Literary Shrines Part 6

A morning's drive westward through the shade and sheen of a delectable urban district conveys us to the village of Auburndale, where we find the tasteful cottage home of Louise Imogen Guiney, with its French roofs, wide windows, square tower, and embosoming foliage. Here, if we come properly accredited, we may (or might before she became the village postmistress) see the gifted poetess of "White Sail" and "Roadside Harp" and essayist of "English Gallery" and "Prose Idyls"--a _pet.i.te_ and attractive young lady--at her desk, surrounded by her treasures of books and bric-a-brac and with the portraits of many friends looking down upon her from the walls of the square upper room where she writes. She has little to say concerning her own work,--fascinating as it is to her,--but discourses pleasantly on many topics and narrates _con amore_ the history of the precious tomes and the literary relics she has gathered here, and describes the traits and lineage of her beloved canine pets, who have been execrated by some of her neighbors.

[Sidenote: Brook Farm]

Nearer Jamaica Plain is the quiet corner of West Roxbury, where the exalted community of Brook Farmers attempted to realize in external and material fas.h.i.+on their high ideals and to inaugurate the precursor of an Arcadian era. In this season, "the sweet o' the year," we find the farm a delightful spot, fully warranting Hawthorne's eulogium in "Blithedale Romance." The songful stream which gives the place its name is margined by verdant and sun-kissed meads which slope away to the circling Charles; on either side, fields and picturesque pastures--broken here and there by rocky ledges and copse-covered knolls--swell upward to feathery acclivities of pine and oak, with rugged escarpments of rock.

From the elevation about the farm-house we overlook most of the domain of these social reformers,--the many acres of woodlands, the orchards and fields where Ripley, George William Curtis, Hawthorne, Dwight, Bedford, Pratt, Dana, and other transcendental enthusiasts held sublimated discourse while they performed the coa.r.s.est farm drudgery, applied uncelestial fertilizers, "belabored rugged furrows," or delved for the infinite in a peat-bog. Curtis has said "there never were such witty potato-patches, such sparkling corn-fields; the weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson and Browning." The farm-house stands above the highway, and is shaded by giant trees planted by Ripley and his a.s.sociates. It is a commodious, antiquated structure of weather-worn wood, two stories in height, with a vast attic beneath the sloping roofs and an extension which has been recently enlarged. The original edifice is a ponderous fabric of almost square form, with an entrance in the middle of the front, ma.s.sive chimneys at either end, and contains four s.p.a.cious lower rooms, besides an outer scullery. Here we see the sitting-room of the reformers, where at first Channing sometimes preached and the now "Nestor of American journalism"

sang ba.s.s in the choir; their refectory, where Dana served as head-waiter; and their brick-paved kitchen, where the erudite Mrs.

Ripley and the soulful Margaret Fuller sometimes helped to prepare the bran bread and baked beans for the exalted brotherhood. Adjoining is the old "wash-room," where some who have since become famous in literature or politics pounded the soiled linen in a hogshead with a heavy wooden pestle; and just without is the turf-carpeted yard where the dignified and handsome Hawthorne, the brilliant Charles A. Dana (who certainly was the most popular member of the community), and the genial Curtis were sometimes seen hanging the moist garments upon the lines, a truly edifying spectacle for G.o.ds and men. It was from Curtis's pockets that the clothes-pins sometimes dropped during the evening dances. Some of the trees yet to be seen near the house were rooted from the nursery established here by Dana.

This old house was the original "Hive" of the community, who added the extensive wing at the back, but increasing numbers soon forced a portion of the company to swarm, and other dormitories were erected.

Of these we find vestiges of the "Eyrie"--which was also used as a school-house--upon a commanding ledge at a little distance from the house, and nearer the grove where the rural festivals of the a.s.sociation were held. Of the "Nest," the little house where Miss Ripley lived, the "Cottage," where Margaret Fuller lodged during her sojourns at the farm, the large barn, where social _seances_ were held while the starry company prepared vegetables for the market, and the other steading erected by the community, only the cellars and broken foundations remain. In the wood at some distance from the house is the "Eliot's Pulpit" of Coverdale's narrative, a ma.s.s of rock crowning a knoll and having a great fissure through its core; in the forest beyond we may find "Coverdale's Walk," and the "Hermitage" where he heard by accident the colloquy of Westervelt and Zen.o.bia.

