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Title: The Old Manse (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Release date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #9221]
                Most recently updated: November 9, 2022

Language: English

Credits: David Widger and Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MANSE (FROM "MOSSES FROM AN 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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