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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old
+Manse"), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Posting Date: December 8, 2010 [EBook #9221]
+Release Date: November, 2005
+First Posted: September 6, 2003
+Last Updated: February 6, 2007
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MANSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                          THE OLD MANSE.
+
+
+      The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.
+
+
+Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself
+having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the
+gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of
+black-ash trees.  It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral
+procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned
+from that gateway towards the village burying-ground.  The wheel-track
+leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was
+almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or
+three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to
+pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half
+asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a
+kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite
+the aspect of belonging to the material world.  Certainly it had
+little in common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent
+upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were,
+into the domestic circle.  From these quiet windows the figures of
+passing travellers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of
+privacy.  In its near retirement and accessible seclusion, it was the
+very spot for the residence of a clergyman,--a man not estranged from
+human life, yet enveloped, in the midst of it, with a veil woven of
+intermingled gloom and brightness.  It was worthy to have been one of
+the time-honored parsonages of England, in which, through many
+generations, a succession of holy occupants pass from youth to age,
+and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and
+hover over it as with an atmosphere.
+
+Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
+until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home.  A
+priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
+from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
+had grown up to assume the priestly character.  It was awful to
+reflect how many sermons must have been written there.  The latest
+inhabitant alone--he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was
+left vacant--had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the
+better, if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips.
+How often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue,
+attuning his meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and
+solemn peals of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees!  In that
+variety of natural utterances he could find something accordant with
+every passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential
+fear.  The boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as
+well as with rustling leaves.  I took shame to myself for having been
+so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom
+would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that
+I should light upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well
+worth those hoards of long-hidden gold which people seek for in
+moss-grown houses. Profound treatises of morality; a layman's
+unprofessional, and therefore unprejudiced, views of religion;
+histories (such as Bancroft might have written had he taken up his
+abode here, as he once purposed) bright with picture, gleaming over a
+depth of philosophic thought,--these were the works that might fitly
+have flowed from such a retirement.  In the humblest event, I resolved
+at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and
+should possess physical substance enough to stand alone.
+
+In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
+fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful
+little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a
+scholar.  It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an
+inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and
+Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill.  When
+I first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of
+unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan
+ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad
+angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so
+sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been
+imparted to their own visages.  They had all vanished now; a cheerful
+coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
+apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the
+overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine.  In place of
+the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of
+Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of
+Como.  The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers,
+always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns.  My books
+(few, and by no means choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as
+chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about the room, seldom to
+be disturbed.
+
+The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
+glass, each with a crack across it.  The two on the western side
+looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the
+orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third,
+facing northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot
+where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of
+history.  It was at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in
+the Manse stood watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle
+between two nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on
+the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British
+on the hither bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of
+the musketry. It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the
+battle-smoke around this quiet house.
+
+Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
+Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of
+sight-showing,--perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the
+memorable spot. We stand now on the river's brink.  It may well be called
+the Concord,--the river of peace and quietness; for it is certainly the
+most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly
+towards its eternity,--the sea. Positively I had lived three weeks
+beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the
+current flowed.  It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
+northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day.  From the
+incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
+becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
+wild, free mountain torrent.  While all things else are compelled to
+subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
+liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even water-power
+enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks.  The torpor
+of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much
+as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course.  It
+slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
+bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the
+roots of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples.  Flags and rushes
+grow along its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad,
+flat leaves on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds,
+generally selecting a position just so far from the river's brink that
+it cannot be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.
+
+It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
+perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
+sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the
+mud-turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
+black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
+noisome odor.  Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
+assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral
+circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance
+of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.
+
+The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
+towards our slumberous stream.  In the light of a calm and golden
+sunset it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the
+quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
+blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest.  Each tree and
+rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
+unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection.  The
+minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
+pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
+All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
+the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
+peaceful heart.  We will not, then, malign our river as gross and
+impure while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the
+heaven that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
+muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
+has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
+within its depths.  But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
+any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
+everywhere, it must be true.
+
+Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
+battle-ground.  Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed
+by the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of
+the contest.  On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a
+wide circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some
+period within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
+battle-day.  On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes,
+we discern the stone abutment of the bridge.  Looking down
+into the river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers,
+all green with half a century's growth of water-moss; for during that
+length of time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased
+along this ancient highway.  The stream has here about the breadth of
+twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm,--a space not too wide when the
+bullets were whistling across.  Old people who dwell hereabouts will
+point out, the very spots on the western bank where our countrymen
+fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of
+granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British
+blood.  The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as
+it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a
+matter of local interest rather than what was suitable to commemorate
+an epoch of national history. Still, by the fathers of the village
+this famous deed was done; and their descendants might rightfully
+claim the privilege of building a memorial.
+
+A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the
+granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which
+separates the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is
+the grave,--marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head
+and another at the foot,--the grave of two British soldiers who were
+slain in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where
+Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis buried them.  Soon was their warfare
+ended; a weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry
+across the river, and then these many years of rest.  In the long
+procession of slain invaders who passed into eternity from the
+battle-fields of the Revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.
+
+Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
+tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below.  The story has
+something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot
+altogether be reconciled with probability.  A youth in the service of
+the clergyman happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the
+back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to
+side of the bridge, he hastened across the intervening field to see
+what might be going forward.  It is rather strange, by the way, that
+this lad should have been so diligently at work when the whole
+population of town and country were startled out of their customary
+business by the advance of the British troops.  Be that as it might,
+the tradition, says that the lad now left his task and hurried to the
+battle-field with the axe still in his hand.  The British had by this
+time retreated; the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of
+strife was thus deserted by both parties.  Two soldiers lay on the
+ground,--one was a corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh,
+the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and
+gave a ghastly stare into his face.  The boy,--it must have been a
+nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and betokening a
+sensitive and impressible nature rather than a hardened one,--the boy
+uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow
+upon the head.
+
+I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
+whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
+skull.  The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
+intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
+youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
+tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
+custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
+seemed murderous to slay a brother man.  This one circumstance has
+borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.
+
+Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
+my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
+any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
+the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
+died there.  There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
+hundred yards in breadth--which extends between the battle-field and
+the northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and
+orchard. Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood
+an Indian village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants
+must have drawn so large a part of their substance.  The site is
+identified by the spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other
+implements of war, labor, and the chase, which the plough turns up
+from the soil.  You see a splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a
+sod; it looks like nothing worthy of note; but, if you have faith
+enough to pick it up, behold a relic! Thoreau, who has a strange
+faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set
+me on the search; and I afterwards enriched myself with some very
+perfect specimens, so rudely wrought that it seemed almost as if
+chance had fashioned them.  Their great charm consists in this
+rudeness and in the individuality of each article, so different from
+the productions of civilized machinery, which shapes everything on one
+pattern.  There is exquisite delight, too, in picking up for one's
+self an arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago and has never been
+handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the
+red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at his game or at an enemy.  Such
+an incident builds up again the Indian village and its encircling
+forest, and recalls to life the painted chiefs and warriors, the
+squaws at their household toil, and the children sporting among the
+wigwams, while the little wind-rocked pappose swings from the branch
+of a tree.  It can hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after
+such a momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad daylight of
+reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato-fields, and men
+doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun pantaloons.  But
+this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than a thousand wigwams.
+
+The Old Manse!  We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
+through the orchard.  This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
+decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed
+man for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of
+gathering fruit.  Even had that been the case, there was only so much
+the better motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of
+benefiting his successors,--an end so seldom achieved by more
+ambitious efforts. But the old minister, before reaching his
+patriarchal age of ninety, ate the apples from this orchard during
+many years, and added silver and gold to his annual stipend by
+disposing of the superfluity.  It is pleasant to think of him walking
+among the trees in the quiet afternoons of early autumn and picking up
+here and there a windfall, while he observes how heavily the branches
+are weighed down, and computes the number of empty flour-barrels that
+will be filled by their burden.  He loved each tree, doubtless, as if
+it had been his own child.  An orchard has a relation to mankind, and
+readily connects itself with matters of the heart.  The trees possess
+a domestic character; they have lost the wild nature of their forest
+kindred, and have grown humanized by receiving the care of man as well
+as by contributing to his wants. There, is so much individuality of
+character, too, among apple trees, that it gives them all additional
+claim to be the objects of human interest.  One is harsh and crabbed
+in its manifestations; another gives us fruit as mild as charity.  One
+is churlish and illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it
+bears; another exhausts itself in free-hearted benevolence.  The
+variety of grotesque shapes into which apple, trees contort themselves
+has its effect on those who get acquainted with them: they stretch out
+their crooked branches, and take such hold of the imagination, that we
+remember them as humorists and odd fellows. And what is more
+melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where
+once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney
+rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar?  They offer their fruit
+to every wayfarer,--apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of
+Time's vicissitude.
