e
less. But her success brought with it no flush, only an opportunity
for her pleasant service. In these years my mood toward her had quite
changed; at first I had thought of her as a competitor, perhaps as on
my level. When I learned, however, that about that time she had been
reading my _History of German Literature_ with approval, I felt
that I was greatly honoured, that a mind of high distinction had
condescended to notice my pages. During the '80s when the "School
of Philosophy" was holding its sessions in the rustic temple on the
Lexington Road where her Orphic father was hierophant, it was rumoured
that Louisa looked somewhat askance upon the sublimated discussions
of the brotherhood that gathered. What was said was very wise, but
far removed from what one finds in children's books, but Louisa was
sometimes present, a dignified hostess to the strangers who came,
taking her modest part among the women in the entertainment of the
guests but never in the conclave as a participant. Alas! that she went
so prematurely to her grave in "Sleepy Hollow"!

Hawthorne came into my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school
near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist
as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed
building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th
of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure
showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the
world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It
is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient
wainscoting, the ample low-studded rooms, the quaint fireplace, and at
the rear toward the west the windows with their small panes on some
of which Hawthorne made inscriptions. "Every leaf and twig is outlined
against the sky," or words to that effect, "scratched with my wife's
diamond ring"; here the sunset pours in gorgeously but there is more
of shadow than sunlight about the Old Manse, and that is befitting for
a dwelling with associations somewhat sombre. In later years Hawthorne
occupied a house on the Lexington Road, new and modern, writing there
some famous books in an upper study said to be accessible only through
a trap-door, but the Old Manse was the appropriate home for him. It
was there that his young genius produced its earlier fruit and it
deserves to be particularly cherished. As a little child I went once
with my father and mot