensated for all his horse-driving brethren. To be sure,
+_vettura_ driving is not like cabbing, and Gaetano was in the habit of
+getting out often and walking up the hills, thus exercising his liver.
+But he must have been born with a strong predisposition to goodness,
+which he never outgrew.
+
+Save for a few showers, it was fine weather all the way, and a good part
+of the way was covered on foot by my father and me; for the hills were
+many, and the winding ascents long, and we would alight and leave
+the slow-moving vehicle, with its ponderous freight, behind us, to be
+overtaken perhaps an hour or two later on the levels or declivities.
+Gaetano was a consummate whip, and he carried his team down the descents
+and round the exciting turns at a thrilling pace, while the yards of
+whiplash cracked and detonated overhead like a liliputian thunder-storm.
+On the mountain-tops were romantic villages, surrounding rock-built
+castles which had been robber strongholds centuries before, and we
+traversed peaceful plains which had been the scenes of famous Roman
+battles, and whose brooks had run red with blood before England's
+history began. We paused a day in Perugia, and received the Bronze
+Pontiff's benediction; the silent voices of history were everywhere
+speaking to the spiritual ear. Meanwhile I regarded the trip as being,
+primarily, an opportunity to collect unusual snail-shells; and we passed
+through a region full of natural crystals, some of them of such size as
+to prompt my father to forbid their being added to our luggage. I could
+not understand his insensibility. Could I have had my way, I would have
+loaded a wain with them. I liked the villages and castles, too, and
+the good dinners at the inns, and the sound sleeps in mediaeval beds
+at night; but the crystals and the snail-shells were the true aim and
+sustenance of my life. My mother and sister sketched continually, and
+Miss Shepard was always ready to tell us the story of the historical
+features which we encountered; it astounded me to note how much she knew
+about things which she had never before seen. One afternoon we drove
+down from surrounding heights to Florence, which lay in a golden haze
+characteristic of Italian Junes in this latitude. Powers, the sculptor,
+had promised to engage lodgings for us, but he had not expected us
+so soon, and meanwhile we put up at a hotel near by, and walked out a
+little in the long evening, admiring the broad, flagstone pavements and
+all the minor features which made Florence so unlike Rome. The next day
+began our acquaintance with the Powers family, who, with the Brownings,
+constituted most of the social element of our sojourn. Powers had an
+agreeable wife, two lovely daughters, and a tall son, a few years older
+than I, and a pleasant companion, though he could not take the place of
+Eddy Thompson in my heart. He was clever with his hands, and soon began
+to make fishing-rods for me, having learned of my predilection for the
+sport. There were no opportunities to fish in Florence; but the rods
+which Bob Powers produced were works of art, straight and tapering, and
+made in lengths, which fitted into one another--a refinement which was
+new to me, who had hitherto imagined nothing better than a bamboo pole.
+Bob finally confided to me that he straightened his rods by softening
+the wood in steam; but I found that they did not long retain their
+straightness; and, there being no use for them, except the delight of
+the eye, I presently lost interest in them. Then Bob showed me how to
+make blow-pipes by pushing out the pith from the stems of some species
+of bushy shrub that grew outside the walls. He made pellets of clay from
+his father's studio; and I was deeply affected by the long range and
+accuracy of these weapons. We used to ensconce ourselves behind the
+blinds of the front windows of Powers's house, and practise through the
+slats at the passers-by in the street. They would feel a smart hit and
+look here and there, indignant; but, after a while, seeing nothing
+but the innocent fronts of sleepy houses, would resume their way. Bob
+inherited his handiness from his father, who seemed a master of all
+crafts, a true Yankee genius. He might have made his fortune as an
+inventor had he not happened to turn the main stream of his energy in
+the direction of sculpture. I believe that the literary art was the only
+one in which he did not claim proficiency, and that was a pity, because
+Powers's autobiography would have been a book of books. He was a
+Swedenborgian by faith, but he also dabbled somewhat in spiritualism,
+which was having a vogue at that time, owing partly to the exploits of
+the American medium Home. Marvellous, indeed, were the ghostly yarns
+Powers used to spin, and they lost nothing by the physical appearance of
+the narrator, with his tall figure, square brow, great, black eyes, and
+impressive gestures; his voice, too, was deep and flexible, and could
+sink into the most blood-curdling tones. My recollection is that Powers
+was always clad in a long, linen pinafore, reaching from his chin to his
+feet, and daubed with clay, and on his head a cap made either of paper,
+like a baker's, or, for dress occasions, of black velvet. His homely
+ways and speech, which smacked of the Vermont farm as strongly as if he
+had just come thence, whereas in truth he had lived in Florence, at this
+time, about twenty years, and had won high fame as a sculptor, tempted
+one to suspect him of affectation--of a pose; and there is no doubt that
+Powers was aware of the contrast between his physical presentment and
+his artistic reputation, and felt a sort of dramatic pleasure in it.
+Nevertheless, it would be unjust to call him affected; he was a big man,
+in all senses of the term, and his instinct of independence led him to
+repudiate all external polish and ear-marks of social culture, and to
+say, as it were, "You see, a plain Vermont countryman can live half a
+lifetime in the centre of artificial refinement and rival by the works
+of his native genius the foremost living artists, and yet remain the
+same simple, honest old sixpence that he was at home!" It was certainly
+a more manly and wholesome attitude than that of the ordinary American
+foreign resident, who makes a point of forgetting his native ways and
+point of view, and aping the habits and traits of his alien associates.
+And, besides, Powers had such an immense temperament and individuality
+that very likely he could not have modified them successfully even had
+he been disposed to do so.