+
+I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
+finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
+privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman's wealth of
+fruits.  Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and
+then came Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them
+continually from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along.  In the
+stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was
+audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of
+perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that flung down
+bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach-trees, which, in a good
+year, tormented me with peaches, neither to be eaten nor kept, nor,
+without labor and perplexity, to be given away.  The idea of an
+infinite generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother
+Nature was well worth obtaining through such cares as these.  That
+feeling can be enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer
+islands, where the bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange
+grow spontaneously and hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise
+almost as well by a man long habituated to city life, who plunges into
+such a solitude as that of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of
+trees that he did not plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox
+taste, bear the closest resemblance to those that grew in Eden.  It
+has been an apothegm these five thousand years, that toil sweetens the
+bread it earns. For my part (speaking from hard experience, acquired
+while belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best the
+free gifts of Providence.
+
+Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate
+a moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as
+is never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they
+would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,--be
+it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless
+weed,--should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy
+to maturity altogether by their own care.  If there be not too many of
+them, each individual plant becomes an object of separate interest.
+My garden, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the
+right extent.  An hour or two of morning labor was all that it
+required.  But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and
+stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that
+nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the
+process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the
+world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of
+early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate
+green. Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted by the
+blossoms of a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a joy to me,
+those little spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip airy food out of
+my nectar-cups.  Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the
+yellow blossoms of the summer-squashes.  This, too, was a deep
+satisfaction; although, when they had laden themselves with sweets,
+they flew away to some unknown hive, which would give back nothing in
+requital of what my garden had contributed.  But I was glad thus to
+fling a benefaction upon the passing breeze with the certainty that
+somebody must profit by it and that there would be a little more honey
+in the world to allay the sourness and bitterness which mankind is
+always complaining of.  Yes, indeed; my life was the sweeter for that
+honey.
+
+Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
+varied forms.  They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
+shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a
+sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything
+more graceful.  A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my
+eyes at least, of being rendered indestructible in marble.  If ever
+Providence (but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity
+of gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most
+delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer-squashes
+gathered from vines which I will plant with my own hands.  As dishes
+for containing vegetables, they would be peculiarly appropriate.
+
+But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
+toil in the kitchen-garden.  There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise,
+in observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the
+first little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until
+they lay strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads
+beneath the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to
+the noontide sun.  Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something
+worth living for had been done.  A new substance was born into the
+world.  They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could
+seize hold of and rejoice in.  A cabbage, too,--especially the early
+Dutch cabbage, which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its
+ambitious heart often bursts asunder,--is a matter to be proud of when
+we can claim a share with the earth and sky in producing it. But,
+after all, the hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable
+children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a
+meal of them.
+
+What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden,
+the reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old
+Manse. But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep
+him out of doors.  I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation
+till a long spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof.
+There could not be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as
+then seen from the windows of my study.  The great willow-tree had
+caught and retained among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be
+shaken down at intervals by the frequent gusts of wind.  All day long,
+and for a week together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and
+splash-splash-splashing from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into
+the tubs beneath the spouts.  The old, unpainted shingles of the house
+and outbuildings were black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient
+growth upon the walls looked green and fresh, as if they were the
+newest things and afterthought of Time.  The usually mirrored surface
+of the river was blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole
+landscape had a completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the
+impression that the earth was wet through like a sponge; while the
+summit of a wooded hill, about a mile distant, was enveloped in a
+dense mist, where the demon of the tempest seemed to have his
+abiding-place and to be plotting still direr inclemencies.
+
+Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain.  In the
+fiercest beat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes
+the wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot
+penetrate; but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us
+shiver to think of those deep, umbrageous recesses, those
+overshadowing banks, where we found such enjoyment during the sultry
+afternoons.  Not a twig of foliage there but would dash a little
+shower into our faces.  Looking reproachfully towards the impenetrable
+sky,--if sky there be above that dismal uniformity of cloud,--we are
+apt to murmur against the whole system of the universe, since it
+involves the extinction of so many summer days in so short a life by
+the hissing and spluttering rain.  In such spells of weather,--and it
+is to be supposed such weather came,--Eve's bower in paradise must
+have been but a cheerless and aguish kind of shelter, nowise
+comparable to the old parsonage, which had resources of its own to
+beguile the week's imprisonment.  The idea of sleeping on a couch of
+wet roses!
+
+Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
+stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has
+left behind it from a period before the Revolution.  Our garret was an
+arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was
+but a twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns,
+of deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too
+reverent of their dust and cobwebs.  The beams and rafters, roughly
+hewn and with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of
+the chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, an aspect
+unlike what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house.
+But on one side there was a little whitewashed apartment, which bore
+the traditionary title of the Saint's Chamber, because holy men in
+their youth had slept, and studied, and prayed there. With its
+elevated retirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its
+closet convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where a young
+man might inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly
+dreams.  The occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and
+ejaculations inscribed upon the walls.  There, too, hung a tattered
+and shrivelled roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the
+forcibly wrought picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown,
+holding a Bible in his hand.  As I turned his face towards the light,
+he eyed me with an air of authority such as men of his profession
+seldom assume in our days.  The original had been pastor of the parish
+more than a century ago, a friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal
+in fervid eloquence.  I bowed before the effigy of the dignified
+divine, and felt as if I had now met face to face with the ghost by
+whom, as there was reason to apprehend, the Manse was haunted.
+
+Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed
+with spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to.  Our
+ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor,
+and sometimes rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in
+the long upper entry,--where nevertheless he was invisible, in spite
+of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window.  Not
+improbably he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest
+full of manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.  Once, while
+Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there
+came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown, sweeping through
+the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against
+the chairs.  Still there was nothing visible.  A yet stranger business
+was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the
+kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking,
+ironing,--performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labor,--although
+no traces of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning.
+Some neglected duty of her servitude, some ill-starched ministerial
+band, disturbed the poor damsel in her grave and kept her at work
+without any wages.
+
+But to return from this digression.  A part of my predecessor's
+library was stored in the garret,--no unfit receptacle indeed for such
+dreary trash as comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books
+would have been worth nothing at an auction.  In this venerable
+garret, however, they possessed an interest, quite apart from their
+literary value, as heirlooms, many of which had been transmitted down
+through a series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty
+Puritan divines. Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded
+ink on some of their fly-leaves; and there were marginal observations
+or interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegible
+shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom.
+The world will never be the better for it.  A few of the books were
+Latin folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry,
+as with a sledge-hammer, in plain English.  A dissertation on the Book
+of Job--which only Job himself could have had patience to read--filled
+at least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or
+three volumes to a chapter.  Then there was a vast folio body of
+divinity,--too corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the
+spiritual element of religion.  Volumes of this form dated back two
+hundred years or more, and were generally bound in black leather,
+exhibiting precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to
+books of enchantment.  Others equally antique were of a size proper to
+be carried in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,--diminutive,
+but as black as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with
+Greek and Latin quotations.  These little old volumes impressed me as
+if they had been intended for very large ones, but had been
+unfortunately blighted at an early stage of their growth.
+
+The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
+garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
+of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
+like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
+hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
+could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
+that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands.
+Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the
+spirits of one generation affords no sustenance for the next.  Books
+of religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring
+and vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so
+seldom really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have,
+therefore, so little business to be written at all.  So long as an
+unlettered soul can attain to saving grace there would seem to be no
+deadly error in holding theological libraries to be accumulations of,
+for the most part, stupendous impertinence.
+
+Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last
+clergyman's lifetime.  These threatened to be of even less interest
+than the elder works a century hence to any curious inquirer who
+should then rummage then as I was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal
+Preacher and Christian Examiner, occasional sermons, controversial
+pamphlets, tracts, and other productions of a like fugitive nature,
+took the place of the thick and heavy volumes of past time.  In a
+physical point of view, there was much the same difference as between
+a feather and a lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the
+specific gravity of old and new was about upon a par.  Both also were
+alike frigid.  The elder books nevertheless seemed to have been
+earnestly written, and might be conceived to have possessed warmth at
+some former period; although, with the lapse of time, the heated
+masses had cooled down even to the freezing-point. The frigidity of
+the modern productions, on the other hand, was characteristic and
+inherent, and evidently had little to do with the writer's qualities
+of mind and heart.  In fine, of this whole dusty heap of literature I
+tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt myself none the less a
+Christian for eschewing it.  There appeared no hope of either mounting
+to the better world on a Gothic staircase of ancient folios or of
+flying thither on the wings of a modern tract.
+
+Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
+for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea
+of permanence.  There were a few old newspapers, and still older
+almanacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had
+issued from the press with a distinctness that was altogether
+unaccountable.  It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass
+among the books with the images of a vanished century in them.  I
+turned my eyes towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked
+of the austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, after
+the most painful rummaging and groping into their minds, had been able
+to produce nothing half so real as these newspaper scribblers and
+almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a moment. The
+portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself.  It is the
+age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
+distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible
+truth for all times; whereas most other works--being written by men
+who, in the very act, set themselves apart from their age--are likely
+to possess little significance when new, and none at all when old.
+Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something
+permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more
+ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century,
+or perchance of a hundred centuries.
+
+Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me
+a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds.  A bound volume
+has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess
+for the good Mussulman.  He imagines that those wind-wafted records
+are perhaps hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book
+or antique one may contain the "open sesame,"--the spell to disclose
+treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth.  Thus it was not
+without sadness that I turned away from the library of the Old Manse.
+
+Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of another
+stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western horizon; while the
+massive firmament of clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but
+served only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant glow by
+the strongly contrasted shadows.  Heaven smiled at the earth, so long
+unseen, from beneath its heavy eyelid.  To-morrow for the hill-tops
+and the woodpaths.
+
+Or it might be that Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a
+fishing excursion on the river.  Strange and happy times were those
+when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and
+delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or
+any less conventional race during one bright semicircle of the sun.
+Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned
+aside into the Assabeth.  A more lovely stream than this, for a mile
+above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth,
+nowhere, indeed, except to lave the interior regions of a poet's
+imagination.  It is sheltered from the breeze by woods and a hillside;
+so that elsewhere there might be a hurricane, and here scarcely a
+ripple across the shaded water.  The current lingers along so gently
+that the mere force of the boatman's will seems sufficient to propel
+his craft against it.  It comes flowing softly through the midmost
+privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet;
+while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if
+river and wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river
+sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and of the clustering
+foliage, amid which fall showers of broken sunlight, imparting specks
+of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast with the quiet depth of the
+prevailing tint.  Of all this scene, the slumbering river has a
+dream-picture in its bosom.  Which, after all, was the most real,--the
+picture, or the original?--the objects palpable to our grosser senses,
+or their apotheosis in the stream beneath?  Surely the disembodied
+images stand in closer relation to the soul.  But both the original
+and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had it been a thought
+more wild, I could have fancied that this river had strayed forth out
+of the rich scenery of my companion's inner world; only the vegetation
+along its banks should then have had an Oriental character.
+
+Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods seem
+hardly satisfied to allow it passage.  The trees are rooted on the
+very verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it.  At
+one spot there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which grow some
+hemlocks, declining across the stream with outstretched arms, as if
+resolute to take the plunge.  In other places the banks are almost on
+a level with the water; so that the quiet congregation of trees set
+their feet in the flood, and are Fringed with foliage down to the
+surface.  Cardinal-flowers kindle their spiral flames and illuminate
+the dark nooks among the shrubbery.  The pond-lily grows abundantly
+along the margin,--that delicious flower which, as Thoreau tells me,
+opens its virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being
+through the magic of that genial kiss.  He has beheld beds of them
+unfolding in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower
+to flower,--a sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his
+inward eye to a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here
+and there twine themselves around shrub and tree and hang their
+clusters over the water within reach of the boatman's hand.
+Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien race in an inextricable
+twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple against their will and
+enriching them with a purple offspring of which neither is the parent.
+One of these ambitious parasites has climbed into the upper branches
+of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending from bough to bough,
+unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree's airy summit with a wreath
+of its broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.
+
+The winding course of the stream continually shut out the scene behind
+us and revealed as calm and lovely a one before.  We glided from depth
+to depth, and breathed new seclusion at every turn.  The shy
+kingfisher flew from the withered branch close at hand to another at a
+distance, uttering a shrill cry of anger or alarm.  Ducks that had
+been floating there since the preceding eve were startled at our
+approach and skimmed along the glassy river, breaking its dark surface
+with a bright streak. The pickerel leaped from among the lilypads.
+The turtle, sunning itself upon a rock or at the root of a tree, slid
+suddenly into the water with a plunge.  The painted Indian who paddled
+his canoe along the Assabeth three hundred years ago could hardly have
+seen a wilder gentleness displayed upon its banks and reflected in its
+bosom than we did.  Nor could the same Indian have prepared his
+noontide meal with more simplicity.  We drew up our skiff at some
+point where the overarching shade formed a natural bower, and there
+kindled a fire with the pine cones and decayed branches that lay
+strewn plentifully around.  Soon the smoke ascended among the trees,
+impregnated with a savory incense, not heavy, dull, and surfeiting,
+like the steam of cookery within doors, but sprightly and piquant.
+The smell of our feast was akin to the woodland odors with which it
+mingled: there was no sacrilege committed by our intrusion there: the
+sacred solitude was hospitable, and granted us free leave to cook and
+eat in the recess that was at once our kitchen and banqueting-hall.
+It is strange what humble offices may be performed in a beautiful
+scene without destroying its poetry. Our fire, red gleaming among the
+trees, and we beside it, busied with culinary rites and spreading out
+our meal on a mossgrown log, all seemed in unison with the river
+gliding by and the foliage rustling over us.  And, what was strangest,
+neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety of the solemn
+woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and the
+will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places might have come
+trooping to share our table-talk and have added their shrill laughter
+to our merriment.  It was the very spot in which to utter the extremest
+nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product of the
+mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in
+correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.
+
+So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
+gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain.  The evanescent spray
+was Ellery's; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay
+glimmering in the fountain's bed and brightened both our faces by the
+reflection. Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it
+with the mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had
+the profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the
+knowledge that it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days,
+to him and me, lay not in any definite idea, not in any angular or
+rounded truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical
+stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and
+conventionalism and fettering influences of man on man.  We were so
+free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow.  When
+we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements
+of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth
+were whispering to us, "Be free! be free!" Therefore along that shady
+river-bank there are spots, marked with a heap of ashes and
+half-consumed brands, only less sacred in my remembrance than the
+hearth of a household fire.
+
+And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
+sunset,--how sweet was it to return within the system of human
+society, not as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice,
+whence we could go forth at will into state--her simplicity!  How
+gently, too, did the sight of the Old Manse, best seen from the river,
+overshadowed with its willow and all environed about with the foliage
+of its orchard and avenue,--how gently did its gray, homely aspect
+rebuke the speculative extravagances of the day!  It had grown sacred
+in connection with the artificial life against which we inveighed; it
+had been a home for many years, in spite of all; it was my home too;
+and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all the artifice and
+conventionalism of life was but an impalpable thinness upon its
+surface, and that the depth below was none the worse for it. Once, as
+we turned our boat to the bank, there was a cloud, in the shape of an
+immensely gigantic figure of a hound, couched above the house, as if
+keeping guard over it.  Gazing at this symbol, I prayed that the upper
+influences might long protect the institutions that had grown out of
+the heart of mankind.
+
+If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities,
+houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these
+the perverted ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the
+early autumn.  Then Nature will love him better than at any other
+season, and will take him to her bosom with a more motherly
+tenderness. I could scarcely endure the roof of the old house above me
+in those first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too, the
+prophecy of autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others;
+sometimes even in the first weeks of July.  There is no other feeling
+like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception--if
+it be not rather a foreboding--of the year's decay, so blessedly sweet
+and sad in the same breath.
+
+Did I say that there was no feeling like it?  Ah, but there is a
+half-acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the perfected
+vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers,
+and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to steal them
+one by one away.
+
+I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as early a
+token of autumn's approach as any other,--that song which may be
+called an audible stillness; for though very loud and heard afar, yet
+the mind does not take note of it as a sound, so completely is its
+individual existence merged among the accompanying characteristics of
+the season. Alas for the pleasant summertime!  In August the grass is
+still verdant on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the
+trees is as dense as ever and as green; the flowers gleam forth in
+richer abundance along the margin of the river and by the stone walls
+and deep among the woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as they
+were a month ago; and yet in every breath of wind and in every beam of
+sunshine we hear the whispered farewell and behold the parting smile
+of a dear friend.  There is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness
+in the blazing noon.  Not a breeze can stir but it thrills us with the
+breath of autumn.  A pensive glory is seen in the far, golden gleams,
+among the shadows of the trees. The flowers--even the brightest of
+them, and they are the most gorgeous of the year--have this gentle
+sadness wedded to their pomp, and typify the character of the
+delicious time each within itself.  The brilliant cardinal-flower has
+never seemed gay to me.
+
+Still later in the season Nature's tenderness waxes stronger.  It is
+impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so fond of us!
+At other periods she does not make this impression on me, or only at
+rare intervals; but in those genial days of autumn, when she has
+perfected her harvests and accomplished every needful thing that was
+given her to do, then she overflows with a blessed superfluity of
+love. She has leisure to caress her children now.  It is good to be
+alive and at such times. Thank Heaven for breath--yes, for mere
+breath--when it is made up of a heavenly breeze like this!  It comes
+with a real kiss upon our cheeks; it would linger fondly around us if
+it might; but, since it must be gone, it embraces us with its whole
+kindly heart and passes onward to embrace likewise the next thing that
+it meets.  A blessing is flung abroad and scattered far and wide over
+the earth, to be gathered up by all who choose.  I recline upon the
+still unwithered grass and whisper to myself, "O perfect day!  O
+beautiful world!  O beneficent God!"  And it is the promise of a
+blessed eternity; for our Creator would never have made such lovely
+days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond
+all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.  This sunshine is
+the golden pledge thereof.  It beams through the gates of paradise and
+shows us glimpses far inward.