After the day of Ripley's brilliant colony the broad acres of Brook Farm were tilled by the town poor, and--"to what base uses!"--the pretty cottage of Margaret Fuller became a loathsome small-pox pest-house; the rooms of the "Hive," after six years of familiarity with ideal refiners and reformers, became the abode of paupers, and at this day are aswarm with an odorous mult.i.tude of German orphans, wards of a Lutheran society that now owns the place.

While the pilgrim may find but few traces of the physical labors of the choice spirits who once inhabited this spot, the beneficent results of the mental and moral work here accomplished--especially among the young--are manifest and ineffaceable. These infertile fields yielded but scant returns for the manual toil of the optimistic philosophers, but their earnest strivings toward social and mental emanc.i.p.ation have borne abundant fruit.

IN BERKs.h.i.+RE WITH HAWTHORNE

I. The Graylock and Hoosac Region II. Lenox and Middle Berks.h.i.+re

I

THE GRAYLOCK AND HOOSAC REGION

_North Adams and about--Hawthorne's Acquaintances and Excursions--Actors and Incidents of Ethan Brand--Kiln of Bertram the Lime-Burner--Natural Bridge--Graylock--Th.o.r.eau--Hoosac Mountain--Deerfield Arch-- Williamstown--Bryant._

The Hawthorne pilgrimage has drawn us to many shrines: the sunny scenes of "The Marble Faun," the peaceful landscapes of "Our Old Home," the now busy city of "The Scarlet Letter," the elm-shaded Salem of "Dr.

Grimshaw" and "The House of the Seven Gables," the Manse of the "Mosses," the Wayside of "Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver Romance,"--these and many another resort of the subtile romancer, in the Old World and the New, have held our lingering feet.

Amid the splendors of a New England September we follow him into the "headlong Berks.h.i.+re" of "Ethan Brand" and "Tanglewood Tales."

Hawthorne was more than most writers influenced by environment; the situations and circ.u.mstances under which his work was produced often determined its tone and color, while the persons, localities, and occurrences observed by his alert senses in the real world about him were skilfully wrought into his romance. His residence in Berks.h.i.+re affected not only the books written there, but some subsequently produced, and the scenery of this loveliest corner of New England supplied the setting for many of his tales. Some of the best pa.s.sages of his "American Note-Books" are records of his observations in this region,--sundry scenes, characters, and incidents being afterward literally transcribed therefrom into his fiction,--while a few of his shorter stories seem to have been suggested by legends once current in Berks.h.i.+re. It pa.s.ses, therefore, that for us the greatest charm of this realm of delights is that all its beauties--the grandeur of its mountains, the enchantment of its valleys, the glamour of its autumn woods, the sheen of its lakelets, the sapphire of its skies--serve to bring us into closer sympathy with Hawthorne, to whom these beauties were once a familiar vision.

He first came to Berks.h.i.+re in the summer of 1838. For thirteen years he had bravely "waited for the world to know" him. His "Twice-Told Tales"

had brought him little fame or money, but they had procured him the friends.h.i.+p of the Peabodys, and it would appear that he and the lovely Sophia already loved each other. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth, written early in the summer, Sophia says, "Hawthorne came one morning for a take-leave call, looking radiant. He said he was not going to tell any one, not even his mother, where he should be for the next months; he thought he should change his name, so that if he died no one would be able to find his gravestone. We asked him to keep a journal while he was gone. He at first said he would not write anything, but finally concluded it would suit very well for hints for future stories." It was from his journal of these months of mysterious retirement that, forty years later, the gentle Sophia--then his widow--transcribed those pages of the "Note-Books" which contain the account of his sojourn in upper Berks.h.i.+re and of his observations and meditations there. How far the journal furnished "hints for future stories" the literary world well knows.