+
+[IMAGE: HIRAM POWERS]
+
+His daughters, as I have said, were lovely creatures. Powers was at this
+time modelling an ideal bust of a woman, and one day I went into his
+studio expecting to find Bob there, but the studio was empty but for the
+bust, which I now had an opportunity to contemplate at my ease for the
+first time. I thought it very beautiful, and there was something about
+the face which reminded me of somebody, I could not decide who. Just
+then a portiere in the doorway parted, and in came a living bust, a
+reality in warm flesh and blood, compared with which the ideal seemed
+second-rate. It belonged to one of Powers's daughters, who had come
+for a sitting; she was serving as her father's model. Upon seeing the
+unexpected boy, fixed there in speechless admiration, the young lady
+uttered a scream and vanished. I now knew whom the face of the clay
+effigy reminded me of, and afterwards when I saw beautiful statues I
+thought of her, and shook my head.
+
+My father and Powers took a strong fancy to each other, and met and
+talked a great deal. As I just said now, spiritualism was a fad at that
+time, and Powers was pregnant with marvels which he had either seen
+or heard of, and which he was always ready to attempt to explain on
+philosophical grounds. My father would listen to it all, and both
+believe it and not believe it. He felt, I suppose, that Powers was
+telling the truth, but he was not persuaded that all the truth was in
+Powers's possession, or in any one else's. Powers also had a great deal
+to say concerning the exoteric and esoteric truths of sculpture; his
+racy individuality marked it all. He would not admit that there was any
+limit to what might be done with marble; and when my father asked him
+one day whether he could model a blush on a woman's cheek, he said,
+stoutly, that the thing was possible. My father, as his manner was
+with people, went with the sculptor as far as he chose to carry him,
+accepting all his opinions and judgments, and becoming Powers, so far as
+he might, for the time being, in order the better to get to the root of
+his position. And then, afterwards, he would return to his own self, and
+quietly examine Powers's assertions and theories in the dry light. My
+father was two men, one sympathetic and intuitional, the other critical
+and logical; together they formed a combination which could not be
+thrown off its feet.
+
+We had already met the Brownings in London; but at this period they
+belonged in Italy more than anywhere else, and Florence formed the best
+setting for the authors both of Aurora Leigh and of Sordello. They lived
+in a villa called Casa Guidi, and with them was their son, a boy
+younger than myself, whom they called Pennini, though his real name
+was something much less fastidious. Penni, I believe, used to be an
+assistant of Raphael early in the sixteenth century, and Pennini may
+have been nicknamed after him. His mother, who was an extravagant woman
+on the emotional and spiritual plane, made the poor little boy wear
+his hair curled in long ringlets down his back, and clad him in a fancy
+costume of black velvet, with knickerbockers and black silk stockings;
+he was homely of face, and looked "soft," as normal boys would say. But
+his parents were determined to make an ideal dream-child of him, and, of
+course, he had to submit. I had the contempt for him which a philistine
+boy feels for a creature whom he knows he can lick with one hand tied
+behind his back, and I had nothing whatever to say to him. But Pennini
+was not such a mollycoddle and ass as he looked, and when he grew up he
+gave evidence enough of having a mind and a way of his own. My mother
+took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have
+expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published
+journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity;
+there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark
+eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has
+dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning
+was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and
+that with wonderful impetus and suddenness; he was never still a moment,
+and he talked with extraordinary velocity and zeal. There was a mass
+of wild hair on his head, and he wore bushy whiskers. He appeared very
+different twenty years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's
+death; he was quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed
+beard, and the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman
+of the sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these
+outsides with the poet within--that remarkable imagination, intellect,
+and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the
+century. There was a genial charm in Browning, emphasized, in this
+earlier time, with a bewildering vivacity and an affluence of courtesy.
+In his mature phase he was still courteous and agreeable when he chose
+to be so, but was also occasionally supercilious and repellent, and
+assiduously cultivated smart society. I once asked him, in 1879, why he
+made his poetry so often obscure, and he replied, frankly, that he did
+so because he couldn't help it; the inability to put his thoughts in
+clear phrases had always been a grief to him. This statement was, to me,
+unexpected, and it has a certain importance.
+
+After a few weeks in Casa Bella, opposite Powers's house, Florence grew
+so hot that we were glad of an opportunity to rent the Villa Montauto,
+up on the hill of Bellosguardo, less than a mile beyond the city gate.
+The villa, with two stories and an attic, must have been nearly two
+hundred feet long, and was two or three rooms deep; at the hither end
+rose a tower evidently much older than the house attached to it. Near
+the foot of the tower grew an ancient tree, on a projecting branch of
+which we soon had a swing suspended, and all of us children did some
+very tall swinging. There was a little girl of ten belonging to the
+estate, named Teresa, an amiable, brown-haired, homely little personage.
+We admitted her to our intimacy, and swung her in the swing till she
+screamed for mercy. The road from Florence, after passing our big iron
+gate on the east, continued on westward, beneath the tower and the
+parapet of the grounds; beyond extended the wide valley of the Arno,
+with mountains hemming it in, and to the left of the mountains, every
+evening, Donati's comet shone, with a golden sweep of tail subtending
+twenty degrees along the horizon. The peasant folk regarded it with
+foreboding; and I remember seeing in the book-shops of Rome, before we
+left, pamphlets in both Italian and English, with such titles as "Will
+the great comet, now rapidly approaching, strike the earth?" It did not
+strike the earth, but it afforded us a magnificent spectacle during
+our stay in Montauto, and the next year it was followed by war between
+Austria and France and the evacuation of Venice.
