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Literary and Social Essays

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LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS

BY

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS







CONTENTS


EMERSON
_Homes of American Authors, 1854._

HAWTHORNE
_Homes of American Authors, 1854._

THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
_North American Review_, Vol. XCIX., 1864.

RACHEL
_Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. VI., 1855.

THACKERAY IN AMERICA
_Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I., 1853.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Hitherto unpublished. Written in 1857.

LONGFELLOW
HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXV., 1882.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXXXIII., 1891.

WASHINGTON IRVING
Read at Ashfield, 1889. Printed by the Grolier Club, 1892.




EMERSON


The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from
Boston, upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New
England towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make
but a slight impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying
to or from the city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy
traveller has scarcely time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker
Hill" before the town has vanished and he is darting through woods and
fields as solitary as those he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as
it vanishes he may chance to "see" two or three spires, and as they
rush behind the trees his eyes fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It
is Walden Pond--or Walden Water, as Orphic Alcott used to call
it--whose virgin seclusion was a just image of that of the little
village, until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a
shriek, sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the
last war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, announced to
astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth
century had overtaken it. Yet long before the material force of the age
bound the town to the rest of the world, the spiritual force of a single
mind in it had attracted attention to it, and made its lonely plains as
dear to many widely scattered minds as the groves of the Academy or the
vineyards of Vaucluse.

Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several
dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one
of the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those
who, by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the
great agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the
feverish throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but
the few puffs of the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is
thronged with the neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival
--the annual cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord
life is not varied, even on that day, by anything more exciting than
fat oxen and the cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The
population of the region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy
representatives of the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores,
with their seed-corn and rye, the germs of a prodigious national
greatness. At intervals every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the
swift shuttle darting to and from the metropolitan heart of New
England, weaving prosperity upon the land, remind those farmers in
their silent fields that the great world yet wags and wrestles. And
the farmer-boy--sweeping with flashing scythe through the river
meadows, whose coarse grass glitters, apt for mowing, in the early
June morning--pauses as the whistle dies into the distance, and,
wiping his brow and whetting his blade anew, questions the
country-smitten citizen, the amateur Corydon struggling with imperfect
stroke behind him, of the mystic romance of city life.

The sluggish repose of the little river images the farmer-boy's life.
He bullies his oxen, and trembles at the locomotive. His wonder and
fancy stretch towards the great world beyond the barn-yard and the
village church as the torpid stream tends towards the ocean. The
river, in fact, seems the thread upon which all the beads of that
rustic life are strung--the clew to its tranquil character. If it were
an impetuous stream, dashing along as if it claimed and required the
career to which every American river is entitled, a career it would
have. Wheels, factories, shops, traders, factory-girls, boards of
directors, dreary white lines of boarding-houses, all the signs that
indicate the spirit of the age, and of the American age, would arise
upon its margin. Some shaven magician from State Street would run up
by rail, and, from proposals, maps, schedules of stock, etc., educe a
spacious factory as easily as Aladdin's palace arose from nothing.
Instead of a dreaming, pastoral poet of a village, Concord would be a
rushing, whirling, bustling manufacturer of a town, like its thrifty
neighbor Lowell. Many a fine equipage, flashing along city ways--many
an Elizabethan-Gothic-Grecian rural retreat, in which State Street
woos Pan and grows Arcadian in summer, would be reduced, in the last
analysis, to the Concord mills. Yet if these broad river meadows grew
factories instead of corn, they might perhaps lack another harvest, of
which the poet's thought is the sickle.

"One harvest from your field
Homeward brought the oxen strong.
Another crop your acres yield,
Which I gather in a song,"

sings Emerson, and again, as the afternoon light strikes pensive
across his memory, as over the fields below him:

"Knows he who tills this lonely field,
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic crops his acres yield,
At midnight and at morn?"