+
+By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts on a drear
+austerity.  On some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the
+grass and along the tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall
+from the trees of our avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly
+descending by their own weight.  All summer long they have murmured
+like the noise of waters; they have roared loudly while the branches
+were wrestling with the thunder-gust; they have made music both glad
+and solemn; they have attuned my thoughts by their quiet sound as I
+paced to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling boughs.  Now they
+can only rustle under my feet.  Henceforth the gray parsonage begins
+to assume a larger importance, and draws to its fireside,--for the
+abomination of the air-tight stove is reserved till wintry
+weather,--draws closer and closer to its fireside the vagrant impulses
+that had gone wandering about through the summer.
+
+When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became as lonely as a
+hermitage.  Not that ever--in my time at least--it had been thronged
+with company; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some friend out
+of the dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with
+him the transparent obscurity that was floating over us.  In one
+respect our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the
+pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City.  The guests, each
+and all, felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in
+chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen
+stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily
+through the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable
+compliment to my abode nor to my own qualities as a host.  I held it
+as a proof that they left their cares behind them as they passed
+between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our avenue, and that
+the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet within and
+all around us.  Others could give them pleasure and amusement or
+instruction,--these could be picked up anywhere; but it was for me to
+give them rest,--rest in a life of trouble.  What better could be
+done for those weary and world-worn spirits?--for him whose career of
+perpetual action was impeded and harassed by the rarest of his powers
+and the richest of his acquirements?--for another who had thrown his
+ardent heart from earliest youth into the strife of politics, and now,
+perchance, began to suspect that one lifetime is too brief for the
+accomplishment of any lofty aim?--for her oil whose feminine nature
+had been imposed the heavy gift of intellectual power, such as a
+strong man might have staggered under, and with it the necessity to
+act upon the world?--in a word, not to multiply instances, what
+better could be done for anybody who came within our magic circle than
+to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him?  And when it had
+wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty
+reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.
+
+Were I to adopt a pet idea as so many people do, and fondle it in my
+embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great
+want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep.  The
+world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and
+take an age-long nap.  It has gone distracted through a morbid
+activity, and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless
+tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their
+true aspect and character were all things once set right by an
+interval of sound repose. This is the only method of getting rid of
+old delusions and avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, so that
+it might in due time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of
+restoring to us the simple perception of what is right and the
+single-hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost
+in consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of
+the heart that now afflict the universe. Stimulants, the only mode of
+treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but
+heighten the delirium.
+
+Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for,
+though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is the result and
+expression of what he knew, while he was writing, to be but a
+distorted survey of the state and prospects of mankind.  There were
+circumstances around me which made it difficult to view the world
+precisely as it exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it
+was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before
+meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been
+encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles.
+
+These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
+widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
+earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.  His mind
+acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful
+magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him
+face to face.  Young visionaries--to whom just so much of insight had
+been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them--came to
+seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved
+bewilderment.  Gray-headed theorists--whose systems, at first air, had
+finally imprisoned them in an iron framework--travelled painfully to
+his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into
+their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought or a
+thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a
+glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and
+value.  Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of
+the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a
+hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the
+surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto.  The light
+revealed objects unseen before,--mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses
+of a creation among the chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it
+attracted bats and owls and the whole host of night birds, which
+flapped their dusky wings against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were
+mistaken for fowls of angelic feather.  Such delusions always hover
+nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is kindled.
+
+For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
+asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
+of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
+question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep
+beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
+philosopher.  It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
+or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam
+diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be,
+so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
+alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.  And, in
+truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions
+which he could not read.  But it was impossible to dwell in his
+vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his
+lofty thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular
+giddiness,--new truth being as heady as new wine.  Never was a poor
+little country village infested with such a variety of queer,
+strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon
+themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were
+simply bores of a very intense water.  Such, I imagine, is the
+invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original
+thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath and thus become imbued with
+a false originality.  This triteness of novelty is enough to make any
+man of common-sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's
+standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered
+immovable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever
+yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by such schemes of such
+philosophers.
+
+And now I begin to feel--and perhaps should have sooner felt--that we
+have talked enough of the Old Manse.  Mine honored reader, it may be,
+will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many
+pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its
+walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that
+wrought upon him from all these sources.  My conscience, however, does
+not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to be
+revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit.  How
+narrow-how shallow and scanty too--is the stream of thought that has
+been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim
+emotions, ideas, and associations which swell around me from that
+portion of my existence!  How little have I told!  and of that little,
+how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it
+exclusively my own!  Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with
+me, through the inner passages of my being? and have we groped
+together into all its chambers and examined their treasures or their
+rubbish?  Not so.  We have been standing on the greensward, but just
+within the cavern's mouth, where the common sunshine is free to
+penetrate, and where every footstep is therefore free to come.  I have
+appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities save such as are diffused
+among us all.  So far as I am a man of really individual attributes I
+veil my face; nor am I, nor have I ever been, one of those supremely
+hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried,
+with brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.
+
+Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
+reminiscences of a single summer.  In fairyland there is no
+measurement of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of
+life's ocean, three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as
+the breezy sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a
+still valley. Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the
+owner of the old house was pining for his native air.  Carpenters
+next, appeared, making a tremendous racket among the outbuildings,
+strewing the green grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut
+joists, and vexing the whole antiquity of the place with their
+discordant renovations.  Soon, moreover, they divested our abode of
+the veil of woodbine which had crept over a large portion of its
+southern face.  All the aged mosses were cleared unsparingly away; and
+there were horrible whispers about brushing up the external walls with
+a coat of paint,--a purpose as little to my taste as might be that of
+rouging the venerable cheeks of one's grandmother. But the hand that
+renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which destroys.  In
+fine, we gathered up our household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea
+in our pleasant little breakfast-room,--delicately fragrant tea, an
+unpurchasable luxury, one of the many angel gifts that had fallen like
+dew upon us,--and passed forth between the tall stone gate-posts as
+uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent might next be pitched.
+Providence took me by the hand, and--an oddity of dispensation which,
+I trust, there is no irreverence in smiling at--has led me, as the
+newspapers announce while I am writing, from the Old Manse into a
+custom-house.  As a story-teller, I have often contrived strange
+vicissitudes for my imaginary personages, but none like this.
+
+The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our
+secluded dwelling had never come to light.  No profound treatise of
+ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand
+unsupported on its edges.  All that I had to show, as a man of
+letters, were these, few tales and essays, which had blossomed out
+like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and mind.  Save editing
+(an easy task) the journal of my friend of many years, the African
+Cruiser, I had done nothing else. With these idle weeds and withering
+blossoms I have intermixed some that were produced long ago,--old,
+faded things, reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a
+book,--and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may
+please.  These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about
+them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,--so reserved, even while
+they sometimes seem so frank,--often but half in earnest, and never,
+even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they
+profess to image,--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis
+for a literary reputation. Nevertheless, the public--if my limited
+number of readers, whom I venture to regard rather as a circle of
+friends, may be termed a public--will receive them the more kindly,
+as the last offering, the last collection of this nature which it is
+my purpose ever to put forth. Unless I could do better, I have done
+enough in this kind.  For myself the book will always retain one
+charm,--as reminding me of the river, with its delightful solitudes,
+and of the avenue, the garden, and the orchard, and especially the
+dear Old Manse, with the little study on its western side, and the
+sunshine glimmering through the willow branches while I wrote.
+
+Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine himself my
+guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy of notice within
+and about the Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study.
+There, after seating him in an antique elbow-chair, an heirloom of the
+house, I take forth a roll of manuscript and entreat his attention to
+the following tales,--an act of personal inhospitality, however, which
+I never was guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst enemy.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An
+Old Manse"), by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+Project Gutenberg EBook The Old Manse, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+From "Mosses From An Old Manse"
+#48 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+Title: The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse")
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Release Date: Nov, 2005  [EBook #9221]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2003]
+[Last updated on February 6, 2007]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE OLD MANSE ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
+
+                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+                          THE OLD MANSE.
+
+
+      The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.
+
+
+Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself
+having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the
+gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of
+black-ash trees.  It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral
+procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned
+from that gateway towards the village burying-ground.  The wheel-track
+leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was
+almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or
+three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to
+pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half
+asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a
+kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite
+the aspect of belonging to the material world.  Certainly it had
+little in common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent
+upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were,
+into the domestic circle.  From these quiet windows the figures of
+passing travellers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of
+privacy.  In its near retirement and accessible seclusion, it was the
+very spot for the residence of a clergyman,--a man not estranged from
+human life, yet enveloped, in the midst of it, with a veil woven of
+intermingled gloom and brightness.  It was worthy to have been one of
+the time-honored parsonages of England, in which, through many
+generations, a succession of holy occupants pass from youth to age,
+and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and
+hover over it as with an atmosphere.