+
+The elevation of Bellosguardo sloped from the villa north and east, and
+this declivity was occupied by a podere of some dozen acres, on which
+grew grape-vines, olive and fig trees. Every morning, about ten o'clock,
+the peasants on the estate would come in loaded with grapes, which they
+piled up on a large table in the reception-hall on the ground floor. We
+ate them by handfuls, but were never able to finish them. Between times
+we would go out among the fruit trees and devour fresh figs, luscious
+with purple pulp. I had three or four rooms to myself at the western
+extremity of the house; they were always cool on the hottest days. There
+I was wont to retire to pursue my literary labors; I was still writing
+works on conchology. My sister Una had rooms on the ground floor,
+adjoining the chapel. They were haunted by the ghost of a nun, and
+several times the candle which she took in there at night was moved by
+invisible hands from its place and set down elsewhere. Ghostly voices
+called to us, and various unaccountable noises were heard now and then,
+both within and without the house; but we children did not mind them,
+not having been bred in the fear of spirits. Indeed, at the instance
+of Mrs. Browning, who was often with us, we held spirit seances,
+Miss Shepard being the medium, though she mildly protested. Long
+communications were written down, but the sceptics were not converted,
+nor were the believers discouraged. "I discern in the alleged
+communications from my wife's mother," wrote my father, "much of her own
+beautiful fancy and many of her preconceived ideas, although thinner
+and weaker than at first hand. They are the echoes of her own voice,
+returning out of the lovely chambers of her heart, and mistaken by her
+for the tones of her mother."
+
+Almost every day some of us made an incursion into Florence. The town
+itself seemed to me more agreeable than Rome; but the Boboli Gardens
+could not rival the Borghese, and the Pitti and Uffizi galleries were
+not so captivating as the Vatican and the Capitol. However, the Cascine
+and the Lung' Arno were delightful, and the Arno, shallow and placid,
+flowing through the midst of the city, was a fairer object than the
+muddy and turbulent Tiber. Men and boys bathed along the banks in the
+afternoons and evenings; and the Ponte Vecchio, crowded with grotesque
+little houses, was a favorite promenade of mine. There was also a large
+marketplace, where the peasant women sold the produce of their farms. My
+insatiable appetite for such things prompted me often to go thither
+and eat everything I had money to buy. One day I consumed so many fresh
+tomatoes that I had a giddiness in the back of my head, and ate no more
+tomatoes for some years. But the place I best liked was the great open
+square of the Palazzo Vecchio, with the statues of David and of Perseus
+under the Loggia dei Lanzi, a retreat from sun and rain; and the Duomo
+and Giotto's Campanile, hard by. The pavements of Florence, smooth as
+the surface of stone canals, were most soothing and comfortable after
+the relentless, sharp cobble-stones of Rome; the low houses that
+bordered them seemed to slumber in the hot, still sunshine. What a
+sunshine was that! Not fierce and feverish, as in the tropics, but soft
+and intense and white. Who would not live in Florence if he could? I
+think my father would have settled there but for his children, to whom
+he wished to give an American education. The thought was often in his
+mind; and he perhaps cherished some hope of returning thither later
+in life, and letting old age steal gently upon him and his wife in
+the delicious city. But the Celestial City was nearer to him than he
+suspected.
+
+There was a magical old man in Florence named Kirkup, an Englishman,
+though he had dwelt abroad so many years that he seemed more Florentine
+than the Florentines themselves. He had known, in his youth, Byron,
+Shelley, Hunt, and Edward Trelawney. After that famous group was
+disparted, Kirkup, having an income sufficient for his needs, came to
+Florence and settled there. He took to antiquarianism, which is a sort
+of philtre, driving its votaries mildly insane, and filling them
+with emotions which, on the whole, are probably more often happy than
+grievous. But Kirkup, in the course of his researches into the past,
+came upon the books of the necromancers, and bought and studied them,
+and began to practise their spells and conjurations; and by-and-by,
+being a great admirer and student of Dante, that poet manifested himself
+to him in his lonely vigils and told him many unknown facts about his
+career on earth, and incidentally revealed to him the whereabouts of the
+now-familiar fresco of Dante on the wall of the Bargello Chapel, where
+it had been hidden for ages beneath a coat of whitewash. In these occult
+researches, Kirkup, of course, had need of a medium, and he found among
+the Florentine peasants a young girl, radiantly beautiful, who possessed
+an extraordinary susceptibility to spiritual influences. Through her
+means he conversed with the renowned dead men of the past times. But one
+day Regina (such was the girl's name), much to the old man's surprise,
+gave birth to a child. She herself died, in Kirkup's house, soon after,
+and on her death-bed she swore a solemn oath on the crucifix that the
+baby's father was none other than Kirkup himself. The poor old gentleman
+had grown so accustomed to believing in miracles that he made little ado
+about accepting this one also; he received the child as his daughter,
+and made provision for her in his will. No one had the heart or thought
+it worth while to enlighten him as to certain facts which might have
+altered his attitude; but it was well known that Regina had a lover, a
+handsome young Italian peasant, much more capable of begetting children
+than of taking care of them afterwards.
+
+These interesting circumstances I did not learn until long after
+Florence had receded into the distance in my memory. But one afternoon,
+with my father and mother, I entered the door of a queer old house close
+to the Ponte Vecchio; I was told that it had formerly been a palace of
+the Knights Templars. We ascended a very darksome flight of stairs, and
+a door was opened by a strange little man. He may have been, at that
+time, some seventy years my senior, but he was little above my height;
+he had long, soft, white hair and a flowing white beard; his features
+bore a resemblance to those of Bulwer Lytton, only Bulwer never lived to
+anything like Mr. Kirkup's age. Old as he was, our host was very brisk
+and polite, and did the honors of his suite of large rooms with much
+grace and fantastic hospitality. Dancing about him, and making friends
+freely with us all meanwhile, was the little girl, Imogen by name, who
+was accredited as the octogenarian's offspring. She was some four or
+five years of age, but intellectually precocious, though a complete
+child, too. Mr. Kirkup said that she, like her beautiful mother, was a
+powerful medium, and that he often used to communicate through her with
+her mother, who would seem to have kept her secret even after death. The
+house was stuffed full of curiosities, but was very dirty and cobwebby;
+the pictures and the books looked much in need of a caretaker. The
+little child frolicked and flitted about the dusky apartments, or seated
+herself like a butterfly on the great tomes of magic that were piled in
+corners. Nothing could be stronger or stranger than the contrast between
+her and this environment. My father wrote it all down in his journal,
+and it evidently impressed his imagination; and she and Kirkup
+himself--_mutatis mutandis_--appear in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and
+again, in a somewhat different form, in The Dolliver Romance. There
+was even a Persian kitten, too, to bear little Imogen company. But no
+fiction could surpass the singularity of this withered old magician
+living with the pale, tiny sprite of a child of mysterious birth in the
+ghost-haunted rooms of the ancient palace.
