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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hawthorne and His Circle, by Julian Hawthorne
+
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+Title: Hawthorne and His Circle
+
+Author: Julian Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6982]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 19, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE ***
+
+
+
+
+
+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 assthetic 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 l850--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 l850--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 l9th 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 feelng 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, joiliest, 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 arid 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 carne 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; bat 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 Cassar, 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 mediseval 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 ist
+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 fagade, 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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