+
+Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
+until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home.  A
+priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
+from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
+had grown up to assume the priestly character.  It was awful to
+reflect how many sermons must have been written there.  The latest
+inhabitant alone--he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was
+left vacant--had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the
+better, if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips.
+How often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue,
+attuning his meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and
+solemn peals of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees!  In that
+variety of natural utterances he could find something accordant with
+every passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential
+fear.  The boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as
+well as with rustling leaves.  I took shame to myself for having been
+so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom
+would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that
+I should light upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well
+worth those hoards of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-
+grown houses. Profound treatises of morality; a layman's
+unprofessional, and therefore unprejudiced, views of religion;
+histories (such as Bancroft might have written had he taken up his
+abode here, as he once purposed) bright with picture, gleaming over a
+depth of philosophic thought,--these were the works that might fitly
+have flowed from such a retirement.  In the humblest event, I resolved
+at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and
+should possess physical substance enough to stand alone.
+
+In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
+fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful
+little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a
+scholar.  It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an
+inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and
+Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill.  When
+I first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of
+unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan
+ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad
+angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so
+sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been
+imparted to their own visages.  They had all vanished now; a cheerful
+coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
+apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the
+overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine.  In place of
+the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of
+Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of
+Como.  The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers,
+always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns.  My books
+(few, and by no means choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as
+chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about the room, seldom to
+be disturbed.
+
+The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
+glass, each with a crack across it.  The two on the western side
+looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the
+orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third,
+facing northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot
+where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of
+history.  It was at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in
+the Manse stood watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle
+between two nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on
+the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British
+on the hither bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of
+the musketry. It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the
+battle-smoke around this quiet house.
+
+Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
+Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of sight-showing,--
+perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the memorable spot.
+We stand now on the river's brink.  It may well be called the
+Concord,--the river of peace and quietness; for it is certainly the
+most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly
+towards its eternity,--the sea. Positively I had lived three weeks
+beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the
+current flowed.  It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
+northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day.  From the
+incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
+becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
+wild, free mountain torrent.  While all things else are compelled to
+subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
+liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even water-
+power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks.  The torpor
+of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much
+as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course.  It
+slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
+bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the
+roots of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples.  Flags and rushes
+grow along its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad,
+flat leaves on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds,
+generally selecting a position just so far from the river's brink that
+it cannot be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.
+
+It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
+perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
+sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the mud-
+turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
+black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
+noisome odor.  Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
+assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral
+circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance
+of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.
+
+The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
+towards our slumberous stream.  In the light of a calm and golden
+sunset it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the
+quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
+blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest.  Each tree and
+rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
+unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection.  The
+minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
+pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
+All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
+the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
+peaceful heart.  We will not, then, malign our river as gross and
+impure while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the
+heaven that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
+muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
+has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
+within its depths.  But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
+any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
+everywhere, it must be true.
+
+Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
+battle-ground.  Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed
+by the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of
+the contest.  On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a
+wide circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some
+period within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
+battle-day.  On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-
+bushes, we discern the stone abutment of the bridge.  Looking down
+into the river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers,
+all green with half a century's growth of water-moss; for during that
+length of time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased
+along this ancient highway.  The stream has here about the breadth of
+twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm,--a space not too wide when the
+bullets were whistling across.  Old people who dwell hereabouts will
+point out, the very spots on the western bank where our countrymen
+fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of
+granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British
+blood.  The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as
+it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a
+matter of local interest rather than what was suitable to commemorate
+an epoch of national history. Still, by the fathers of the village
+this famous deed was done; and their descendants might rightfully
+claim the privilege of building a memorial.
+
+A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the
+granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which
+separates the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is
+the grave,--marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head
+and another at the foot,--the grave of two British soldiers who were
+slain in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where
+Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis buried them.  Soon was their warfare
+ended; a weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry
+across the river, and then these many years of rest.  In the long
+procession of slain invaders who passed into eternity from the battle-
+fields of the Revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.
+
+Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
+tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below.  The story has
+something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot
+altogether be reconciled with probability.  A youth in the service of
+the clergyman happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the
+back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to
+side of the bridge, he hastened across the intervening field to see
+what might be going forward.  It is rather strange, by the way, that
+this lad should have been so diligently at work when the whole
+population of town and country were startled out of their customary
+business by the advance of the British troops.  Be that as it might,
+the tradition, says that the lad now left his task and hurried to the
+battle-field with the axe still in his hand.  The British had by this
+time retreated; the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of
+strife was thus deserted by both parties.  Two soldiers lay on the
+ground,--one was a corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh,
+the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and
+gave a ghastly stare into his face.  The boy,--it must have been a
+nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and betokening a
+sensitive and impressible nature rather than a hardened one,--the boy
+uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow
+upon the head.
+
+I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
+whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
+skull.  The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
+intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
+youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
+tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
+custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
+seemed murderous to slay a brother man.  This one circumstance has
+borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.
+
+Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
+my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
+any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
+the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
+died there.  There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
+hundred yards in breadth--which extends between the battle-field and
+the northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and
+orchard. Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood
+an Indian village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants
+must have drawn so large a part of their substance.  The site is
+identified by the spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other
+implements of war, labor, and the chase, which the plough turns up
+from the soil.  You see a splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a
+sod; it looks like nothing worthy of note; but, if you have faith
+enough to pick it up, behold a relic! Thoreau, who has a strange
+faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set
+me on the search; and I afterwards enriched myself with some very
+perfect specimens, so rudely wrought that it seemed almost as if
+chance had fashioned them.  Their great charm consists in this
+rudeness and in the individuality of each article, so different from
+the productions of civilized machinery, which shapes everything on one
+pattern.  There is exquisite delight, too, in picking up for one's
+self an arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago and has never been
+handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the
+red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at his game or at an enemy.  Such
+an incident builds up again the Indian village and its encircling
+forest, and recalls to life the painted chiefs and warriors, the
+squaws at their household toil, and the children sporting among the
+wigwams, while the little wind-rocked pappose swings from the branch
+of a tree.  It can hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after
+such a momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad daylight of
+reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato-fields, and men
+doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun pantaloons.  But
+this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than a thousand wigwams.
+
+The Old Manse!  We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
+through the orchard.  This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
+decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed
+man for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of
+gathering fruit.  Even had that been the case, there was only so much
+the better motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of
+benefiting his successors,--an end so seldom achieved by more
+ambitious efforts. But the old minister, before reaching his
+patriarchal age of ninety, ate the apples from this orchard during
+many years, and added silver and gold to his annual stipend by
+disposing of the superfluity.  It is pleasant to think of him walking
+among the trees in the quiet afternoons of early autumn and picking up
+here and there a windfall, while he observes how heavily the branches
+are weighed down, and computes the number of empty flour-barrels that
+will be filled by their burden.  He loved each tree, doubtless, as if
+it had been his own child.  An orchard has a relation to mankind, and
+readily connects itself with matters of the heart.  The trees possess
+a domestic character; they have lost the wild nature of their forest
+kindred, and have grown humanized by receiving the care of man as well
+as by contributing to his wants. There, is so much individuality of
+character, too, among apple trees, that it gives them all additional
+claim to be the objects of human interest.  One is harsh and crabbed
+in its manifestations; another gives us fruit as mild as charity.  One
+is churlish and illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it
+bears; another exhausts itself in free-hearted benevolence.  The
+variety of grotesque shapes into which apple, trees contort themselves
+has its effect on those who get acquainted with them: they stretch out
+their crooked branches, and take such hold of the imagination, that we
+remember them as humorists and odd fellows. And what is more
+melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where
+once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney
+rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar?  They offer their fruit
+to every wayfarer,--apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of
+Time's vicissitude.
+
+I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
+finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
+privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman's wealth of
+fruits.  Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and
+then came Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them
+continually from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along.  In the
+stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was
+audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of
+perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that flung down
+bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach-trees, which, in a good
+year, tormented me with peaches, neither to be eaten nor kept, nor,
+without labor and perplexity, to be given away.  The idea of an
+infinite generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother
+Nature was well worth obtaining through such cares as these.  That
+feeling can be enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer
+islands, where the bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange
+grow spontaneously and hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise
+almost as well by a man long habituated to city life, who plunges into
+such a solitude as that of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of
+trees that he did not plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox
+taste, bear the closest resemblance to those that grew in Eden.  It
+has been an apothegm these five thousand years, that toil sweetens the
+bread it earns. For my part (speaking from hard experience, acquired
+while belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best the
+free gifts of Providence.