+
+It seemed as if the world of the occult were making a determined attack
+upon us during this Florentine sojourn; whichever way we turned we came
+in contact with something mysterious. In one of my father's unpublished
+diaries he writes, in reference to the stories with which he was being
+regaled by Powers, the Brownings, and others, that he was reminded "of
+an incident that took place at the old manse, in the first summer of our
+marriage. One night, about eleven o'clock, before either my wife or
+I had fallen asleep (we had been talking together just before), she
+suddenly asked me why I had touched her shoulder? The next instant she
+had a sense that the touch was not mine, but that of some third presence
+in the chamber. She clung to me in great affright, but I got out of
+bed and searched the chamber and adjacent entry, and, finding nothing,
+concluded that the touch was a fancied one. My wife, however, has never
+varied in her belief that the incident was supernatural and connected
+with the apparition of old Dr. Harris, who used to show himself to
+me daily in the reading-room of the Boston Athenaeum. I am still
+incredulous both as to the doctor's identity and as to the reality of
+the mysterious touch. That same summer of our honeymoon, too, George
+Hillard and his wife were sitting with us in our parlor, when a rustling
+as of a silken robe passed from corner to corner of the room, right
+among my wife and the two guests, and was heard, I think, by all three.
+Mrs. Hillard, I remember, was greatly startled. As for myself, I was
+reclining on the sofa at a little distance, and neither heard the rustle
+nor believed it."
+
+Nevertheless, such things affect one in a degree. Here is a straw to
+show which way the wind of doctrine was blowing with my father: We were
+in Siena immediately after the date of our Florentine residence, and
+he and I, leaving the rest of the family at our hotel, sallied forth in
+quest of adventures. "We went to the cathedral," he writes, "and while
+standing near the entrance, or about midway in the nave, we saw a female
+figure approaching through the dimness and distance, far away in the
+region of the high altar; as it drew nearer its air reminded me of Una,
+whom we had left at home. Finally, it came close to us, and proved to
+be Una herself; she had come, immediately after we left the hotel, with
+Miss Shepard, and was looking for objects to sketch. It is an empty
+thing to write down, but the surprise made the incident stand out very
+vividly." Una was to pass near the gates of the next world a little
+while later, and doubtless my father often during that dark period
+pictured her to himself as a spirit. To make an end of this subject, I
+will quote here my father's account of a story told him by Mrs. Story
+when we were living in Rome for the second time. The incident of the
+woman's face at the carriage window reappears in The Marble Faun.
+"She told it," he says, "on the authority of Mrs. Gaskell, to whom the
+personages were known. A lady, recently married, was observed to be in a
+melancholy frame of mind, and fell into a bad state of health. She told
+her husband that she was haunted with the constant vision of a certain
+face, which affected her with an indescribable horror, and was the cause
+of her melancholy and illness. The physician prescribed travel, and they
+went first to Paris, where the lady's spirits grew somewhat better, and
+the vision haunted her less constantly. They purposed going to Italy,
+and before their departure from Paris a letter of introduction was given
+them by a friend, directed to a person in Rome. On their arrival in Rome
+the letter was delivered; the person called, and in his face the lady
+recognized the precise reality of her vision. By-the-bye, I think the
+lady saw this face in the streets of Rome before the introduction took
+place. The end of the story is that the husband was almost immediately
+recalled to England by an urgent summons; the wife disappeared that very
+night, and was recognized driving out of Rome, in a carriage, in tears,
+and accompanied by the visionary unknown. It is a very foolish story,
+but told as truth. Mrs. Story also said that in an Etruscan tomb, on the
+Barberini estate, the form and impression, in dust, of a female figure
+were discovered. Not even a bone of her was left; but where her neck had
+been there lay a magnificent necklace, all of gold and of the richest
+workmanship. The necklace, just as it was found (except, I suppose,
+for a little furbishing), is now worn by the Princess Barberini as her
+richest adornment. Mrs. Story herself had on a bracelet composed, I
+think, of seven ancient Etruscan scorabei in carnelian, every one of
+which has been taken from a separate tomb, and on one side of each was
+engraved the signet of the person to whom it had belonged and who
+had carried it to the grave with him. This bracelet would make a good
+connecting link for a series of Etruscan tales, the more fantastic the
+better!"
+
+On the first day of October, 1859, we left Florence by railway for Siena
+on our way back to Rome. There had been no drawbacks to our enjoyment of
+the city and of our villa and of the people we had met. We departed with
+regret; had we stayed on there, instead, and not again attempted the
+fatal air of the Seven Hills, our after chronicles might have been
+very different. But we walk over precipices with our eyes open, or pass
+safely along their verge in the dark, and only the Power who made us
+knows why. Providence takes very long views.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+     Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle
+     creature--The most beautiful woman in the world--Better
+     friends than ever--A shadow brooded--Boys are whole-souled
+     creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon,
+     Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New
+     England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of
+     mishaps--My father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the
+     fourth, death--Havre, Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool.
+
+Siena is distant from Florence, in a direct line, not more than fifty
+miles, but the railway turns the western flank of the mountains, and
+kept us full three hours on the trip. I had long been familiar with a
+paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested
+to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena
+stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed
+the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I
+thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my
+lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not
+so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less
+attractive in themselves than either the Roman or the Florentine ones.
