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Title: The Old Manse
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9221]
[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MANSE ***
The Old Manse
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
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