A few days after this "take-leave call" we find Hawthorne at Pittsfield, where his Berks.h.i.+re saunterings (and ours) fitly began. We follow him northward along a curving valley hemmed by mountains that slope upward to the azure; on the right rise the rugged Hoosacs in

"Wave-like walls that block the sky With tints of gold and mists of blue;"

on the left loom the darkly-wooded domes of the Taconics above the bright upland pastures, while before us grand old "Graylock" uprears his head "s.h.a.ggy with primeval forest,"--his gigantic shape forming the culmination of the superb landscape. Hawthorne's superlative pleasure of beholding this grandeur and beauty from the driver's seat of a stage and being regaled at the same time by the converse of the driver is denied to us, but we enjoy quite as much as did Hawthorne the little "love-pats" and pa.s.sages of a newly-wedded pair of our fellow-pa.s.sengers. The stage has disappeared, the driver and the high-stepping steeds which served him "in wheel and in whoa" have given place to the engineer and the locomotive; the changes of the half-century since Hawthorne journeyed here have well-nigh overturned the world; only the eternal beauty of these hills and the bewraying demeanor of the newly-married remain evermore unchanged.

[Sidenote: Hawthorne at North Adams]

[Sidenote: Characters of his Fiction]

At North Adams, which the magician, "liking indifferent well, made his head-quarters," we have lodgings near the place of his on the Main Street and in the domicile of one who, as a lad of fourteen years, had known Hawthorne during his stay here. Apparently he did not attempt to carry out his plan of concealing his ident.i.ty; he certainly was known to some of the villagers as the author of "Twice-Told Tales," and a descendant of one of Hawthorne's "seven doctors of the place" recalls his delight on being told that the "Whig Tavern boarder" was the creator of "The Gentle Boy;" and he remembers his subsequent and consequent wors.h.i.+pful espionage of the wonderful being. To this espionage we are indebted for some edifying details of Hawthorne's sojourn in upper Berks.h.i.+re. The world has known few handsomer men than Hawthorne was at this period of his life,--he had been styled Oberon at college,--and our informant recollects him as "the most brilliantly handsome person he ever beheld," tall, dark, with an expressive mobile face and a l.u.s.trous eye which held something "indescribably more than keenness" in its quick glances. (Charles Reade said Hawthorne's eye was "like a violet with a soul in it.") As remembered here, his expression was often abstracted, sometimes despondent. He would sit for hours at a time on the broad porch of the old "North Adams House," or in a corner of the bar-room, silently smoking and apparently oblivious to his surroundings, yet, as we know, vigilant to note the oddities of character and opinion he encountered. It is certain that he did not drink immoderately at this time. There were a few persons--_not_ the model men of the community--to whom he occasionally unbent and whom he admitted to a sort of comrades.h.i.+p, which, as his diary shows, often became confessionary upon their part. With these he held prolonged converse upon the tavern porch,--his part in the conversations being mainly suggestions calculated to elicit the whimsical conceits or experiences of his companions,--sitting the while in the posture of the venerable custom-house officials, described in the sketch introductory to the "Scarlet Letter," with "chair tipped on its hind legs" and his feet elevated against a pillar of the porch. Among those remembered to have been thus favored was Captain C----, called Captain Gavett in the "Note-Books," who dispensed metaphysics and maple sugar from the tavern steps, and a jolly blacksmith named Wetherel, described by Hawthorne as "big in the paunch and enormous in the rear," who came regularly to the bar for his stimulant. Another was the "lath-like, round-backed, rough-bearded, thin-visaged" stage-driver, Platt, whom Hawthorne honors as "a friend of mine" in the diary, and whose acquaintance he made during the ride from Pittsfield. In later years Platt's pride in having known Hawthorne eclipsed even his sense of distinction in being "the first and only man to drive an ox-team to the top of Graylock, sir." He had once been employed to haul the materials for an observatory up that mountain's steep inclines. Of the other "hangers-on" who were wont to infest the bar-room and porch fifty years ago and whom Hawthorne depicts in his journal and his fiction, few of the present generation of loungers in the place have ever heard. Orrin ----, the sportive widower whose peccadilloes are hinted at in the "Note-Books," is remembered by older residents of the town, and the "fellow who refused to pay six dollars for the coffin in which his wife was buried" may still be named as the personification of meanness. The maimed and dissolute Daniel Haines--nicknamed "Black Hawk"--was then a familiar figure in the village streets, and his unique history and appearance could not escape the notice of the great romancer nor be soon forgotten by the towns-people. As Hawthorne says, "he had slid down by degrees from law to the soap-vat." Once a reputable lawyer, his bibulous habits and an accident--his hand being "torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine"--had so reduced him that at the time Hawthorne saw him he maintained himself by boiling soap and practising phrenology. It is remembered that he used to "feel of b.u.mps" for the price of a drink, and that, Hawthorne's head being submitted to his manipulation, he gravely a.s.sured the tavern company, "This man was created to s.h.i.+ne as a bank president," and then privately advised the landlord to "make that chap pay in advance for his board." A resident tells us that this dirty and often drunken Haines used to make biweekly visits to his father's house, with a cart drawn by disreputable-looking dogs, to receive fat in exchange for soap. The novelist touches this odd character many times in his journal, and utilizes it in the romance of "Ethan Brand," where it is the "Lawyer Giles, the elderly ragam.u.f.fin," who, with the rest of the lazy regiment from the village tavern, came in response to the summons of the "boy Joe" to see poor Brand returned from his long search after the Unpardonable Sin. This "boy Joe," son of "Bertram the lime-burner,"