+The shells were personally ugly, but they were shells, and fossils into
+the bargain, and they sufficed for my happiness.
+
+The Storys had a villa in Siena, and my father certainly had in the back
+part of his mind an idea of settling there, or elsewhere in Italy, now
+or later; but after ten days we were on our travels again. There were
+no ruins to be seen, that I remember, but many churches and frescoes and
+old oil-paintings, which I regarded with indifference. Mediaeval remains
+did not attract me like classic ones. It was here that Story drew the
+caricatures which I have already spoken of, and from the windows of the
+room, as the twilight fell, we could see the great comet, then in its
+apogee of brilliance. Where will the world be when it comes again? We
+had rooms at the Aquila Nera, looking out on the venerable, gray Palazzo
+Tolomei. The narrow streets were full of people; the steepness and
+irregularity of the thoroughfares of the city produced a feeling of
+energy and activity in the midst of the ancient historic peace. Siena
+is, I believe, built about the crater of an extinct volcano. The old
+brick wall of the city was still extant, running up hill and down,
+and confining the rusty heaps of houses within its belt. There were
+projecting balconies, crumbling with age, and irregular arcades,
+resembling tunnels hewn out of the solid rock. From the windows of
+our sitting-room in the hotel we commanded the piazza, in front of the
+Palazzo Tolomei, with a pillar in the midst of it, on which was a group
+of Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, the tradition of the city
+being that it was founded during the epoch of the Roman kings. My mother
+made a sketch of this monument in her little sketch-book, and my father,
+according to a common custom of his, sat for an hour at the window
+one day and made a note of every person who passed through the little
+square, thus getting an idea of the character of the local population
+not otherwise obtainable. I can imagine that, were one born in Siena,
+one might conceive an ardent affection for it; but, in spite of its
+picturesqueness, it never touched my heart like Rome or Florence, or
+even London or Paris. I left it without regret, but with specimens of
+its fossils in my pockets.
+
+It often happens with miracles that they occur in doubles or trebles, in
+order, I suppose, to suggest to us that they may be simply instances
+of an undiscovered law. Gaetano was a miracle, and he was followed by
+Constantino, who, though of an altogether different human type, was
+of no less sweet and shining a nature than the other. He was a grand,
+noble, gentle creature, and my mother soon dubbed him "The Emperor,"
+though it may be doubted whether the original emperor of that name was
+as good a man as ours; he was certainly not nearly so good-looking. He
+was only the driver of our _vettura_ from Siena to Rome, but there was
+a princely munificence in his treatment of us that made us feel his
+debtors in an indefinitely greater sum than that which technically
+discharged our obligations. He was massive, quiescent, oxlike, with
+great, slow-moving, black eyes. He had the air of extending to us the
+hospitalities of Italy, and our journey assumed the character of a royal
+progress. He was especially devoted to my small sister Rose, and often,
+going up the hills, he would have her beside him on foot, one of his
+great hands clasping hers, while with the other he wielded the long whip
+that encouraged the horses. His garments were of the humblest fashion,
+but he so wore them as to make them seem imperial robes. My mother
+caught an excellent likeness of him as he sat before her on the driver's
+seat. The second trip was as enjoyable as the first, though it was two
+or three days shorter. The route was west of our former one, passing
+through Radicofani, incrusted round its hill-top; and Bolsena, climbing
+backward from the poisonous shore of its beautiful lake; and Viterbo,
+ugly and beggar-ridden, though famous forever on account of the war for
+Galiana waged between Viterbo and Rome. In the front of an old church in
+the town I saw the carved side of her sarcophagus, incorporate with the
+wall. She was the most beautiful woman in the world in her day, and in
+the fight for the possession of her her townsmen overcame the Romans,
+but the latter were permitted, as a salve for their defeat, to have one
+final glimpse of Galiana as they marched homeward without her. From
+a window in a tower of one of the gates of the city, therefore, her
+heavenly face looked forth and shed a farewell gleam over the dusty,
+defeated ranks of Rome as they filed past, up-looking. The tale is as
+old as the incident itself, but I always love to recall it; there is in
+it something that touches the soul more inwardly than even the legend of
+Grecian Helen.
+
+By the middle of October we were back again in Rome, and though we were
+now in new lodgings, the feeling was that of getting home after travels.
+The weather was fine, and we revisited the familiar ruins and gardens,
+and renewed our acquaintance with our favorite statues and pictures with
+fresh enjoyment. Eddy Thompson and I found each other better
+friends than ever--we had written each other laborious but sincerely
+affectionate letters during our separation--and he and I, with one or
+more favored companions sometimes, perambulated Rome incessantly, and
+felt that the world had begun again. But by the 1st of November there
+came to pass an untoward change, and our rejoicing was changed to
+lamentation. First, my father himself had a touch of malaria, which
+clouded his view of all outward things; and then my sister Una,
+disregarding the law which provides that all persons must be in-doors
+in Rome by six o'clock in the evening, caught the veritable Roman fever,
+and during four months thereafter a shadow brooded over our snug little
+lodgings in the Piazza, Poli. "It is not a severe attack," my father
+wrote at the beginning, "yet it is attended by fits of exceeding
+discomfort, occasional comatoseness, and even delirium to the extent
+of making the poor child talk in rhythmic measure, like a tragic
+heroine--as if the fever lifted her feet off the earth; the fever being
+seldom dangerous, but is liable to recur on slight occasion hereafter."
+But, as it turned out, Una's attack was of the worst kind, and she
+sank and sank, till it seemed at last as if she must vanish from us
+altogether. Eddy and I held melancholy consultations together, for Eddy,
+besides being my special crony and confidant, had allowed himself to
+conceive a heroic and transcendental passion for my sister--one of the
+antique, Spenserian sort--and his concern for her condition was only
+less than mine. So we went about with solemn faces, comforting each
+other as best we might. I remember, when the crisis of the fever
+was reached, taking him into a room and closing the door, and there
+imparting to him the news that Una might not recover. We stared drearily
+into each other's faces, and felt that the world would never again be
+bright for us. Boys are whole-souled creatures; they feel one thing at a
+time, and feel it with their might.
