harming in his
verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to himself about them.
"Oh," he breaks out, of an October afternoon, "the beauty of grassy
slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the
intervals between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingers and
sits down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue asters as her parting
gifts and memorials!" He was but a single summer at Brook Farm; the
rest of his residence had the winter-quality.

But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the French
say, a _solitude a deux_. He was married in July 1842, and betook
himself immediately to the ancient village of Concord, near Boston,
where he occupied the so-called Manse which has given the title to one
of his collections of tales, and upon which this work, in turn, has
conferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets "ancient" and
"near" in the foregoing sentence, according to the American
measurement of time and distance. Concord is some twenty miles from
Boston, and even to day, upwards of forty years after the date of
Hawthorne's removal thither, it is a very fresh and well-preserved
looking town. It had already a local history when, a hundred years
ago, the larger current of human affairs flowed for a moment around
it. Concord has the honour of being the first spot in which blood was
shed in the war of the Revolution; here occurred the first exchange of
musket-shots between the King's troops and the American insurgents.
Here, as Emerson says in the little hymn which he contributed in 1836
to the dedication of a small monument commemorating this
circumstance--

"Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."

The battle was a small one, and the farmers were not destined
individually to emerge from obscurity; but the memory of these things
has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered,
moreover, so to speak, by the life-long presence there of one of the
most honoured of American men of letters--the poet from whom I just
quoted two lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and
is an excellent specimen of a New England village of the riper sort.
At the time of Hawthorne's first going there it must have been an even
better specimen than to-day--more homogeneous, more indigenous, more
absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration
had scarcely begun to break upon the rural stron