was also a bar-room character, noted here by Hawthorne, but obviously for a different use than that made of him in "Ethan Brand,"--a reference to him in the "Note-Books" being supplemented by this memorandum: "take this boy as the germ of a tavern-haunter, a country _roue_, to spend a wild and brutal youth, ten years of his prime in prison and his old age in the poor-house." This sketch may have been written in the spirit of prophecy, so exactly has the life of one bar-room boy coincided with Hawthorne's outline; the career of another lad whom he here saw and possibly had in mind was happier.

[Sidenote: Characters and Scenes]

A modern hotel has replaced the "Whig Tavern" of Hawthorne's time, and a new set of _habitues_ now frequent its bar-room; another generation of fat men has succeeded the individuals whose breadth of back was a marvel to the novelist, and in the increased population of the place the "many obese" would no longer provoke comment. The lapsing decades have expanded the pretty and busy factory-village he found into a prettier and busier factory-city without materially changing its prevailing air.

The vigorous young city has not wholly out-grown the "hollow vale"

walled in by towering mountains; the aspect of its grand environment is therefore essentially unaltered, and it chances that there is scarcely a spot, in or about the town, which received the notice of Hawthorne which may not still be identified. It is our crowning pleasure in the resplendent autumn days to follow his thoughtful step and dreamy vision through town and country-side to the spots he frequented and described, thus sharing, in a way, his companions.h.i.+p and beholding through his eyes the beauties which he has depicted of mountain and vale, forest and stream. On the summit of a hill in the village cemetery, where white gravestones gleam amid the evergreens, the grave of a child at whose burial Hawthorne a.s.sisted is pointed out by one who was present with him. The well-known author-divine Was.h.i.+ngton Gladden, sometime preached in a near-by church. The ever-varying phases of the heights which look down upon the town--the wondrous play of light and shade upon the great sweeps of foliage which clothe the mountain-sides, the shadows chasing each other along the slopes and changing from side to side as the day declines, until the vale lies in twilight while the near summits are gilded with sunset gold, the exquisite cloud-effects as the fleecy ma.s.ses drift above the ridges or cling to the higher peaks--were a never-failing source of pleasure to Hawthorne, as they are to the loiterer of this day. Every s.h.i.+fting of the point of view as we stroll in the town reveals a new aspect of its mountain ramparts and arouses fresh delight. Hawthorne thought the village itself most beautiful when clouds deeply shaded the mountains while suns.h.i.+ne flooded the valley and, by contrast, made streets and houses a bright, rich gold.

[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Rambles]

The investing mountains give to the place the "snug and insular" air which Hawthorne observed; from many points it seems completely severed from the rest of the world. On some dark days sombre banks of cloud settle along the ridges and apparently so strengthen and heighten the beleaguering walls that we recall Hawthorne's fancy that egress is impossible save by "climbing above the clouds." However, the railways tunnel the base of one mountain and curve around the flanks of others, while

"Old roads winding, as old roads will,"

find easy grades about and over the ramparts, so that the bustling "Tunnel-city" is by no means isolated from the outside world.