+
+However, Una safely passed her crisis, thanks mainly to the wonderful
+nursing of her mother, and by carnival-time was able to be out again and
+to get her share of sugar-plums and flowers. But my mother was exhausted
+by her ceaseless vigils in the sick-room, and my father, as I have
+before intimated, never recovered from the long-drawn fear; it sapped
+his energies at the root, and the continued infirmity of Una's health
+prevented what chance there might have been of his recuperation. Yet for
+the moment he could find fun and pleasure in the carnival, and he felt
+as never before the searching beauty of the Borghese, the Pincian, and
+the galleries. He was also comforted by the companionship of his friend
+Franklin Pierce, who, his Presidential term over, had come to Europe to
+get the scent of Washington out of his garments. There was a winning,
+irresistible magnetism in the presence of this man. Except my father,
+there was no man in whose company I liked to be so much as in his. I
+had little to say to him, and demanded nothing more than a silent
+recognition from him; but his voice, his look, his gestures, his gait,
+the spiritual sphere of him, were delightful to me; and I suspect that
+his rise to the highest office in our nation was due quite as much to
+this power or quality in him as to any intellectual or even executive
+ability that he may have possessed. He was a good, conscientious,
+patriotic, strong man, and gentle and tender as a woman. He had the
+old-fashioned ways, the courtesy, and the personal dignity which are
+not often seen nowadays. His physical frame was immensely powerful and
+athletic; but life used him hard, and he was far from considerate of
+himself, and he died at sixty-five, when he might, under more favorable
+conditions, have rounded out his century.
+
+My father had written nothing, not even his journal, during the period
+of Una's illness; but he began to work again now, being moved thereto
+not only as a man whose nature is spontaneously impelled to express
+itself on the imaginative side, but also in order to recoup himself for
+some part of the loss of the ten thousand dollars which he had loaned to
+John O'Sullivan, which, it was now evident, could never be repaid.
+His first conception of the story of The Marble Faun had been as a
+novelette; but he now decided to expand it so as to contain a large
+amount of descriptive matter; and although the strict rules of artistic
+construction may have been somewhat relaxed in order to admit these
+passages, there is no doubt that the book gained thereby in value as a
+permanent addition to literature, the plot, powerful though it is, being
+of importance secondary to the creation of an atmosphere which
+should soften the outlines and remove the whole theme into a suitable
+remoteness from the domain of matter-of-fact. The Eternal City is, after
+all, as vital a portion of the story as are the adventures of Miriam,
+Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello. They could not have existed and played
+their parts in any other city of the world.
+
+In selecting local habitations for the creatures of his imagination, he
+strolled into the Via Portoghese, and there found the "Virgin's Shrine,"
+which, with minor modifications, was to become the home of Hilda. I
+quote from his journal the description of the actual place as he saw
+it. "The tower in the Via Portoghese," he says, "has battlements
+and machicolations, and the upper half of it is covered with gray,
+ancient-looking stucco. On the summit, at one corner, is the shrine of
+the Virgin, rising quite above the battlements, and with its lamp before
+it. Beneath the machicolations is a window, probably belonging to the
+upper chamber; and there seems to be a level space on the top of the
+tower. Close at hand is the facade of a church, the highest pinnacle of
+which appears to be at about the same level as the battlements of
+the tower, and there are two or more stone figures (either angels or
+allegorical) ornamenting the top of the facade, and, I think, blowing
+trumpets. These personages are the nearest neighbors of any person
+inhabiting the upper story of the tower, and the sound of their angelic
+trumpets must needs be very loud in that close vicinity: The lower story
+of the palace extends out and round the lower part of the tower, and
+is surrounded by a stone balustrade. The entrance from the street is
+through a long, arched doorway and passage, giving admittance into a
+small, enclosed court; and deep within the passage there is a very broad
+staircase, which branches off, apparently, on one side, and leads to the
+height of the tower. At the base of the tower, and along the front of
+the palace, the street widens, so as to form something like a small
+piazza, in which there are two or three bakers' shops, one or two
+shoe-shops, a lottery-office, and, at one corner, the stand of a woman
+who sells, I think, vegetables; a little further, a stand of oranges.
+Not so many doors from the palace entrance there is a station of French
+soldiers and a sentinel on duty. The palace, judging from the broad
+staircase, the balustraded platform, the tower itself, and other tokens,
+may have been a grand one centuries ago; but the locality is now a
+poor one, and the edifice itself seems to have fallen to unaristocratic
+occupants. A man was cleaning a carriage in the enclosed court-yard,
+but I rather conceive it was a cab for hire, and not the equipage of a
+dweller in the palace."
+
+John Lothrop Motley, the historian of the Netherlands, had come to Rome
+this winter and brought his family with him. I believe my father had met
+Motley in America; at all events, we saw a good deal of him now. He
+was an exceedingly handsome man, not only on account of the beauty
+of physical features which marked him, but in the sensitiveness and
+vividness of expression which constantly illuminated them. He was at
+this time about five-and-forty years of age, and lacked a couple of
+inches of six feet in height. His hair, a dark, chestnut brown, had the
+hyacinthine wave through it, and was slightly streaked with gray;
+his beard, which was full and rather short, was likewise wavy; he was
+quietly and harmoniously dressed, but the artistic temperament declared
+itself in a touch of color in his cravat. His voice was melodious and
+finely modulated; his bearing gravely cheerful and very courteous. No
+type of man finer than Motley's has existed in modern times; all the
+elements of the best and purest society were illustrated in him. He had
+the depth of the scholar, the breadth and self-poise of the man of the
+world, the genial warmth of the human fellow-creature, and, over all,
+the harmonizing, individualizing charm of the artist. When New England
+gathers her resources to make a man she achieves a result hardly to be
+surpassed.
