at his method here is the same
as Scott's. The truth of this may be admitted up to a certain point. Our
Puritan romancer had certainly steeped his imagination in the annals of
colonial New England, as Scott had done in his border legends. He was
familiar with the documents--especially with Mather's "Magnalia," that
great source book of New England poetry and romance. But it was not the
history itself that interested him, the broad picture of an extinct
society, the _tableau large de la vie_, which Scott delighted to paint;
rather it was some adventure of the private soul. For example, Lowell
had told him the tradition of the young hired man who was chopping wood
at the backdoor of the Old Manse on the morning of the Concord fight;
and who hurried to the battlefield in the neighboring lane, to find both
armies gone and two British soldiers lying on the ground, one dead, the
other wounded. As the wounded man raised himself on his knees and stared
up at the lad, the latter, obeying a nervous impulse, struck him on the
head with his axe and finished him. "The story," says Hawthorne, "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.... This
one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells
us of the fight." How different is this bit of pathology from the public
feeling of Emerson's lines:

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

A PILGRIM IN CONCORD

Rura quae Liris quieta
Mordet aqua, taciturnus amnis.

The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summer
of 1879. The dust of late July lay velvet soft and velvet deep on all
the highways; or, stirred by the passing wheel, rose in slow clouds, not
unemblematic of the transcendental haze which filled the mental
atmosphere thereabout.

Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorne
and Thoreau had been dead many years--I saw their graves in Sleepy
Hollow;--and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on Fire
Island Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and Ellery
Channing--Thoreau's biographer--was alive. Above all, the sage of
Concord, "the friend and aider of those who would