The rambles among and beyond these investing mountains, by which Hawthorne made himself and "Eustace Bright" of "Wonder-Book" and "Tanglewood Tales" familiar with "rough, rugged, broken, headlong"

Berks.h.i.+re, were usually solitary. The before-mentioned admirer of the "Gentle Boy" sometimes offered to guide the novelist to places of interest in the vicinage, but he usually preferred to be alone with nature and his own reveries. Once when the lad proposed to pilot him to the peak of Graylock, Hawthorne replied he "did not care to soar so high; the Bellows-Pipe was sightly enough for him." He visited the latter point many times; it is a long walk from the village, and once he returned so late that the hotel was closed for the night and our lad pommelled the door for him until the landlord descended, in wrath and confidentially scant attire, to admit the novelist.

[Sidenote: Ethan Brand]

One starless night we were guided to the kiln of "Bertram the lime-burner" which Hawthorne visited with Mr. Leach,--one of several kilns high up on the steep slope without the town, where the marble of the mountain is converted into snow-white lime. The graphic imagery of the tale may all be realized here upon the spot where it is laid. Amid the darkness, the iron door which encloses the glowing limestone apparently opens into the mountain-side, and seems a veritable entrance to the infernal regions whose lurid flames escape by every crevice. The dark and silent figure, revealed to us by the weird light, sitting and musing before the kiln, is surely "Ethan Brand" on his solitary vigil, intent on perilous thoughts as he looks into the flame, or mutely listening to the fiend he has evoked from the fire to tell him of the Unpardonable Sin; or it is the same Brand returned to the foot of Graylock after eighteen years of weary searching abroad, to find the Sin in his own heart and to burn that heart into snowy whiteness and purity in the kiln he had watched so long. As we ponder the scene we would scarce be surprised to witness the approach of the village rabble led by Joe, the old Jew exhibiting his "peep-show" at the foot of the kiln, and the self-pursuing cur violently chasing his own shortened tail, or to hear the demoniac laughter of Brand which scattered the terror-stricken rabble in the surrounding darkness. Certain it is that, thirteen years before he wrote the tale, Hawthorne saw here, at a kiln on the foot-hill of Graylock, his "Bertram," and heard the legend of a demented creature who threw himself into the midst of the circle of fire. The name "Ethan Brand" was that of an old resident of Hawthorne's Salem.

[Sidenote: Graylock]

The summit of Graylock, whose rugged beauty has been sung by Holmes, Th.o.r.eau, Bryant, and f.a.n.n.y Kemble, had for Hawthorne a sort of fascination. From the streets of the village, from all the ways by which he sauntered through the country-side, his eyes were continually turning to that lofty height, observant of its ever-changing aspects.

His diary of the time abounds with records of its phases, presented in varying conditions of cloud and suns.h.i.+ne and from different places of prospect, and of the fanciful impressions suggested to his subtile thought by each fresh and unfamiliar appearance. A walk repeatedly enjoyed by him is along a primitive road on the mountain-side to the southern end of The Notch,--"where it slopes upward to the skies,"--whence he could see most of the enchanting valley of Berks.h.i.+re--with its lakes, embowered villages, and billowy expanses of upland and mead--extending between mountain-borders to the great Dome which looms across it sixty miles away. In the distance he could see the crags of Bryant's Monument Mountain--the "headless sphinx" of his own "Wonder-Book"--rising above the gleaming lake whose margin was to be his later home.

Our route to the peak of Graylock is that taken by Hawthorne and Th.o.r.eau through the savage cleft of The Notch. We follow up a das.h.i.+ng mountain-stream past a charming cascade beneath darkening hemlocks, then along a rough road by the houses whose inhabitants Hawthorne thought "ought to be temperance people" from the quality of the water they gave him to drink. In the remoter parts of the glen a stranger-pedestrian is still a wonder, and will be regarded as curiously as was the romancer.