The Concord River, upon whose winding shores the town has scattered
its few houses--as if, loitering over the plain some fervent day, it
had fallen asleep obedient to the slumberous spell, and had not since
awakened--is a languid, shallow stream, that loiters through broad
meadows, which fringe it with rushes and long grasses. Its sluggish
current scarcely moves the autumn leaves showered upon it by a few
maples that lean over the Assabet--as one of its branches is named.
Yellow lily-buds and leathery lily-pads tessellate its surface, and
the white water-lilies--pale, proud Ladies of Shalott--bare their
virgin breasts to the sun in the seclusion of its distant reaches.
Clustering vines of wild grape hang its wooded shores with a tapestry
of the South and the Rhine. The pickerel-weed marks with blue spikes
of flowers the points where small tributary brooks flow in, and along
the dusky windings of those brooks cardinal-flowers with a scarlet
splendor paint the tropics upon New England green. All summer long,
from founts unknown, in the upper counties, from some anonymous pond
or wooded hillside moist with springs, steals the gentle river through
the plain, spreading at one point above the town into a little lake,
called by the farmers "Fairhaven Bay", as if all its lesser names must
share the sunny significance of Concord. Then, shrinking again,
alarmed at its own boldness, it dreams on towards the Merrimac and the
sea.

The absence of factories has already implied its shallowness and
slowness. In truth it is a very slow river, belonging much more to the
Indian than to the Yankee; so much so, indeed, that until within a
very few years there was an annual visit to its shores from a few sad
heirs of its old masters, who pitched a group of tents in the meadows,
and wove their tidy baskets and strung their beads in unsmiling
silence. It was the same thing that I saw in Jerusalem among the Jews.
Every Friday they repair to the remains of the old temple wall, and
pray and wail, kneeling upon the pavement and kissing the stones. But
that passionate Oriental regret was not more impressive than this
silent homage of a waning race, who, as they beheld the unchanged
river, knew that, unlike it, the last drops of their existence were
gradually flowing away, and that for their tribes there shall be no
ingathering.

So shallow is the stream that the amateur Corydons who embark at
morning to explore its remoter shores will, not infrequently in
midsummer, find their boat as suddenly tranquil and motionless as the
river, having placidly grounded upon its oozy bottom. Or, returning at
evening, they may lean over the edge as they lie at length in the
boat, and float with the almost imperceptible current, brushing the
tips of the long water-grass and reeds below them in the stream--a
river jungle, in which lurk pickerel and trout--with the sensation of
a bird drifting upon soft evening air over the tree-tops. No available
or profitable craft navigate these waters, and animated gentlemen from
the city who run up for "a mouthful of fresh air" cannot possibly
detect the final cause of such a river. Yet the dreaming idler has a
place on maps and a name in history.

Near the town it is crossed by three or four bridges. One is a massive
structure to help the railroad over. The stern, strong pile readily
betrays that it is part of good, solid stock, owned in the right
quarter. Close by it is a little arched stone bridge, auxiliary to a
great road leading to some vague region of the world called Acton upon
guide-posts and on maps. Just beyond these bridges the river bends and
forgets the railroad, but it is grateful to the graceful arch of the
little stone bridge for making its curve more picturesque, and, as it
muses towards the Old Manse, listlessly brushing the lilies, it
wonders if Ellery Channing, who lives beyond, upon a hill-side sloping
to the shore, wrote his poem of "The Bridge" to that particular one.
There are two or three wooden bridges also, always combining well with
the landscape, always making and suggesting pictures.

The Concord, as I said, has a name in history. Near one of the wooden
bridges you turn aside from the main road, close by the Old Mause
--whose mosses of mystic hue were gathered by Hawthorne, who lived
there for three years--and a few steps bring you to the river and to
a small monument upon its brink. It is a narrow, grassy way; not a
field nor a meadow, but of that shape and character which would
perplex the animated stranger from the city, who would see, also, its
unfitness for a building-lot. The narrow, grassy way is the old road,
which in the month of April, 1775, led to a bridge that crossed the
stream at this spot. And upon the river's margin, upon the bridge and
the shore beyond, took place the sharp struggle between the Middlesex
farmers and the scarlet British soldiers known in tradition as
"Concord fight". The small monument records the day and the event.
When it was erected Emerson wrote the following hymn for the ceremony:

APRIL 19, 1836.

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

"The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

"On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We see to-day a votive stone,
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

"Spirit that made these heroes dare
To die, or leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and Thee."

