gholds of the New
England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt
Hibernian spray. It is very possible, however, that at this period
there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a
village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village
community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England
civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous
summers and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous
field and forest, would have been part of the composition. For the
rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools
and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and
familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to
manage its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the
_Mosses_, Hawthorne has given an account of his dwelling, of his
simple occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics
of the place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the
surface of which--even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to
mosses and lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a
picturesque complexion--a hundred and fifty years of exposure have
imparted a kind of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord
river, and approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It had
been the dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers,
ancestors of the celebrated Emerson, who had himself spent his early
manhood and written some of his most beautiful essays there. "He
used," as Hawthorne says, "to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian
sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its
clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of
theological association--a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic
sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent
quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should
suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in
any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial.
In the American Note-Books there is a charming passage (too long to
quote) descriptive of the entertainment the new couple found in
renovating and re-furnishing the old parsonage, which, at the time of
their going into it, was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little
drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed, he writes that
"the shade o