From the extremity of The Notch, Graylock rises steeply, his sides clothed with forests, through which we climb to the summit and our reward. From the site of Th.o.r.eau's bivouac, where f.a.n.n.y Kemble once declaimed Romeo and Juliet to a picnic party, we behold a scene of unrivalled vastness and beauty,--on every side peak soaring beyond peak until the shadowy outlines blend with the distant sky. The view ranges from Grand Monadnock and the misty Adirondacks to the Catskills, the Dome of Mount Was.h.i.+ngton, and the far-away hills of Connecticut, while at our feet smiles the bright valley, as beautiful as that in which Ra.s.selas dwelt.

[Sidenote: Natural Bridge]

A mile from the town we find one of the most picturesque spectacles in New England, the Natural Bridge, to which Hawthorne came again and again during his sojourn in this region. Amid a grove of pines apparently rooted in the solid rock, a tributary of the Hoosac has, during measureless eons of time, worn in the white marble a chasm sixty feet deep and fifteen feet wide, spanned at one point by a beautifully arched ma.s.s which forms a bridge high above the stream which frets along the rock-strewn floor of the canyon. Within the ravine the brook falls in a rainbow-crowned cascade, and below this is a placid pool with margins of polished marble, where Hawthorne once meditated a bath, but, alarmed by the approach of visitors, he hastily resumed his habiliments, "not caring to be to them the most curious part of the spectacle."

From the deep bed of the brook the gazer looks heavenward between lofty walls of crystalline whiteness which seem to converge as they rise, whose surmounting crags jutting from the verge are crowned by sombre evergreens which overhang the chasm and almost shut out the sky. As we traverse the gorge whose wildness so impressed Hawthorne and listen to the re-echoing roar of the now diminished stream, we are reminded of his conceit that the scene is "like a heart that has been rent asunder by a torrent of pa.s.sion which has raged and left ineffaceable traces, though now there is but a rill of feeling at the bottom."

Our way back to the town is along a riotous stream which took strong hold upon the liking of the novelist, by which he often walked and in whose cool depths he bathed. His brief descriptions of its secluded and turbulent course, through resounding hollows, amid dark woods, under pine-crowned cliffs,--"talking to itself of its own wild fantasies in the voice of solitude and the wilderness,"--although written at the time but for his own perusal, are among the gems of the language. Farther down, the boisterous stream is now subdued and harnessed by man and made to turn wheels of factories; its limpid waters are discolored by dye-stuffs; its beauty is lost with its freedom; it becomes useful and--ugly.

[Sidenote: Incidents and Characters of Tales]

One day our excursion is into the romantic valley of the Deerfield by the old stage-road over the Hoosac range, the route which Hawthorne took with his friends Birch and Leach. The many turns by which the road accomplishes the ascent afford constantly varying vistas of the valley out of which we rise, and progressively widening prospects of the forest-clad mountains beyond. At the summit we are in the centre of the magnificent panorama of mountains--glowing now with autumnal crimson and gold--which extorted from Henry Clay the declaration that he had "never beheld anything so beautiful."

On the bare and wind-swept plain which lies along the summit are a few farm-dwellings. Among these at the time of Hawthorne's visit--before the great tunnel had pierced the mountain and superseded the stage-route--was a homely wayside inn, afterward a farm-house, at whose bar pa.s.sengers were wont to "wet their whistles." It may be a.s.sumed that the romancer and his companions failed not to conform to this time-honored custom, for it was in that rude bar-room--since a farm-kitchen--that Hawthorne met the itinerant Jew with a diorama of execrable scratchings which he carried upon his back and exhibited as "specimens of the fine arts;" in that room also the novelist witnessed the whimsical performance of the usually sensible and sedate old dog, who periodically broke out in an infuriated pursuit of his own tail, "as if one half of his body were at deadly enmity with the other." These incidents were carefully noted at the time for possible future use, and in such choice diction that when, many years afterward, he wove them into the fabric of a tale of "The Snow Image" volume, he transcribed them from his diary to his ma.n.u.script essentially unchanged. This instance ill.u.s.trates the method of this consummate literary artist and his alertness to perceive and utilize the details of real life. His journals abundantly show that he was by no means the aphelxian dreamer he has been adjudged.