+
+The Storys were also in Rome during these last months of our stay, and
+Miss Mitchell, I think, still lingered in her little lodgings in the Via
+Bocca di Leone. Miss Cushman likewise reappeared for a time, with all
+her former greatness and fascination, and many other friends, new and
+old, made that spring season memorable. As the moment for our departure
+drew near, the magical allurement of Rome laid upon us a grasp more
+than ever potent; it was impossible to realize that we were leaving it
+forever. On the last evening we walked in the moonlight to the fountain
+of Trevi, near our lodgings, and drank of the water--a ceremony which,
+according to tradition, insures the return of the drinker. It was the
+25th of May, forty-four years ago. None of us has gone back since then,
+and, of the five who drank, three have passed to the country whence
+no traveller returns. For my own part, as a patriotic American nearly
+thirteen years old, I had no wish ever again to see Rome, and declared
+myself glad to turn my back upon it, not that I had any fault to find
+with it--I had always had a good time there--but my imagination was full
+of my native land, with which nothing else could be comparable. I did
+not learn of the fabled spell of Trevi until afterwards; then I scoffed
+at and defied it, and possibly Rome may have decided that it could do
+without me.
+
+The railway to Civita Vecchia had just been completed, and we passed
+swiftly over the route which had been so full of dangers and discomforts
+eighteen months before. Embarking on the steamer for Marseilles, we kept
+on thence to Avignon, where we spent about a week. This venerable
+town had few attractions for me; I did not much care for the
+fourteenth-century popes, nor for the eighteenth-century silks, nor even
+for Petrarch and Laura; and the architecture of the palace, after I had
+tried to sketch it, ceased to exhilarate me. My father was in no mood
+for sight-seeing, either, but he went through it all conscientiously. My
+mother, of course, enjoyed herself, but she met with an accident. While
+sketching some figures of saints and monsters that adorned the arch of
+the northern portal of the palace, she made an incautious movement and
+sprained her ankle. The pain was excessive for the moment, but it soon
+passed off, so as to enable her to limp back to our hotel. But the next
+day the pain was worse; my father had a headache, a rare affliction with
+him; I had caught a bad cold from swimming in the arrowy Rhone, and Una
+and Miss Shepard were both in a state of exhaustion from sight-seeing;
+and in this condition the journey to Geneva had to be made. We had
+intended to remain there but a day, but we stayed longer, breathing the
+pure air from the Alps, and feeling better as we breathed. I stood on
+a bridge and looked down at that wonderful azure water rushing into the
+lovely lake; I looked up and beheld those glorious mountains soaring
+into the sky, and I forgot Rome and Florence, and almost America, in my
+joy. Everything that life needs for life seemed present there.
+
+We got into a little steamer and made the trip up the lake, the
+mountains all about us. Up to this time I had imagined that the
+acclivities in the north of England and in Scotland were mountains. We
+sat on deck, in the stern of the steamer, my father gazing out and up
+from beneath the rim of his soft felt hat, with his dark cloak over his
+shoulders. He looked revived and vigorous again. Shortly before we left
+Rome he had ceased to shave his upper lip, for what reason I know not;
+I think it was simply indisposition to take that trouble any longer. My
+mother had at first gently protested; she did not want his upper lip and
+mouth to be hidden. But as the brown mustache, thick and soldier-like,
+appeared, she became reconciled, and he wore it to the end of his life.
+"Field-Marshal Hawthorne" James T. Fields used to call him after we got
+home. Owing to the preponderance of expression of the upper part of his
+head, the addition did not change his look as much as might have been
+expected; we soon got used to it, and, inasmuch as all his photographs
+were taken after the mustache was established, the world does not know
+him otherwise.
+
+The view became more and more enchanting as we penetrated farther into
+the depths of the embrace of the mountains, and at last, at its most
+ravishing point, the lake ceased, and the lonely little pile of dingy
+white masonry, which is Chillon, appeared. Few works of man have a
+more romantic interest than this castle; but, seen from the lake, its
+environment was too much for it. Had it plunged downward into the smooth
+waters and vanished, its absence would not have been marked in that
+stupendous landscape. But it improved greatly upon closer acquaintance;
+and when we stood in its vaults, and saw the pillar to which the
+prisoner was chained, and the hole in the floor, with its three steps of
+stone, and the fourth of death, we felt that Chillon was not unequal to
+its reputation.
+
+After leaving Chillon and Geneva our faces were turned homeward, and we
+hastened our steps. My father wrote to England to engage our passage for
+the first of August. We were now at midsummer. We returned to Paris, and
+after a few days there proceeded to Havre, in order to see Ada Shepard
+safe on board her steamer for home; her Wanderjahre was over, and
+she was now to be married to Henry Clay Badger. We were sorry to say
+good-bye to her; she had been a faithful and valuable element in our
+household, and she had become a dear friend and comrade. She stood
+waving her handkerchief to us as her steamer slipped away down the
+harbor. She, too, was sorry for the parting. She once had said to me: "I
+think your father is the wisest man I ever knew; he does not seem ever
+to say much, but what he does say is always the truest and best thing
+that could be said."
+
+From Havre we crossed the Channel to Southampton, and were soon in
+London. Boston and Concord were only six weeks distant. Such, at any
+rate, had been the original design. But after we reached London
+the subject of the English copyright of The Marble Faun came up for
+discussion. Henry Bright introduced Mr. Smith, of the firm of Smith,
+Elder & Company, who made such proposals for the English publication
+of the book as were not to be disregarded; but, in order to make them
+available, it was necessary that the manuscript should be completed in
+England. Nothing but the short sketch of it was as yet in existence; it
+could not be written in much less than a year; either the English
+offer must be rejected, or we must stay out that year in her Majesty's
+dominions. My father decided, not altogether unwillingly, perhaps, to
+stay. He had written in his journal a few weeks before: "Bennoch and
+Henry Bright are the only two men in England to whom I shall be much
+grieved to say farewell; but to the island itself I cannot bear to say
+that word as a finality. I shall dreamily hope to come back again at
+some indefinite time, rather foolishly, perhaps, for it will tend to
+take the substance out of my life in my own land. But this, I suspect,
+is apt to be the penalty of those who stay abroad and stay too long."