Close under the rough stone wall at the left, which separates it from
the little grassy orchard of the Manse, is a small mound of turf and a
broken stone. Grave and headstone shrink from sight amid the grass and
under the wall, but they mark the earthly bed of the first victims of
that first fight. A few large trees overhang the ground, which
Hawthorne thinks have been planted since that day, and he says that in
the river he has seen mossy timbers of the old bridge, and on the
farther bank, half hidden, the crumbling stone abutments that
supported it. In an old house upon the main road, nearly opposite the
entrance to this grassy way, I knew a hale old woman who well
remembered the gay advance of the flashing soldiers, the terrible ring
and crack of fire-arms, and the panic-stricken retreat of the
regulars, blackened and bloody. But the placid river has long since
overborne it all. The alarm, the struggle, the retreat, are swallowed
up in its supreme tranquillity. The summers of more than seventy years
have obliterated every trace of the road with thick grass, which seeks
to bury the graves, as earth buried the victims. Let the sweet ministry
of summer avail. Let its mild iteration even sap the monument and conceal
its stones as it hides the abutment in foliage; for, still on the sunny
slopes, white with the May blossoming of apple-orchards, and in the
broad fields, golden to the marge of the river, and tilled in security
and peace, survives the imperishable remembrance of that day and its
results.

The river is thus the main feature of the Concord landscape. It is
surrounded by a wide plain, from which rise only three or four low
hills. One is a wooded cliff over Fairhaven Bay, a mile from the town;
one separates the main river from the Assabeth; and just beyond the
battle-ground one rises, rich with orchards, to a fine wood which
crowns it. The river meadows blend with broad, lonely fields. A wide
horizon, like that of the prairie or the sea, is the grand charm of
Concord. At night the stars are seen from the roads crossing the
plain, as from a ship at sea. The landscape would be called tame by
those who think no scenery grand but that of mountains or the
sea-coast. But the wide solitude of that region is not so accounted by
those who live there. To them it is rich and suggestive, as Emerson
shows, by saying in the essay upon "Nature", "My house stands in low
land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go
with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke
of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and
the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a
delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted
man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this
incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes
are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a
royal-revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor
and beauty, power and taste ever decked and enjoyed, establishes
itself upon the instant". And again, as indicating where the true
charm of scenery lies: "In every landscape the point to astonishment
is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the
first hillock, as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars
stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual
magnificence which they shed on the Campagna or on the marble deserts
of Egypt." He is speaking here, of course, of the spiritual excitement
of Beauty, which crops up everywhere in nature, like gold in a rich
region; but the quality of the imagery indicates the character of the
scenery in which the essay was written.

Concord is too far from Boston to rival in garden cultivation its
neighbors, West Cambridge, Lexington, and Waltham; nor can it boast,
with Brookline, Dorchester, and Cambridge, the handsome summer homes
of city wealth. But it surpasses them all, perhaps, in a genuine
country freshness and feeling, derived from its loneliness. If not
touched by city elegance, neither is it infected by city
meretriciousness; it is sweet, wholesome country. By climbing one of
the hills, your eye sweeps a wide, wide landscape, until it rests upon
graceful Wachuset, or, farther and mistier, Moriadnoc, the lofty
outpost of New Hampshire hills. Level scenery is not tame. The ocean,
the prairie, the desert, are not tame, although of monotonous surface.
The gentle undulations which mark certain scenes--a rippling
landscape, in which all sense of space, of breadth, and of height is
lost--that is tame. It may be made beautiful by exquisite cultivation,
as it often is in England and on parts of the Hudson shores, but it
is, at best, rather pleasing than inspiring. For a permanent view the
eye craves large and simple forms, as the body requires plain food for
its best nourishment.

The town of Concord is built mainly upon one side of the river. In its
centre is a large open square, shaded by fine elms. A white wooden
church, in the most classical style of Yankee-Greek, stands upon the
square. The Court-house is upon one of the corners. In the old
Courthouse, in the days when I knew Concord, many conventions were
held for humane as well as merely political objects. One summer day I
especially remember, when I did not envy Athens its forum, for Emerson
and William Henry Channing spoke. In the speech of both burned the
sacred fire of eloquence, but in Emerson it was light, and in Channing
heat.

