om that
gateway toward 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
travelers look 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.

[Footnote 74: From the introductory chapter of "Mosses from an Old
Manse," published by Houghton, Mifflin Company. This house, built in
1765, is still standing in Concord. Emerson lived there while writing
his "Nature." Hawthorne made it his home soon after his marriage in
1842.]

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 tops of the lofty trees! In that variety
of natural utterances he could find