+
+Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate
+a moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as
+is never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they
+would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,--
+be it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless
+weed,--should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy
+to maturity altogether by their own care.  If there be not too many of
+them, each individual plant becomes an object of separate interest.
+My garden, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the
+right extent.  An hour or two of morning labor was all that it
+required.  But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and
+stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that
+nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the
+process of creation.  It was one of the most bewitching sights in the
+world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of
+early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate
+green. Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted by the
+blossoms of a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a joy to me,
+those little spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip airy food out of
+my nectar-cups.  Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the
+yellow blossoms of the summer-squashes.  This, too, was a deep
+satisfaction; although, when they had laden themselves with sweets,
+they flew away to some unknown hive, which would give back nothing in
+requital of what my garden had contributed.  But I was glad thus to
+fling a benefaction upon the passing breeze with the certainty that
+somebody must profit by it and that there would be a little more honey
+in the world to allay the sourness and bitterness which mankind is
+always complaining of.  Yes, indeed; my life was the sweeter for that
+honey.
+
+Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
+varied forms.  They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
+shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a
+sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything
+more graceful.  A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my
+eyes at least, of being rendered indestructible in marble.  If ever
+Providence (but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity
+of gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most
+delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer-squashes
+gathered from vines which I will plant with my own hands.  As dishes
+for containing vegetables, they would be peculiarly appropriate.
+
+But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
+toil in the kitchen-garden.  There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise,
+in observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the
+first little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until
+they lay strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads
+beneath the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to
+the noontide sun.  Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something
+worth living for had been done.  A new substance was born into the
+world.  They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could
+seize hold of and rejoice in.  A cabbage, too,--especially the early
+Dutch cabbage, which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its
+ambitious heart often bursts asunder,--is a matter to be proud of when
+we can claim a share with the earth and sky in producing it. But,
+after all, the hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable
+children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a
+meal of them.
+
+What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden,
+the reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old
+Manse. But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep
+him out of doors.  I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation
+till a long spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof.
+There could not be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as
+then seen from the windows of my study.  The great willow-tree had
+caught and retained among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be
+shaken down at intervals by the frequent gusts of wind.  All day long,
+and for a week together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash-
+splash-splashing from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into the tubs
+beneath the spouts.  The old, unpainted shingles of the house and
+outbuildings were black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient
+growth upon the walls looked green and fresh, as if they were the
+newest things and afterthought of Time.  The usually mirrored surface
+of the river was blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole
+landscape had a completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the
+impression that the earth was wet through like a sponge; while the
+summit of a wooded hill, about a mile distant, was enveloped in a
+dense mist, where the demon of the tempest seemed to have his abiding-
+place and to be plotting still direr inclemencies.
+
+Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain.  In the
+fiercest beat of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes
+the wayfarer to shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot
+penetrate; but she provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us
+shiver to think of those deep, umbrageous recesses, those
+overshadowing banks, where we found such enjoyment during the sultry
+afternoons.  Not a twig of foliage there but would dash a little
+shower into our faces.  Looking reproachfully towards the impenetrable
+sky,--if sky there be above that dismal uniformity of cloud,--we are
+apt to murmur against the whole system of the universe, since it
+involves the extinction of so many summer days in so short a life by
+the hissing and spluttering rain.  In such spells of weather,--and it
+is to be supposed such weather came,--Eve's bower in paradise must
+have been but a cheerless and aguish kind of shelter, nowise
+comparable to the old parsonage, which had resources of its own to
+beguile the week's imprisonment.  The idea of sleeping on a couch of
+wet roses!
+
+Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
+stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has
+left behind it from a period before the Revolution.  Our garret was an
+arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was
+but a twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns,
+of deep obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too
+reverent of their dust and cobwebs.  The beams and rafters, roughly
+hewn and with strips of bark still on them, and the rude masonry of
+the chimneys, made the garret look wild and uncivilized, an aspect
+unlike what was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house.
+But on one side there was a little whitewashed apartment, which bore
+the traditionary title of the Saint's Chamber, because holy men in
+their youth had slept, and studied, and prayed there. With its
+elevated retirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its
+closet convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where a young
+man might inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish saintly
+dreams.  The occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and
+ejaculations inscribed upon the walls.  There, too, hung a tattered
+and shrivelled roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the
+forcibly wrought picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown,
+holding a Bible in his hand.  As I turned his face towards the light,
+he eyed me with an air of authority such as men of his profession
+seldom assume in our days.  The original had been pastor of the parish
+more than a century ago, a friend of Whitefield, and almost his equal
+in fervid eloquence.  I bowed before the effigy of the dignified
+divine, and felt as if I had now met face to face with the ghost by
+whom, as there was reason to apprehend, the Manse was haunted.
+
+Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed
+with spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to.  Our
+ghost used to heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor,
+and sometimes rustled paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in
+the long upper entry,--where nevertheless he was invisible, in spite
+of the bright moonshine that fell through the eastern window.  Not
+improbably he wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest
+full of manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.  Once, while
+Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the twilight, there
+came a rustling noise as of a minister's silk gown, sweeping through
+the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush against
+the chairs.  Still there was nothing visible.  A yet stranger business
+was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the
+kitchen at deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,--
+performing, in short, all kinds of domestic labor,--although no traces
+of anything accomplished could be detected the next morning.  Some
+neglected duty of her servitude, some ill-starched ministerial band,
+disturbed the poor damsel in her grave and kept her at work without
+any wages.
+
+But to return from this digression.  A part of my predecessor's
+library was stored in the garret,--no unfit receptacle indeed for such
+dreary trash as comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books
+would have been worth nothing at an auction.  In this venerable
+garret, however, they possessed an interest, quite apart from their
+literary value, as heirlooms, many of which had been transmitted down
+through a series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty
+Puritan divines. Autographs of famous names were to be seen in faded
+ink on some of their fly-leaves; and there were marginal observations
+or interpolated pages closely covered with manuscript in illegible
+shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wisdom.
+The world will never be the better for it.  A few of the books were
+Latin folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished Papistry,
+as with a sledge-hammer, in plain English.  A dissertation on the Book
+of Job--which only Job himself could have had patience to read--filled
+at least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or
+three volumes to a chapter.  Then there was a vast folio body of
+divinity,--too corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the
+spiritual element of religion.  Volumes of this form dated back two
+hundred years or more, and were generally bound in black leather,
+exhibiting precisely such an appearance as we should attribute to
+books of enchantment.  Others equally antique were of a size proper to
+be carried in the large waistcoat pockets of old times,--diminutive,
+but as black as their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with
+Greek and Latin quotations.  These little old volumes impressed me as
+if they had been intended for very large ones, but had been
+unfortunately blighted at an early stage of their growth.
+
+The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
+garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search
+of any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow
+like an inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long
+hidden it. But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I
+could not but muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact
+that the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands.
+Thought grows mouldy. What was good and nourishing food for the
+spirits of one generation affords no sustenance for the next.  Books
+of religion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the enduring
+and vivacious properties of human thought, because such books so
+seldom really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have,
+therefore, so little business to be written at all.  So long as an
+unlettered soul can attain to saving grace there would seem to be no
+deadly error in holding theological libraries to be accumulations of,
+for the most part, stupendous impertinence.
+
+Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last
+clergyman's lifetime.  These threatened to be of even less interest
+than the elder works a century hence to any curious inquirer who
+should then rummage then as I was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal
+Preacher and Christian Examiner, occasional sermons, controversial
+pamphlets, tracts, and other productions of a like fugitive nature,
+took the place of the thick and heavy volumes of past time.  In a
+physical point of view, there was much the same difference as between
+a feather and a lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the
+specific gravity of old and new was about upon a par.  Both also were
+alike frigid.  The elder books nevertheless seemed to have been
+earnestly written, and might be conceived to have possessed warmth at
+some former period; although, with the lapse of time, the heated
+masses had cooled down even to the freezing-point. The frigidity of
+the modern productions, on the other hand, was characteristic and
+inherent, and evidently had little to do with the writer's qualities
+of mind and heart.  In fine, of this whole dusty heap of literature I
+tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt myself none the less a
+Christian for eschewing it.  There appeared no hope of either mounting
+to the better world on a Gothic staircase of ancient folios or of
+flying thither on the wings of a modern tract.
+
+Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
+for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea
+of permanence.  There were a few old newspapers, and still older
+almanacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had
+issued from the press with a distinctness that was altogether
+unaccountable.  It was as if I had found bits of magic looking-glass
+among the books with the images of a vanished century in them.  I
+turned my eyes towards the tattered picture above mentioned, and asked
+of the austere divine wherefore it was that he and his brethren, after
+the most painful rummaging and groping into their minds, had been able
+to produce nothing half so real as these newspaper scribblers and
+almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a moment. The
+portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself.  It is the
+age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
+distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible
+truth for all times; whereas most other works--being written by men
+who, in the very act, set themselves apart from their age--are likely
+to possess little significance when new, and none at all when old.
+Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something
+permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more
+ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century,
+or perchance of a hundred centuries.
+
+Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me
+a superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds.  A bound volume
+has a charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess
+for the good Mussulman.  He imagines that those wind-wafted records
+are perhaps hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book
+or antique one may contain the "open sesame,"--the spell to disclose
+treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of Truth.  Thus it was not
+without sadness that I turned away from the library of the Old Manse.
+
+Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of another
+stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western horizon; while the
+massive firmament of clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but
+served only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant glow by
+the strongly contrasted shadows.  Heaven smiled at the earth, so long
+unseen, from beneath its heavy eyelid.  To-morrow for the hill-tops
+and the woodpaths.
+
+Or it might be that Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a
+fishing excursion on the river.  Strange and happy times were those
+when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and
+delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or
+any less conventional race during one bright semicircle of the sun.
+Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we turned
+aside into the Assabeth.  A more lovely stream than this, for a mile
+above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth,
+nowhere, indeed, except to lave the interior regions of a poet's
+imagination.  It is sheltered from the breeze by woods and a hillside;
+so that elsewhere there might be a hurricane, and here scarcely a
+ripple across the shaded water.  The current lingers along so gently
+that the mere force of the boatman's will seems sufficient to propel
+his craft against it.  It comes flowing softly through the midmost
+privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet;
+while the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if
+river and wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river
+sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and of the clustering
+foliage, amid which fall showers of broken sunlight, imparting specks
+of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast with the quiet depth of the
+prevailing tint.  Of all this scene, the slumbering river has a dream-
+picture in its bosom.  Which, after all, was the most real,--the
+picture, or the original?--the objects palpable to our grosser senses,
+or their apotheosis in the stream beneath?  Surely the disembodied
+images stand in closer relation to the soul.  But both the original
+and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had it been a thought
+more wild, I could have fancied that this river had strayed forth out
+of the rich scenery of my companion's inner world; only the vegetation
+along its banks should then have had an Oriental character.
+
+Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods seem
+hardly satisfied to allow it passage.  The trees are rooted on the
+very verge of the water, and dip their pendent branches into it.  At
+one spot there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which grow some
+hemlocks, declining across the stream with outstretched arms, as if
+resolute to take the plunge.  In other places the banks are almost on
+a level with the water; so that the quiet congregation of trees set
+their feet in the flood, and are Fringed with foliage down to the
+surface.  Cardinal-flowers kindle their spiral flames and illuminate
+the dark nooks among the shrubbery.  The pond-lily grows abundantly
+along the margin,--that delicious flower which, as Thoreau tells me,
+opens its virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being
+through the magic of that genial kiss.  He has beheld beds of them
+unfolding in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower
+to flower,--a sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his
+inward eye to a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here
+and there twine themselves around shrub and tree and hang their
+clusters over the water within reach of the boatman's hand.
+Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien race in an inextricable
+twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple against their will and
+enriching them with a purple offspring of which neither is the parent.
+One of these ambitious parasites has climbed into the upper branches
+of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending from bough to bough,
+unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree's airy summit with a wreath
+of its broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.
+
+The winding course of the stream continually shut out the scene behind
+us and revealed as calm and lovely a one before.  We glided from depth
+to depth, and breathed new seclusion at every turn.  The shy
+kingfisher flew from the withered branch close at hand to another at a
+distance, uttering a shrill cry of anger or alarm.  Ducks that had
+been floating there since the preceding eve were startled at our
+approach and skimmed along the glassy river, breaking its dark surface
+with a bright streak. The pickerel leaped from among the lilypads.
+The turtle, sunning itself upon a rock or at the root of a tree, slid
+suddenly into the water with a plunge.  The painted Indian who paddled
+his canoe along the Assabeth three hundred years ago could hardly have
+seen a wilder gentleness displayed upon its banks and reflected in its
+bosom than we did.  Nor could the same Indian have prepared his
+noontide meal with more simplicity.  We drew up our skiff at some
+point where the overarching shade formed a natural bower, and there
+kindled a fire with the pine cones and decayed branches that lay
+strewn plentifully around.  Soon the smoke ascended among the trees,
+impregnated with a savory incense, not heavy, dull, and surfeiting,
+like the steam of cookery within doors, but sprightly and piquant.
+The smell of our feast was akin to the woodland odors with which it
+mingled: there was no sacrilege committed by our intrusion there: the
+sacred solitude was hospitable, and granted us free leave to cook and
+eat in the recess that was at once our kitchen and banqueting-hall.
+It is strange what humble offices may be performed in a beautiful
+scene without destroying its poetry. Our fire, red gleaming among the
+trees, and we beside it, busied with culinary rites and spreading out
+our meal on a mossgrown log, all seemed in unison with the river
+gliding by and the foliage rustling over us.  And, what was strangest,
+neither did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety of the solemn
+woods; although the hobgoblins of the old wilderness and the will-of-
+the-wisps that glimmered in the marshy places might have come trooping
+to share our table-talk and have added their shrill laughter to our
+merriment.  It was the very spot in which to utter the extremest
+nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal product of the
+mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the other, in
+correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.
+
+So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
+gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain.  The evanescent spray
+was Ellery's; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay
+glimmering in the fountain's bed and brightened both our faces by the
+reflection. Could he have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it
+with the mint-mark that alone gives currency, the world might have had
+the profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer merely by the
+knowledge that it was there. But the chief profit of those wild days,
+to him and me, lay not in any definite idea, not in any angular or
+rounded truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical
+stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and
+conventionalism and fettering influences of man on man.  We were so
+free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow.  When
+we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements
+of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth
+were whispering to us, "Be free! be free!" Therefore along that shady
+river-bank there are spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half-
+consumed brands, only less sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of
+a household fire.
+
+And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
+sunset,--how sweet was it to return within the system of human
+society, not as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice,
+whence we could go forth at will into state--her simplicity!  How
+gently, too, did the sight of the Old Manse, best seen from the river,
+overshadowed with its willow and all environed about with the foliage
+of its orchard and avenue,--how gently did its gray, homely aspect
+rebuke the speculative extravagances of the day!  It had grown sacred
+in connection with the artificial life against which we inveighed; it
+had been a home for many years, in spite of all; it was my home too;
+and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all the artifice and
+conventionalism of life was but an impalpable thinness upon its
+surface, and that the depth below was none the worse for it. Once, as
+we turned our boat to the bank, there was a cloud, in the shape of an
+immensely gigantic figure of a hound, couched above the house, as if
+keeping guard over it.  Gazing at this symbol, I prayed that the upper
+influences might long protect the institutions that had grown out of
+the heart of mankind.
+
+If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities,
+houses, and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these
+the perverted ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the
+early autumn.  Then Nature will love him better than at any other
+season, and will take him to her bosom with a more motherly
+tenderness. I could scarcely endure the roof of the old house above me
+in those first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too, the
+prophecy of autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others;
+sometimes even in the first weeks of July.  There is no other feeling
+like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception--if
+it be not rather a foreboding--of the year's decay, so blessedly sweet
+and sad in the same breath.
+
+Did I say that there was no feeling like it?  Ah, but there is a half-
+acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the perfected
+vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers,
+and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to steal them
+one by one away.
+
+I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as early a
+token of autumn's approach as any other,--that song which may be
+called an audible stillness; for though very loud and heard afar, yet
+the mind does not take note of it as a sound, so completely is its
+individual existence merged among the accompanying characteristics of
+the season. Alas for the pleasant summertime!  In August the grass is
+still verdant on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the
+trees is as dense as ever and as green; the flowers gleam forth in
+richer abundance along the margin of the river and by the stone walls
+and deep among the woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as they
+were a month ago; and yet in every breath of wind and in every beam of
+sunshine we hear the whispered farewell and behold the parting smile
+of a dear friend.  There is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness
+in the blazing noon.  Not a breeze can stir but it thrills us with the
+breath of autumn.  A pensive glory is seen in the far, golden gleams,
+among the shadows of the trees. The flowers--even the brightest of
+them, and they are the most gorgeous of the year--have this gentle
+sadness wedded to their pomp, and typify the character of the
+delicious time each within itself.  The brilliant cardinal-flower has
+never seemed gay to me.
+
+Still later in the season Nature's tenderness waxes stronger.  It is
+impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so fond of us!
+At other periods she does not make this impression on me, or only at
+rare intervals; but in those genial days of autumn, when she has
+perfected her harvests and accomplished every needful thing that was
+given her to do, then she overflows with a blessed superfluity of
+love. She has leisure to caress her children now.  It is good to be
+alive and at such times. Thank Heaven for breath--yes, for mere
+breath--when it is made up of a heavenly breeze like this!  It comes
+with a real kiss upon our cheeks; it would linger fondly around us if
+it might; but, since it must be gone, it embraces us with its whole
+kindly heart and passes onward to embrace likewise the next thing that
+it meets.  A blessing is flung abroad and scattered far and wide over
+the earth, to be gathered up by all who choose.  I recline upon the
+still unwithered grass and whisper to myself, "O perfect day!  O
+beautiful world!  O beneficent God!"  And it is the promise of a
+blessed eternity; for our Creator would never have made such lovely
+days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond
+all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.  This sunshine is
+the golden pledge thereof.  It beams through the gates of paradise and
+shows us glimpses far inward.