From this square diverge four roads, like highways from a forum. One
leads by the Courthouse and under stately sycamores to the Old Manse
and the battle-ground, another goes directly to the river, and a third
is the main avenue of the town. After passing the shops this third
divides, and one branch forms a fair and noble street, spaciously and
loftily arched with elms, the houses standing liberally apart, each
with its garden-plot in front. The fourth avenue is the old Boston
road, also dividing, at the edge of the village, into the direct route
to the metropolis and the Lexington turnpike.

The house of Mr. Emerson stands opposite this junction. It is a plain,
square white dwelling-house, yet it has a city air and could not be
mistaken for a farm-house. A quiet merchant, you would say,
unostentatious and simple, has here hidden himself from town. But a
thick grove of pine and fir trees, almost brushing the two windows
upon the right of the door, and occupying the space between them and
the road, suggests at least a peculiar taste in the retired merchant,
or hints the possibility that he may have sold his place to a poet or
philosopher--or to some old East India sea-captain, perhaps, who
cannot sleep without the sound of waves, and so plants pines to
rustle, surf-like, against his chamber window.

The fact, strangely enough, partly supports your theory. In the year
1828 Charles Coolidge, a brother of J. Templeman Coolidge, a merchant
of repute in Boston and grandson of Joseph Coolidge, a patriarchal
denizen of Bowdoin Square in that city, came to Concord and built this
house. Gratefully remembering the lofty horse-chestnuts which shaded
the city square, and which, perhaps, first inspired him with the wish
to be a nearer neighbor of woods and fields, he planted a row of them
along his lot, which this year ripen their twenty-fifth harvest. With
the liberal hospitality of a New England merchant he did not forget
the spacious cellars of the city, and, as Mr. Emerson writes, "he
built the only good cellar that had then been built in Concord".

Mr. Emerson bought the house in the year 1835. He found it a plain,
convenient, and thoroughly built country residence. An amiable
neighbor of Mr. Coolidge had placed a miserable old barn irregularly
upon the edge of that gentleman's lot, which, for the sake of
comeliness, he was forced to buy and set straight and smooth into a
decent dependence of the mansion house. The estate, upon passing into
Mr. Emerson's hands, comprised the house, barn, and two acres of land.
He has enlarged house and barn, and the two acres have grown to nine.
Our author is no farmer, except as every country gentleman is, yet the
kindly slope from the rear of the house to a little brook, which,
passing to the calm Concord beyond, washes the edge of his land,
yields him at least occasional beans and pease--or some friend,
agriculturally enthusiastic and an original Brook-Farmer, experiments
with guano in the garden, and produces melons and other vines with a
success that relieves Brook Farm from every slur of inadequate
practical genius. Mr. Emerson has shaded his originally bare land with
trees, and counts near a hundred apple and pear trees in his orchard.
The whole estate is quite level, inclining only towards the little
brook, and is well watered and convenient.

The Orphic Alcott--or Plato Skimpole, as Aspasia called him--well
known in the transcendental history of New England, designed and with
his own hands erected a summer-house, which gracefully adorns the
lawn, if I may so call the smooth grass-plot at the side of the house.
Unhappily, this edifice promises no longer duration, not being
"technically based and pointed". This is not a strange, although a
disagreeable fact, to Mr. Emerson, who has been always the most
faithful and appreciative of the lovers of Mr. Alcott. It is natural
that the Orphic Alcott should build graceful summer-houses. There are
even people who declare that he has covered the pleasant but somewhat
misty lawns of ethical speculation with a thousand such edifices,
which need only to be a little more "technically based and pointed" to
be quite perfect. At present they whisper, the wind blows clean
through them, and no figures of flesh and blood are ever seen there,
but only pallid phantoms with large, calm eyes, eating uncooked grain,
out of baskets, and discoursing in a sublime shibboleth of which
mortals have no key. But how could Plato Skimpole, who goes down to
Hingham on the sea, in a New England January, clad only in a suit of
linen, hope to build immortal summer-houses?