+
+But my father could not write in London, and, casting about for a
+fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up
+on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby,
+where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean
+tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene
+with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no
+doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there
+he wrote and wrote; and he walked far along the sands, with his boy
+dogging his steps and stopping for shells and crabs; and at a certain
+point of the beach, where the waves ran over a bar and formed a lake a
+few feet in depth, he would seat himself on a tussock of sand-grass,
+and I would undress and run into the cold water and continue my
+swimming-lessons, which had been begun in Stockbridge Bowl, continued in
+Lake Leman, and were now brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Both my
+feet were finally off the bottom, and I felt the wonderful sensation of
+the first cousin to flying. While I floundered there my father looked
+off towards the gray horizon, and saw the visions of Hilda, Miriam,
+Kenyon, and Donatello which the world of readers was presently to behold
+through his eyes. As we walked home in the twilight, the dull-red glow
+of the sunset would throw the outlines of the town into dark shadows,
+and shed a faint light on the surf roaming in from the east. I found,
+in my old album, the black silhouette of the scene which I made one day.
+The arms of an old mill are flung appealingly upward, the highest object
+of the landscape, above the irregular sky-line of the clustering houses.
+There is also, on the next page, a water-color drawing of a sailor in a
+blue jersey and a sou'wester, standing, with his hands in his pockets,
+on the beach beside one of the boats of the region--a slender,
+clipper-built craft, painted yellow below and black above, good for oars
+or sail. Her bow rests on a shaft connecting two wheels, for convenience
+of running her down into the water. There was a dozen or more of these
+boats always ready on the beach in front of our lodgings. These lodgings
+were just back of the esplanade, which, during our sojourn, was treated
+to a coat of tar from end to end--a delightful entertainment for us
+children--and I have loved the smell of tar ever since. There is little
+else that I remember about Redcar, except that, in the winter, there
+was skating on a part of the beach; but it was "salt ice," and not to be
+compared with the skating I was to enjoy a year or two later in Concord,
+which I shall describe if ever I come to that epoch in my narrative.
+
+
+From Redcar, with the romance more than half done, we went south to our
+old Leamington, which seemed half like home; and there the loveliness of
+an English spring at its best came to greet us, and there the book was
+finished, and sent to the printer. We spent a month or two at Bath, and
+found it very pleasant; my father rested from his labors, except the
+proof-reading; and I was instructed in the use of the broadsword by an
+old Peninsular officer, Major Johnstone, who had fought at Waterloo,
+and had the bearing of such majors as Thackeray puts into Vanity Fair. I
+once asked him whether he had ever killed a man; it was on the day when
+he first allowed me to use a real broadsword in our lesson. "Well,"
+replied the major, hesitatingly, "I was riding in a charge, and there
+came a fellow at me, with his sword up, and made a swing for my head. I
+dodged, and his blade just grazed me; but I let him have it, downright,
+at the same moment, and I caught him where the neck joins the shoulder,
+and he went down, and I went on, and what became of him I don't know; I
+hope nothing serious!" The major sighed and looked serious himself. "And
+was this the sword?" I demanded, balancing the heavy weapon in my hand.
+"No--no--it wasn't that one," said the major, hastily. "I've never used
+the other since! Now, then, sir, if you please, on guard!"
+
+We went to London, and there were our old friends Bright and Bennoch,
+and the Motleys appeared from Italy, and a book called (by the
+publishers) Transformation came out in three volumes, being the latest
+romance by the author of The Scarlet Letter. The title was not bestowed
+with my father's consent. He had, at the publishers' request, sent them
+a list of several titles, beginning with The Marble Faun, and among
+others on the list was "The Faun's Transformation." The publishers took
+the "Transformation," and left out "The Faun." My father laughed, but
+let it go. The book was to come out under its proper title in America,
+and he was indifferent as to what they called it in England.
+
+The end of our tarrying in the Old World was now at hand. Seven years
+had we lived there, and we were eager and yet loath to go. My father's
+friends gathered about him, men who had hardly so much as heard his name
+a little while ago, but who now loved him as a brother. For a few days
+Mrs. Blodgett's hospitable face glowed upon us once more, and pale Miss
+Williams, and trig little Miss Maria, and many of the old captains
+whom we had known. It was the middle of June, and the sun shone even in
+Liverpool. Our red-funnelled steamer lay at her moorings in the yellow
+Mersey, with her steam up. It was not The Niagara, but on her bridge
+stood our handsome little Captain Leitch, with his black whiskers,
+smiling at us in friendly greeting. How much had passed since we had
+seen him last! How much were we changed! What experiences lay behind us!
+What memories would abide with us always! My father leaned on the rail
+and looked across the river at the dingy, brick building, near the
+wharves, where he had spent four wearisome but pregnant years. The big,
+black steamer, with her little, puffing tug, slipped her moorings, and
+slid slowly down the stream. After a few miles the hue of the water
+became less turbid, the engines worked more rapidly and regularly.
+Liverpool was now a smoky mass off our starboard quarter. It sank and
+dwindled, till the smoke alone was left; the blue channel spread around
+us; we were at sea, and home lay yonder, across three thousand miles
+of tumbling waves. But my father still leaned on the rail, and looked
+backward towards the old home that he loved and would never see again.
+It was the hour for good-bye; there would come another hour for the
+other home and for welcome.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Hawthorne and His Circle, by Julian Hawthorne
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