+
+By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts on a drear
+austerity.  On some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the
+grass and along the tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall
+from the trees of our avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly
+descending by their own weight.  All summer long they have murmured
+like the noise of waters; they have roared loudly while the branches
+were wrestling with the thunder-gust; they have made music both glad
+and solemn; they have attuned my thoughts by their quiet sound as I
+paced to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling boughs.  Now they
+can only rustle under my feet.  Henceforth the gray parsonage begins
+to assume a larger importance, and draws to its fireside,--for the
+abomination of the air-tight stove is reserved till wintry weather,--
+draws closer and closer to its fireside the vagrant impulses that had
+gone wandering about through the summer.
+
+When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became as lonely as a
+hermitage.  Not that ever--in my time at least--it had been thronged
+with company; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some friend out
+of the dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with
+him the transparent obscurity that was floating over us.  In one
+respect our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the
+pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City.  The guests, each
+and all, felt a slumberous influence upon them; they fell asleep in
+chairs, or took a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen
+stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking up dreamily
+through the boughs. They could not have paid a more acceptable
+compliment to my abode nor to my own qualities as a host.  I held it
+as a proof that they left their cares behind them as they passed
+between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our avenue, and that
+the so powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet within and
+all around us.  Others could give them pleasure and amusement or
+instruction,--these could be picked up anywhere; but it was for me to
+give them rest,--rest in a life of trouble.  What better could be
+done for those weary and world-worn spirits?--for him whose career of
+perpetual action was impeded and harassed by the rarest of his powers
+and the richest of his acquirements?--for another who had thrown his
+ardent heart from earliest youth into the strife of politics, and now,
+perchance, began to suspect that one lifetime is too brief for the
+accomplishment of any lofty aim?--for her oil whose feminine nature
+had been imposed the heavy gift of intellectual power, such as a
+strong man might have staggered under, and with it the necessity to
+act upon the world?--in a word, not to multiply instances, what
+better could be done for anybody who came within our magic circle than
+to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him?  And when it had
+wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty
+reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.
+
+Were I to adopt a pet idea as so many people do, and fondle it in my
+embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great
+want which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep.  The
+world should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and
+take an age-long nap.  It has gone distracted through a morbid
+activity, and, while preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless
+tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would assume their
+true aspect and character were all things once set right by an
+interval of sound repose. This is the only method of getting rid of
+old delusions and avoiding new ones; of regenerating our race, so that
+it might in due time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of
+restoring to us the simple perception of what is right and the single-
+hearted desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost in
+consequence of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of
+the heart that now afflict the universe. Stimulants, the only mode of
+treatment hitherto attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but
+heighten the delirium.
+
+Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for,
+though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is the result and
+expression of what he knew, while he was writing, to be but a
+distorted survey of the state and prospects of mankind.  There were
+circumstances around me which made it difficult to view the world
+precisely as it exists; for, severe and sober as was the Old Manse, it
+was necessary to go but a little way beyond its threshold before
+meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might have been
+encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles.
+
+These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
+widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his
+earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.  His mind
+acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with wonderful
+magnetism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him
+face to face.  Young visionaries--to whom just so much of insight had
+been imparted as to make life all a labyrinth around them--came to
+seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved
+bewilderment.  Gray-headed theorists--whose systems, at first air, had
+finally imprisoned them in an iron framework--travelled painfully to
+his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into
+their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought or a
+thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a
+glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and
+value.  Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of
+the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a
+hill-top, and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the
+surrounding obscurity more hopefully than hitherto.  The light
+revealed objects unseen before,--mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses
+of a creation among the chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it
+attracted bats and owls and the whole host of night birds, which
+flapped their dusky wings against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were
+mistaken for fowls of angelic feather.  Such delusions always hover
+nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is kindled.
+
+For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
+asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle
+of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no
+question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep
+beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a
+philosopher.  It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
+or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam
+diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be,
+so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man
+alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart.  And, in
+truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions
+which he could not read.  But it was impossible to dwell in his
+vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his
+lofty thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular
+giddiness,--new truth being as heady as new wine.  Never was a poor
+little country village infested with such a variety of queer,
+strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon
+themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were
+simply bores of a very intense water.  Such, I imagine, is the
+invariable character of persons who crowd so closely about an original
+thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath and thus become imbued with
+a false originality.  This triteness of novelty is enough to make any
+man of common-sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century's
+standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered
+immovable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever
+yet arrived at, rather than be benefited by such schemes of such
+philosophers.
+
+And now I begin to feel--and perhaps should have sooner felt--that we
+have talked enough of the Old Manse.  Mine honored reader, it may be,
+will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many
+pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its
+walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that
+wrought upon him from all these sources.  My conscience, however, does
+not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly individual to be
+revealed by a human spirit to its brother or sister spirit.  How
+narrow-how shallow and scanty too--is the stream of thought that has
+been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad tide of dim
+emotions, ideas, and associations which swell around me from that
+portion of my existence!  How little have I told!  and of that little,
+how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it
+exclusively my own!  Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with
+me, through the inner passages of my being? and have we groped
+together into all its chambers and examined their treasures or their
+rubbish?  Not so.  We have been standing on the greensward, but just
+within the cavern's mouth, where the common sunshine is free to
+penetrate, and where every footstep is therefore free to come.  I have
+appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities save such as are diffused
+among us all.  So far as I am a man of really individual attributes I
+veil my face; nor am I, nor have I ever been, one of those supremely
+hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried,
+with brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.
+
+Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
+reminiscences of a single summer.  In fairyland there is no
+measurement of time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of
+life's ocean, three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, as
+the breezy sunshine chases the cloud-shadows across the depths of a
+still valley. Now came hints, growing more and more distinct, that the
+owner of the old house was pining for his native air.  Carpenters
+next, appeared, making a tremendous racket among the outbuildings,
+strewing the green grass with pine shavings and chips of chestnut
+joists, and vexing the whole antiquity of the place with their
+discordant renovations.  Soon, moreover, they divested our abode of
+the veil of woodbine which had crept over a large portion of its
+southern face.  All the aged mosses were cleared unsparingly away; and
+there were horrible whispers about brushing up the external walls with
+a coat of paint,--a purpose as little to my taste as might be that of
+rouging the venerable cheeks of one's grandmother. But the hand that
+renovates is always more sacrilegious than that which destroys.  In
+fine, we gathered up our household goods, drank a farewell cup of tea
+in our pleasant little breakfast-room,--delicately fragrant tea, an
+unpurchasable luxury, one of the many angel gifts that had fallen like
+dew upon us,--and passed forth between the tall stone gate-posts as
+uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent might next be pitched.
+Providence took me by the hand, and--an oddity of dispensation which,
+I trust, there is no irreverence in smiling at--has led me, as the
+newspapers announce while I am writing, from the Old Manse into a
+custom-house.  As a story-teller, I have often contrived strange
+vicissitudes for my imaginary personages, but none like this.
+
+The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our
+secluded dwelling had never come to light.  No profound treatise of
+ethics, no philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand
+unsupported on its edges.  All that I had to show, as a man of
+letters, were these, few tales and essays, which had blossomed out
+like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and mind.  Save editing
+(an easy task) the journal of my friend of many years, the African
+Cruiser, I had done nothing else. With these idle weeds and withering
+blossoms I have intermixed some that were produced long ago,--old,
+faded things, reminding me of flowers pressed between the leaves of a
+book,--and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may
+please.  These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about
+them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose,--so reserved, even while
+they sometimes seem so frank,--often but half in earnest, and never,
+even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they
+profess to image,--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis
+for a literary reputation. Nevertheless, the public--if my limited
+number of readers, whom I venture to regard rather as a circle of
+friends, may be termed a public--will receive them the more kindly,
+as the last offering, the last collection of this nature which it is
+my purpose ever to put forth. Unless I could do better, I have done
+enough in this kind.  For myself the book will always retain one
+charm,--as reminding me of the river, with its delightful solitudes,
+and of the avenue, the garden, and the orchard, and especially the
+dear Old Manse, with the little study on its western side, and the
+sunshine glimmering through the willow branches while I wrote.
+
+Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine himself my
+guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy of notice within
+and about the Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study.
+There, after seating him in an antique elbow-chair, an heirloom of the
+house, I take forth a roll of manuscript and entreat his attention to
+the following tales,--an act of personal inhospitality, however, which
+I never was guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst enemy.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE OLD MANSE ***
+By Nathaniel Hawthorne
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