Mr. Emerson's library is the room at the right of the door upon
entering the house. It is a simple square room, not walled with books
like the den of a literary grub, nor merely elegant like the
ornamental retreat of a dilettante. The books are arranged upon plain
shelves, not in architectural bookcases, and the room is hung with a
few choice engravings of the greatest men. There was a fair copy of
Michael Angelo's "Fates", which, properly enough, imparted that grave
serenity to the ornament of the room which is always apparent in what
is written there. It is the study of a scholar. All our author's
published writings, the essays, orations, and poems, date from this
room, as much as they date from any place or moment. The villagers,
indeed, fancy their philosophical contemporary affected by the
novelist James's constancy of composition. They relate, with wide
eyes, that he has a huge manuscript book, in which he incessantly
records the ends of thoughts, bits of observation and experience, and
facts of all kinds--a kind of intellectual and scientific ragbag, into
which all shreds and remnants of conversations and reminiscences of
wayside reveries are incontinently thrust. This work goes on, they
aver, day and night, and when he travels the rag-bag travels too, and
grows more plethoric with each mile of the journey. And a story, which
will one day be a tradition, is perpetuated in the village, that one
night, before his wife had become completely accustomed to his habits,
she awoke suddenly, and hearing him groping about the room, inquired
anxiously,

"My dear, are you unwell?"

"No, my love, only an idea."

The library is not only the study of a scholar, it is the bower of a
poet. The pines lean against the windows, and to the student deeply
sunk in learned lore or soaring upon the daring speculations of an
intrepid philosophy, they whisper a secret beyond that of the
philosopher's stone, and sing of the springs of poetry.

The site of the house is not memorable. There is no reasonable ground
to suppose that so much as an Indian wigwam ever occupied the spot;
nor has Henry Thoreau, a very faithful friend of Mr. Emerson's and of
the woods and waters of his native Concord, ever found an Indian
arrowhead upon the premises. Henry Thoreau's instinct is as sure
towards the facts of nature as the witch-hazel towards treasure. If
every quiet country town in New England had a son who, with a lore
like Selborne's and an eye like Buffon's, had watched and studied its
landscape and history, and then published the result, as Thoreau has
done, in a book as redolent of genuine and perceptive sympathy with
nature as a clover-field of honey, New England would seem as poetic
and beautiful as Greece. Thoreau lives in the berry pastures upon a
bank over Walden Pond, and in a little house of his own building. One
pleasant summer afternoon a small party of us helped him raise it--a
bit of life as Arcadian as any at Brook Farm. Elsewhere in the village
he turns up arrowheads abundantly, and Hawthorne mentions that Thoreau
initiated him into the mystery of finding them. But neither the Indians
nor nature nor Thoreau can invest the quiet residence of our author with
the dignity or even the suspicion of a legend. History stops short in
that direction with Charles Coolidge, Esq., and the year 1828.

There is little prospect from the house. Directly opposite a low bluff
overhangs the Boston road and obstructs the view. Upon the other sides
the level land stretches away. Towards Lexington it is a broad,
half-marshy region, and between the brook behind and the river good
farms lie upon the outskirts of the town. Pilgrims drawn to Concord by
the desire of conversing with the man whose written or spoken eloquence
has so profoundly charmed them, and who have placed him in some pavilion
of fancy, some peculiar residence, find him in no porch of philosophy
nor academic grove, but in a plain white house by the wayside, ready to
entertain every comer as an ambassador from some remote Cathay of
speculation whence the stars are more nearly seen. But the familiar
reader of our author will not be surprised to find the "walking
eye-ball" simply sheltered, and the "endless experimenter with no past
at my back" housed without ornament. Such a reader will have felt the
Spartan severity of this intellect, and have noticed that the realm of
this imagination is rather sculpturesque than pictorial, more Greek
than Italian. Therefore he will be pleased to alight at the little
gate, and hear the breezy welcome of the pines and the no less cordial
salutation of their owner. For if the visitor knows what he is about,
he has come to this plain for bracing mountain air. These serious
Concord reaches are no vale of Cashmere. Where Plato Skimpole is
architect of the summer-house, you may imagine what is to be expected
in the mansion itself. It is always morning within those doors. If you
have nothing to say, if you are really not an envoy from some kingdom
or colony of thought and cannot cast a gem upon the heaped pile, you
had better pass by upon the other side. For it is the peculiarity of
Emerson's mind to be always on the alert. He eats no lotus, but
for-ever quaffs the waters which engender immortal thirst.

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